IceStorm 98 Study

David Cornwall (DC) is president of CUPE Local 109, the municipal worker’s union for the City of Kingston. Five CUPE locals have been amalgamated into one local under the new amalgamated city. The union includes all outdoor workers, social workers, day care workers, and other municipal employees. He has been president for past 10 years. CUPE looks after and represents the interests of all members in new amalgamated city of Kingston. It’s a part-time position, but may become full-time soon.

In his regular job with the city, DC works on sign maintenance and road maintenance as part of the public works department. He is in the department’s traffic analysis section, which handles such things as line-painting, cross-walks, centre lines and sign repair.

DC broke the news that Brian Sheridan had been fired from his job as parks and recreation director. He said there were some “major problems” during the ice storm between Brian Sheridan’s department and volunteers from Local 43, which is Toronto Parks and Recreation. “The managers were not in with the times with Metropolitan workers in the local, who are tree climbers and that. There were some sarcastic comments made to members of Local 43, and they were ready to pull out.”

“They came down [to Kingston], and ... there was some controversy with one of the [Kingston] managers. The situation was looked after almost immediately. There was no problem there. It was just one supervisor who he was in control. Jim Keech took over from him.”

DC did no work at all for the city during the ice storm, but says he spent a great deal of time on his other role as a trustee with the Frontenac County Board of Education. As the board’s chairman of property, he spent many hours trying to get hydro and heat back into the schools, making sure school pipes didn’t burst and monitoring school shelters. “So I was pretty well tied up with that, but I did monitor any situations that arose through out members in Local 109.”

As it turned out, CUPE members didn’t need his help during the storm. The union made a decision to ignore any problems with management until the state of emergency was lifted, and that’s what they did. DC says “Everything went great ... until it was all over.”

Outdoor workers came to resent the fact that everyone on staff within the city was paid during the ice storm, even though large numbers of indoor workers (such as secretarial and clerical people) stayed home during the emergency, DC says. The union has since asked for three paid days leave for all city employees who worked during the storm, but the city rejected the request, he said. CUPE members who worked during the storm are also upset that their extraordinary efforts were never publicly acknowledged.

“At no time has the employer ever thanked the workers publicly. They might have said thanks through an interview, but at no time did they put an ad in the newspaper, like CUPE did. We paid $10,000 for a full-page ad across the province of Ontario, thanking all workers in all municipalities for a job well-done in the ice storm. At no time did the city of Kingston ever take out an ad. And I’ve raised this issue time and time again over the last three or four months. People were working 24 hours a day, with no sleep. The public response was just astronomical. The public response was excellent. But as far as the employer, I don’t think they fairly compensated the employees who did work.”

“My concern is, and my outside members have always said this: when you close down City Hall because of a snow storm, the outside workers stay to get the roads open for you to get home, so they don’t get that free time off.”

“During the ice storm, when the clerical staff didn’t come in for six days, these guys came in and worked and opened up the roads for the community and everything else. So, yes, they got paid, but they came to work. And their concern was, the people who didn’t come to work still got paid, so why didn’t we stay home? And where’s the compensation. And we were only asking for three days leave. No cost to the employer because it’s non-replaceable, and not money. We asked for time off.”

The job of clearing roads during the storm was made more difficult by the fact that Kingston had fewer than the required number of outdoor workers, DC said. The city has been ordered by a Ministry of Labour arbitrator to have at least 115 outside workers on staff, but during the storm the number dropped to 92, according to DC. The issue was still being dealt with at the time of this interview.

There are 545 full-time employees in total in the City of Kingston. Of those, there are supposed to be 115 outside workers. (The rest are inside workers, clerical staff, day care workers, social workers and employees in homes for the aged).

As of this interview, the city had 107 outdoor workers, “so they still owe us eight employees,” DC said.

The city has been ordered to pay the CUPE local $2,000 twice (for a total of $4,000) in the same arbitration case. The case has been heard in the Best Western hotel, by an arbitrator approved by the Ministry of Labour.

“If they violate [the latest ruling] within the next 25 days and don’t have the 115, then we’ll go to the courts. They have 21 days to hire 8 employees.”

