Greetings Division
The Executive Board held a conference call this past evening following yesterdays meeting with Dwight Duncan, Finance Minister.
About fifteen unions and twelve employer groups attended Duncan’s meeting.
Duncan wants you, the workers, to accept a 0 and 0 % total compensation over two years, whether already negotiated or in negotiations. Meanwhile he will still allow huge bonuses for managers in the Public Service. A Deputy Minister’s bonus is more than the average yearly wage for many of our sisters and brothers in other OPSEU represented jobs! Their regular wages are more than double what most OPS members make.
Shame on the McGuinty government for interfering in free collective bargaining and demanding public sector workers take it on the chin (or somewhere else) for the corporate sectors indiscretions!
This Liberal Government, like any government, has the power to legislate their demands on its people and workers, make a wrong, a right. However we believe that this would be a violation of free collective bargaining and OPSEU will take all legal action necessary to fight this.
Bob Rae’s social contract legislation worked out well for his government didn’t it!!!
Duncan insisted the corporate tax cuts will proceed! Shame – allowing the corporate fat cats to continue to reap huge bonuses, when they were the ones who plunged us into recession!
He spoke for a total of eleven minutes and turned the meeting over to a Deputy Minister who quoted many statistics. That is what public sector workers are worth to the finance minister, eleven minutes of his time!
Duncan requested that OPSEU meet with him August 9, 2010. The date has not been agreed to. When the date is confirmed, Brother Thomas, Sister Rout and Brother Franche of the executive board will be attending this meeting.
We urge our member’s to voice their displeasure with their local MPP’s. As well, urge the membership to not give in to the governments blame game and stand firmly with your union and the collective agreement that was negotiated in good faith.
Please see a cartoon, articles and the OPSEU Press Release below.
The workers struggle continues
In Solidarity
MERC
Toronto Star Opinion
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
The 2007-8 financial crash was, in terms of its global impact, the greatest in history. It was only prevented from immediately triggering another Great Depression by governments in so many countries taking on the enormous private debt of their banks.
Nevertheless, the economic fallout was immense. Even while tax revenues fell as businesses closed and workers were laid off, many governments felt compelled to maintain their spending. Looking for safety in numbers, the G20 (an entirely marginal group until George W. Bush convened it in late 2008) proved useful to coordinate a global stimulus.
Two years later, with the banks having dumped so much debt on the public sector and their profits on the rise, bond traders were feeling confident enough again to dispense the bankers’ old orthodoxies on the evils of public debt.
Even though the growth in state deficits was directly the product of bailing out the banks, the loss of revenue and the emergency spending, governments were expected to shift their policy priorities to public sector austerity. The G20 was reconvened in Toronto to reassure financial markets that they heard the message.
All this serves as a better definition of chutzpah than the old joke about the kid who, after killing his parents, begs the judge for clemency on the grounds he is an orphan.
The hammer is about to hit right here in Ontario.
Despite the relative insulation of Bay Street from the financial collapse, the provincial economy took a major hit. With its deficit projected at $21.3 billion, the Liberal government’s March budget focused almost entirely on debt reduction. Apart from putting on hold essential public transit expansion and reducing food assistance for the disabled (while keeping corporate tax cuts in place), it also imposed a two-year wage freeze on 350,000 non-unionized government workers.
This week, even though data on first quarter economic growth has shown the deficit projections were too high, the other shoe dropped. Finance Minister Dwight Duncan summoned public sector union representatives to Queen’s Park to discuss a broader public sector freeze.
If implemented, the immediate effect of this can only be to cut the feet from under the economic growth that has occurred. Rather than cooperate in this, it is very much to be hoped that the unions will undertake a broad campaign to expose how unreasonable and irrational, let alone unimaginative and unjust, is public sector austerity in this crisis.
The possibility that the worst is not over, and we could yet face a long stagnation if not a global depression, does indeed make it incumbent on the Ontario government, like every other, to take the crisis very seriously indeed.
Its effect on government revenues is the real immediate problem, and since we are dealing with a crisis of once-in-a-life-time dimensions, the remedy should be an emergency once-in-a-life time emergency tax on those who accumulated the most wealth over the past quarter century from asset inflation while workers’ incomes stagnated in both the public and private sectors.
