Saturday, April 26, 2008

TTC Strike In Toronto - Unbelievable!!

After being offered a contract that guarantees that their drivers will be the highest paid in the GTA, they reject it? Not only have their members rejected the generous contract negotiated by their union bosses, they have also broken a major commitment they made with the public.

The union by last night announcing a strike beginning at 12:01 am this morning, broke an agreement that they made with the public to give at least 48 hours notice in the event of a strike. Unbelievable! Especially when they have people manning ticket booths making $25 an hour.

I think this time they have gone beyond what is reasonable and it will not get them much sympathy from the public. Especially since their action will inconvenience approximately 1.4 million transit users a day.

One of the things that irk me as a Torontonian is the contempt that exists for car drivers by the municipality. They are always asking people to get out of their cars and take public transit, but instead of improving it by making it more reliable and convenient for the public to use it, they make it more difficult for the car drivers by increasing parking fees, restricting parking, imposing new taxes, etc. If the TTC had the infrastructure that would allow people to reliably get to where they needed to go within a reasonable time frame, a lot more people would use it.

Unless there is a major improvement in the reliability and the service offered by the Toronto Transit Comission, the acronym, TTC, to me will mean "take the car"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Winnipeg lefties are always clamoring for rapid transit as though Wpg. is a major city and needs it. The truth is Winnipeg already has rapid transit, they're called cars. The first phase for 50 million dollars will move people from south Winnipeg to downtown and shave 9 whole minutes off the commute. That's RAPID TRANSIT? Plus the unions would hold riders to ransom every 3 years and make the whole thing moot. Unionized day care anyone????????

Anonymous said...

Actually, the unions never had any sympathy from me to lose in the first place.

Unions are nothing more than legalized extortion. People should be paid a fair wage, as determined by what an employer is willing to pay and what an individual employee is willing to accept.

These unions drive the wages unrealistically high (I'm sure there are many capable people willing to do the jobs for far less than is currently being paid), and as a result, the entire organization is financially not viable. That's the main reason the TTC is essentially bankrupt--draining the taxpayers of their massive subsidy, and charging riders fares that are so expensive, it's not worth taking transit. If you mess with the free market, you get a huge mess like this. It's just another reason I could never live in Toronto. It's a socialist hole controlled by unions. If we're not careful to contain it, the rest of the country will get sucked right in.