These issues didn’t come up until after the ice storm was over. During the storm, the union didn’t look at their collective agreements or file grievances. “We realized we had a state of emergency in Kingston, and we told them [the administration] we would waive a lot of things in the collective agreement with regard to the ice storm, and we did. We didn’t file one grievance during the ice storm. But after the ice storm, we go to the province of Ontario.”

CUPE members in Kingston are angry at the city for hiring private contractors to clean up brush from the ice storm, but the union hasn’t gone public with their complaint because they are worried that taxpayers won’t understand or support their position.

“They [the administration] brought in contractors from the outside, they defied the union. But at no time have we put this [out] publicly, because we maintain that it was a disaster, the public wants the brush cleaned up, we want it cleaned up, and we’ll meet them at another road, someday.”

The union would like to do all of the clean-up in-house, but they’re worried the public won’t support them if they do anything to slow the clean-up down, DC said.

City administrators seem determined to use anybody other than city staff to clean up the brush, DC said. “The first thing they did was bring in the UIC guys [workers paid through the unemployment insurance system] to mulch the brush. That wasn’t enough. Then council passed a motion to spend $300,000 in overtime for city workers to come in and help clean up the brush. It didn’t last a week, then they went out to private contractors. So at no time did the city employees get what they were guaranteed through a motion of council.”

Q: What’s the motivation there?

“We have a right wing council now that believes in privatization.”

Q: But if they’ve got their own people right there, wouldn’t it be cheaper to use them rather than hire private contractors?

“Approximately three weeks ago we met with them, when the $300,000 came out. Under the collective agreement they’re allowed to hire 35 students. We told them we didn’t care who picked up the brush in the streets, but the brush in the parks was ours. We told them to hire the 35 students, let them bring all the brush out, let them work straight days, they only pay them eight bucks an hour, bring it to the side of the roads, and the workers would work four hours of overtime each night grinding up the brush. It lasted one week and then they just went out and hired private contractors.”

“They hired a few students, but they had the right to hire 35 and they didn’t. My position to them was: if you’re going to spend $300,000 ... why wouldn’t you go out and hire 35 students at eight bucks an hour, and use them throughout the day, and only use the full-time employees at night to do the major dragging, which involved the equipment? The daytime students would have been doing the lugging.”

“Right now if you were to drive through the City of Kingston, I can honestly tell you the grass is three feet high. And that’s because we don’t have enough employees.”

“City workers aren’t touching the brush at all ... We didn’t want to disrupt the public, because they’re fed up. Our position is that we’ll deal with the issue in negotiations.”

The goal would be to establish a stronger clause on contracting out for the future, DC said.

The context for all of this, DC said, is that the administration wants CUPE 109 to abolish its contract and start all over. He feels this is a very pro-business, pro-contracting-out council and administration, and an attempt is being made to bring CUPE’s collective bargaining agreement in line with that vision.

“The city of Kingston adopted the Indianapolis model of amalgamation. The Indianapolis model is: ‘the best practice.’ For example: street-sweeping. We have four sweepers, four guys who sweep the streets. Under ‘the best practice,’ they’ll find out what that costs for a year, and they’ll go to an outside contractor; and he’ll come in and do it per kilometre. Then it becomes cheaper. They told us they didn’t believe in contracting out, but ‘best practice’ is contracting out.”

Getting back to his role as trustee of property for the school board, DC said he was out “24 hours a day, assessing the situation in the schools” and trying to keep the buildings functioning. “You have to remember, we were getting ready for a freeze up. Pipes, furnaces, the whole bit. Then we had a lot of trees down. Our heat was out all over. Hydro was out. We brought up a big huge generator that ran the whole board office ... computers, everything. Our position was to continue to go around checking the schools. A lot of our schools are water heat, and the lines could have been busted if the temperature had dropped. And then the biggest major problem was the school boards was getting the schools back open.”

City staff wound up establishing shelters in QECVI and LCVI, but this was not entirely a good thing from the school board’s perspective, DC said. “Well, everybody and their dog who didn’t have any food at home would come to eat, so it got to be a real nuisance.”

Q: But they’re listed in the emergency plan as places where shelters should be set up, so isn’t it important to allow the schools to be used for that purpose?

“Oh yeah, yeah, we had no objections to that. It’s just more policing than anything. To be honest with you, we had drug dealers in these places.”

Q: What do you think the policy should be on using schools as shelters?

“They can still maintain the schools [as shelters]; I just think the answer is more policing.”