For those of you not living in Toronto, you lucky people you, let me bring you up to speed with what’s been going on here. A few weeks ago, Toronto’s public employee union (the Canadian Union of Public Employees, CUPE) went to re-negotiate their contract with the city, and suffice to say it didn’t go well. While the information on what exactly went wrong isn’t accessible to the public, it sounds like the city wanted them to make concessions from their old contract, and the union understandably refused. Instead of both sides working together to develop a new contract that the union was happy with and the city could actually afford, the union decided that this was an important enough issue to strike over. And so they did.

I’m somewhat on the fence about unions. I think they do serve an important function in protecting workers from being mistreated and taken advantage of at work, and regulating the service that its workers provide. But let’s face it, unions evolved from 18th century guilds, and back then worker abuse took the form of child labor, toxic environments, imprisonment, and withholding pay. The protection that unions provided was necessary to keep people from literally working themselves to death for nothing. But this isn’t the 18th century anymore, and while unions are still trying to defend worker’s rights, we’re starting to see a lot more cases where unions are using their influence to obtain or defend huge benefits under threat of strike, regardless of whether the actual union members want it or not.

Let’s look at the pivotal issue with this strike. Under CUPE’s old contract, employees could bank up to 18 sick days per year, and then cash them in on retirement for up to a maximum of six month’s pay. The idea of this measure was to motivate workers to only take sick days when they really are sick, and it’s similar to the deal a lot of other municipalities had with their unions. But while those municipalities realized how much money this would cost and re-negotiated early to buy people out (which worked), Toronto didn’t, and is now looking at paying a lot of city employees a LOT of money. To avoid doing so, the city wants the union to give up their banked days, which is paramount to cutting their retirement package by $20,000. You can see why the workers would have a problem with that. The city made one hell of a mistake in agreeing to such an expensive contract, and they’re paying for it now.

But let’s face it; the current CUPE contract is way better than most non-unionized employees, and most notably, better than the essential service workers who are not legally allowed to strike, like police and firefighters. The union is claiming that it wants the same benefits afforded other groups, but I have never worked for a company that lets me bank sick days or any kind of days off. They do a lot of tough jobs, and I realize that and thank them for it, but private workers who do the exact same jobs get paid a lot less and receive fewer benefits, so there are people out there who are willing to compromise. All the union has done so far is destroy any sympathy the public might have had for them by bringing to light how good their benefit package is, and then holding the city services at ransom because they feel they are entitled to those benefits. Now the workers are mad because they’re not working and not getting paid, and I bet a lot of them don’t fully agree with the decision to strike anyways. Strikes work against private companies because they implicitly cut off the flow of income, but that doesn’t work against government, and the city is saving millions of dollars every day the strike continues. And the residents of Toronto are seriously pissed off, and not just at the arrogance of refusing to work when unemployment is at its highest. Not only has this strike led to the closure of day cares, summer camps, pools, and a lot of other city-run services, it’s also canceled the one service people benefit from every day without even realizing it; garbage collection.

The same union went on strike a few years ago, and no one was prepared for what Toronto would be like after 16 days without garbage pickup. People just went on creating trash waiting for the strike to end; by the time that happened, the city was an absolute mess. Dumping and littering were rampant, trash cans were overflowing onto the streets and sidewalks, and the smell was so strong you needed a mask to go outside. Thankfully, this time a lot of people remember the previous strike and are accounting for it, so after 19 days the city isn’t nearly as bad as it was, and proper dump sites have been set up to help. But it’s starting to get bad, and just from looking around my neighbourhood, not everyone is changing their habits. If the strike goes on for too much longer, the city will find itself back in the state it was in last time; a horrid, smelly mess. And yet, in the long run, I think this strike is good for Toronto, because it’s forcing us to deal with a fact of urban living that many take for granted:

Every time you create garbage, that garbage has to go somewhere.

Convenient trash disposal systems have led to people treating trash as a temporary issue; you throw it in a bin, empty the bin into a can, the garbage men empty the can into a truck, and then the garbage is gone. But it’s never really gone; it’s just removed further and further from your immediate vicinity, and it’s a process that doesn’t continue indefinitely. At some point, that garbage is put in a static location and left there, because quite frankly, we don’t know what else to do with it. Some of it is composted and returned to the environment, although recent reports have shown that may not be true after all, and some of it is recycled and returned to us to eventually be thrown away again. But the vast majority of it sits in a landfill in Michigan, and there have been rumblings that they’re none to happy with that arrangement. We could find another place to haul our trash, or start a landfill closer to home, or ship it to any number of places, but none of those really solve the problem, do they?

Now that we have miniature dumps around the city, we’re being forced to live alongside the garbage we create, and I think it’s the perfect opportunity to change people’s thinking. Instead of asking “Where can we put our garbage so we don’t have to deal with it?”, what if we started asking “What can we do to create less garbage so no one has to deal with it?” My housemates and I are doing what we can; buying in bulk, re-using bags, saving anything that may be useful again in the future. We generate maybe one black bag every two weeks, and that was even before the strike. Our downstairs neighbours have a compost in the back that they’re asking us to contribute to. The city itself recently mandated that stores must charge $0.05 per plastic bag, and I’ve seen a lot of people carrying re-usable bags because of it. They’re the really inspiring kind of changes; you think they don’t make any difference when you’re the only one making them, but when you see lots of people making them, suddenly things start to improve, and you know that you were a part of it.

At the same time, not everyone has gotten the message. One of our downstairs neighbours is still generating a huge amount of trash that stinks up our front yard. The litter bins in my neighbourhood have piles of trash around them that get bigger every day, which may simply be due to living in Chinatown and the people living there having a more accepting view of litter. And even though the plastic bag charge was announced months in advance, people are still complaining about it as if they’re entitled to their plastic, dammit! It’s not an easy sell, but considering the strike has shown no signs of ending soon, I think for a lot of people this will be their wake-up call. We’ve always had the means to become a clean and green city, but there’s always been a lack of motivation and proper direction, in particular an utterly baffling resistance to putting in proper bike lanes. Toronto is now faced with the reality that closing your eyes and saying “Not In My Back Yard!” isn’t going to make this problem (or smell) go away. If necessity really is the mother of invention, then now’s the time for the city to invent a way of producing less garbage, because a lot of people really need one.

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