The Ontario government should also be expected to take advantage of the lowest interest rates on public debt in memory and use its borrowing capacity to keep economic growth going in the face of the banks’ hesitancy to lend to businesses and consumers, alongside industry’s own reluctance to invest.
One would have thought that a government of a liberal stripe that was at all creative might want in this context to emulate Franklin Roosevelt and undertake the rebuilding of our public infrastructure through direct expansion of public employment.
This is all the more important given the demands of the environmental crisis and the closure of plants and waste of skills that could be converted and applied to productive use.
Rather than freezing the public sector, this moment should be an opportunity to address the crisis in the transportation sector that is so vital to Ontario’s whole economy, as measured not only in auto industry shutdowns and layoffs but in notorious traffic congestion on our roads.
This would mean converting auto assembly and parts plants to the production of energy efficient mass transit vehicles and using the tax revenues from the jobs generated thereby to fund free public transit. If there was ever a time to use Ontario’s capacity to raise funds in bond markets for this, it is now. Far from placing a burden on future generations, it would guarantee them a future.
Of course, one would expect a union campaign to set out a vision for what a more radical government would do. This crisis has proved – by the state’s guarantee of deposits in Canada, and by its acting as lender of last resort almost everywhere – that finance effectively is a public utility. The argument that financing an economy is too important to be left to private banks is waiting to be heard.
What must be brought onto the agenda in face of the pressures that unelected bankers, with astonishing chutzpah, are putting on governments is the need for banking to be turned into a democratic public utility.
The money the people of Ontario entrust to their banking system could then be used to meet our society’s real needs.
Leo Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Sam Gindin is the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University. Their recent book, with Greg Albo, In and Out of Crisis, is available in Canada from Fernwood Books.
1 million Ontario workers face wage freeze
Last Updated: Monday, July 19, 2010 | 7:25 PM ET
CBC News
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/07/19/ontario-wages.html#ixzz0uEX8lbPx
Ontario union leaders and other officials will sit down with Finance Minister Dwight Duncan on Tuesday to discuss a possible wage freeze for more than one million workers.
Duncan is faced with a $21 billion deficit and has already said some public-sector workers – bureaucrats, teachers and nurses – will face wages freezes when their collective agreements expire.
Now it appears Duncan wants to extend the freeze throughout the Ontario civil service.
Not only would 700,000 unionized workers face a wage freeze, but 350,000 managers would as well.
Union representatives don’t appear ready to accept a freeze, saying the employees aren’t responsible for the budget problem.
“The shortfall was never caused by people’s wages,” said Fred Hahn, president of CUPE Ontario, which represents 230,000 workers.
“The shortfall was caused by a global economic meltdown that workers in the province had nothing to do with,”
Hahn said his members have been anxious ever since Duncan hinted in his March budget that wage freezes might be coming.
“Why don’t we have a bigger discussion about how do we invest to create jobs, get people back to work in various parts of the province?” Hahn asked.
Smokey Thomas, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, has cut his vacation short to attend the meeting with Duncan. He said his 130,000 members would not accept a freeze.
Duncan has put the employees in a position where “our answer has got to be, ‘No,’” he said.
Thomas said many of his members are part-time workers who would be disproportionately hurt by any wage freeze.
“I mean if you are only making $20,000 a year, a two per cent raise isn’t much, but it certainly helps.”
As many as 750 contracts would be affected.
Union leaders say they will listen to what Duncan has to say but they don’t expect any decisions to come out of the two-hour meeting.
The government estimates it could save $750 million by next year if the wage freeze comes into effect.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/07/19/ontario-wages.html#ixzz0uEWy9sgt
Ontario seen to freeze public-sector wages
Kenyon Wallace, National Post · Tuesday, Jul. 20, 2010
Dwight Duncan, Ontario’s Minister of Finance, is expected to send a blunt message to representatives of more than a million public-sector employees and managers gathered at a downtown Toronto hotel today: When it comes to wage hikes, provincial coffers are empty.
The spectre of a wage-and-benefit freeze for the public sector, which will affect nurses, teachers, police officers and bureaucrats, was first raised in March when Mr. Duncan warned in his budget that there would be “no net increase in compensation” for a period of two years in future collective agreements.
Faced with a $20-billion deficit this year, Mr. Duncan will use today’s meeting with about 60 union leaders and management representatives at the Eaton Centre Marriott Hotel to outline his plans to contain public-sector salaries and wages, which currently make up more than half of all provincial expenditures.
