About Respect and Fairness, Is It?
A questionable assertion at the very least. Where is the respect and fairness toward the people in the great city of Ottawa who have been led to expect that their municipality and its various organs are there to ensure a reasonable modicum of service to meet their needs? Where is the respect and fairness when people are left adrift, unable to meet their own obligations, to work, to school, to making medical appointments, visiting relatives in hospital, getting the elderly out of their homes and actively engaged in their communities?
The level of respect and fairness offered toward the general public, the voters, the taxpayers on the part of our duly elected municipal council is a wavering thing, sometimes glimpsed, but more often elusive. The respect and fairness offered to the people whose tax burden includes paying the wages of OC Transpo employees, the drivers, technicians and clerical staff, is rather absent at this critical time approaching the holiday season in the face of an economic downturn, when people are themselves sufficiently hard put to struggle with job uncertainties.
What better time to plan a strike, a complete shut-down of vital transit services in a city of a million people, than mid-December, and on the very eve of a sizeable snowstorm, leaving people stranded and puzzled and anxious and upset. Area merchants are somewhat upset too come to think of it, depending so much on moving merchandise at this critical time of year that can make or break a business. University students facing exams are trying to cope without a transit service, as are high school students with bus passes.
The union which declares it is challenging the city's wage settlement offer to represent the needs of their members, and claiming it is a matter of fairness and respect, demonstrates very little of those precious commodities toward others. Placing strident picketers at parking lots, promising to picket other bus lines should they be engaged to assist school bus drivers with their added workload, angrily dismissing universities' plans for temporary bus service for students.
Low-wage earners who don't own a personal vehicle are desperate for help to take them to their place of employment; not everyone lives within a one-hour walking distance of employment, and those who did attempt to walk to work had one whale of a time floundering in foot-deep snow on unploughed sidewalks, venturing out onto the roadways for passage, where cars and trucks are in gridlock on area roads, everyone in a panic, trying to arrive where they're expected to be.
People whose transit time normally takes from a half-hour to an hour, have seen that time tripled and quadrupled. Thanks ever so much. And then, after driving interminable hours on routes plugged with other vehicles, discovering no parking places left where they can leave their vehicles and get on to their places of work. Mothers attempting to take their youngest to day care, their older ones to school, and then get themselves to work, are just out of luck, aren't they?
Well, there's a power struggle between the municipality and the Transit Union, each adamant that they're right, the other wrong; one representing the taxpayer, upon whom an increase of 4.9% has already been imposed in their property taxes, the other Local 279 members who in these financially strapped times - with more bad news to come - insist they deserve 3-1/2% over the next three years, not the measly 3%, and 2-1/2% they've been offered, with a $2,000 signing bonus.
The city insists their new scheduling plans will not impact deleteriously on driver seniority, where drivers now are able to select their routes and times and days off, a situation the city claims is financially unfeasible, and in need of correction; to assign more reasonable routing to achieve better transit coverage daily. The Union remains adamant; they will not accept the city's scheduling.
Come to think of it, why was all this not ironed out adequately before, long before things came to this pass? The contract has been up for renewal since last March. Ottawa's business-oriented mayor whose on-the-job-learning has proven a trial in a dreadful series of errors, all coming back to bite the taxpayers, claims that scheduling control by the municipality would save $3 to 4$ million annually.
Why aren't the full details of the appraised changes in the hands of OC Transpo workers to enable them to interpret the changes to their advantage, as the city claims would occur? The fact that Ottawa remains the sole city in North America, Europe or Australia whose transit system is such that the union controls scheduling as the mayor claims, is really unacceptable, and why has it been allowed to occur in this manner?
What other place of employment permits its employees the delicate tasks of balancing their personal needs against those of the population whom they service? And finally, whose bright idea was it to wait until the last possible moment before this kind of confrontational mess erupted? Want respect and fairness, why then, bargain in good faith, and don't demand what isn't feasible or practical.
And get back to work. Once there, respect will be proffered, and fairness will be realized.
The level of respect and fairness offered toward the general public, the voters, the taxpayers on the part of our duly elected municipal council is a wavering thing, sometimes glimpsed, but more often elusive. The respect and fairness offered to the people whose tax burden includes paying the wages of OC Transpo employees, the drivers, technicians and clerical staff, is rather absent at this critical time approaching the holiday season in the face of an economic downturn, when people are themselves sufficiently hard put to struggle with job uncertainties.
What better time to plan a strike, a complete shut-down of vital transit services in a city of a million people, than mid-December, and on the very eve of a sizeable snowstorm, leaving people stranded and puzzled and anxious and upset. Area merchants are somewhat upset too come to think of it, depending so much on moving merchandise at this critical time of year that can make or break a business. University students facing exams are trying to cope without a transit service, as are high school students with bus passes.
The union which declares it is challenging the city's wage settlement offer to represent the needs of their members, and claiming it is a matter of fairness and respect, demonstrates very little of those precious commodities toward others. Placing strident picketers at parking lots, promising to picket other bus lines should they be engaged to assist school bus drivers with their added workload, angrily dismissing universities' plans for temporary bus service for students.
Low-wage earners who don't own a personal vehicle are desperate for help to take them to their place of employment; not everyone lives within a one-hour walking distance of employment, and those who did attempt to walk to work had one whale of a time floundering in foot-deep snow on unploughed sidewalks, venturing out onto the roadways for passage, where cars and trucks are in gridlock on area roads, everyone in a panic, trying to arrive where they're expected to be.
People whose transit time normally takes from a half-hour to an hour, have seen that time tripled and quadrupled. Thanks ever so much. And then, after driving interminable hours on routes plugged with other vehicles, discovering no parking places left where they can leave their vehicles and get on to their places of work. Mothers attempting to take their youngest to day care, their older ones to school, and then get themselves to work, are just out of luck, aren't they?
Well, there's a power struggle between the municipality and the Transit Union, each adamant that they're right, the other wrong; one representing the taxpayer, upon whom an increase of 4.9% has already been imposed in their property taxes, the other Local 279 members who in these financially strapped times - with more bad news to come - insist they deserve 3-1/2% over the next three years, not the measly 3%, and 2-1/2% they've been offered, with a $2,000 signing bonus.
The city insists their new scheduling plans will not impact deleteriously on driver seniority, where drivers now are able to select their routes and times and days off, a situation the city claims is financially unfeasible, and in need of correction; to assign more reasonable routing to achieve better transit coverage daily. The Union remains adamant; they will not accept the city's scheduling.
Come to think of it, why was all this not ironed out adequately before, long before things came to this pass? The contract has been up for renewal since last March. Ottawa's business-oriented mayor whose on-the-job-learning has proven a trial in a dreadful series of errors, all coming back to bite the taxpayers, claims that scheduling control by the municipality would save $3 to 4$ million annually.
Why aren't the full details of the appraised changes in the hands of OC Transpo workers to enable them to interpret the changes to their advantage, as the city claims would occur? The fact that Ottawa remains the sole city in North America, Europe or Australia whose transit system is such that the union controls scheduling as the mayor claims, is really unacceptable, and why has it been allowed to occur in this manner?
What other place of employment permits its employees the delicate tasks of balancing their personal needs against those of the population whom they service? And finally, whose bright idea was it to wait until the last possible moment before this kind of confrontational mess erupted? Want respect and fairness, why then, bargain in good faith, and don't demand what isn't feasible or practical.
And get back to work. Once there, respect will be proffered, and fairness will be realized.
Labels: Human Relations, Realities
posted by Pieface @ 6:10 PM
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