Paul Moist

August 12, 2009

In these pages and in other media, the issue of contracting out city services — most recently garbage collection — has been bandied about as a way to punish unionized public sector workers for everything from striking to costing too much to "monopolizing" the public sector. Some columnists, such as Lawrence Solomon, even contend that public sector workers weigh too much — or so he alleged in a National Post column last week when he claimed that private sector workers "tend to be fitter" than public sector workers.

What Solomon and other critics tend to forget is that Canadians have already tried a system wherein municipal services were delivered by private entities. It didn’t work then, and it wouldn’t work any better now.

Solid waste collection and disposal, water, hydro and transportation were in private hands until the turn of the last century, when municipal governments assumed control of these services after years of poor quality, low accountability, a lack of universal access and an absence of regulation to protect the health and safety of citizens.

Canadians built our modern public sector in order to collectively invest in services for all residents. In the case of garbage collection, it became a mandated civic responsibility due to public health ordinances and the desire to rid growing urban centres of disease that flows from unattended solid waste.

One hundred years and numerous privatization experiments later, Canadian communities are still finding that contracting out public services doesn’t work. In some Canadian communities, the privatization of waste management is being reversed because it has been shown to cost more and deliver less in terms of quality.

While some contracted out services may seem to cost less initially, their costs can rise much faster than publicly delivered services.  For example, private operators often use younger crews who haven’t yet suffered injuries, but when the injuries build up, so do their costs. The same goes with equipment — a private company’s may be more efficient at first, but all equipment wears and requires replacing over time.

After a cost-benefit analysis, the City of Toronto recently chose to end a private contract in the York community, saving taxpayers $4 million annually by bringing waste collection work back in-house. Four months ago, the City of Windsor rejected the garbage privatization option, as did the City of Peterborough earlier this year. In Port Moody, B.C., residents spent ten years reporting repeated missed pickups, spillage, broken garbage bins and other problems caused by low-quality, contracted-out waste collection. Last spring, Port Moody residents took matters into their own hands and successfully petitioned to bring waste collection in-house and dump their private contractor. These situations are not isolated. Across Canada, the list of communities dissatisfied with privatized services continues to grow.

The private sector will always contribute to parts of public infrastructure work, and benefit from public sector procurement. But it is a fatal leap of logic to decide that Toronto or any other city should be pursuing a contracting-out agenda.

If proponents of privatization are really asking for "non-unionization," they are drastically underestimating the tenacity of the Canadian labour movement. About one-third of our Canadian workforce remains unionized, and for good reason — unions enable millions of citizens to enjoy some measure of dignity in retirement and quality social benefits. These benefits extend beyond actual union memberships, since the level of unionization in a society is a direct reflection of the average person’s quality of life. Whether it’s a livable minimum wage or a 40-hour work week, unions raise the bar in terms of wages and working conditions for everyone.

Working people built Canada. They deserve a better shake than they have received in recent weeks.

Paul Moist is national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).