“We’re not ripping open collective agreements, but we do expect everybody to play a role,” said a senior government source. “We’ve got a timeline to cut the deficit in five years and balance the budget in seven. You can’t do that without addressing salaries.”
The freeze would affect more than 700,000 unionized and 350,000 non-unionized employees and managers, and could last until 2014, since some current collective agreements do not expire for another two years.
“Regardless of whether an existing contract expires today, tomorrow or next year, the same mandate from the budget will apply, which is essentially a two-year freeze,” said the source, adding that the freeze would allow $750-million to be redirected from salaries to front-line services next year alone.
Today’s meeting comes just one week after the Liberal government abandoned its controversial “Supercorp”
initiative to merge four of the province’s largest Crown corporations before selling off a chunk to raise money.
The plan would likely have seen the merging of Ontario Power Generation, Hydro One, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario into a $75-billion corporation, of which 20% would have been sold to investors. The approximately $15-billion in proceeds from the sale was to have been used to reduce the provincial debt and fund other Liberal campaign promises.
The plan was widely derided by labour leaders, who feared the consolidation would result in job losses, as well as the elimination of long-term revenue streams.
The failure of Supercorp leaves the government with one fewer option to raise cash and cut costs, leading some to believe Mr. Duncan will take a harder stance on restraining public-sector wages.
Details on how the freeze will unfold are scarce, but that hasn’t stopped opposition parties and some of Ontario’s most powerful unions from weighing in.
“We should be having a broader discussion on the economy, rather than wage constraints,” said Fred Hahn, Ontario president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). “What do wage constraints do? They depress consumer spending because they take money out of the economy and that slows down economic growth.”
Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak was more guarded in his comments, saying he has been calling for a meeting between the Liberal government and union leaders “to find ways to work towards a wage freeze or to try to find savings in the civil service” since the spring of 2009.
“We need to live within our means and when we face a $19-billion deficit, we have to ensure funding is going to front-line services, not unaccountable bureaucracies,” he told reporters yesterday at Queen’s Park.
NDP leader Andrea Horwath warned that Mr. Duncan will likely experience some pushback from union leaders today, in light of recent corporate tax cuts and controversy surrounding “out-of-control salaries” for public-sector chief executives.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 20, 2010
Austerity plan fails key tests, OPSEU tells Finance Minister
TORONTO – Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s plan to cut the province’s budget deficit fails three key tests, the president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union says.
“The members of our union will support a deficit-reduction strategy that is fair to people, protects the public services Ontarians need, and strengthens our economy,” OPSEU President Warren (Smokey) Thomas said. “The government’s plan fails all three of these tests.”
Thomas and other labour leaders met with Duncan today in Toronto to discuss deficit reduction plans, but the Minister announced nothing that was not already contained in the March 25 Ontario Budget. He hinted at further meetings with unions later this summer.
The government’s austerity plan, which is intended to cut public sector salaries by the rate of inflation, is not fair to public employees who did nothing to create the economic crisis that caused the deficit, Thomas said.
“Under Dwight Duncan’s proposal, a part-time worker making $20,000 a year in a group home will sacrifice an extra $400 a year to reduce the deficit, while an RBC investment banker making $12 million a year won’t pay a penny. This is clearly unfair and the Minister needs to address it.”
The Minister has no plan to protect public services from deficit-cutting, Thomas added, noting that hundreds of layoffs are planned in the Ontario Public Service alone and hundreds more are happening in hospitals. Vital social services have been in crisis for more than a decade, he added.
“In this province we have children’s aid societies facing bankruptcy and children with mental health issues who grow up before they can get help,” Thomas said. “As a society we are failing our citizens and our children. We have to stop punishing innocent victims, deficit or no deficit.”
Cutting public sector wages will harm the economic recovery at a critical time, Thomas said.
“While a recovery is under way, and will ultimately go a long way towards paying down the deficit automatically, Ontario is not out of the woods yet,” he said. “Many hard-hit households and communities depend on public sector wages to survive. Cutting back on those wages can only slow down the recovery and extend the time it takes to pay down the deficit.”
OPSEU is in favour of dialogue with the government, Thomas said, but any dialogue must respect the rules of free collective bargaining.
“As far as we’re concerned, the only place for this dialogue is at the bargaining table or, where that fails, at arbitration,” he said. “That’s where we’ll be focusing our energies.”
