To the Editor, The City of Sault Ste. Marie’s decision to explore pursuing decertification at the Ontario Labour Relations Board in order to be designated as a non-construction employer is highly regrettable and if successful, will lead to a race-to-the-bottom.
Under the guise of promoting "open" tendering, Sault Ste. Marie’s City Council decision is nothing more than a step towards driving down wages for construction workers.
Claims that construction costs will go down as a result of allowing contractors who do not pay their workers a fair wage to bid on city work are completely unsubstantiated, in addition to being a distraction from the real motive behind this push: enhancing profits for employers, on the backs of workers.
At some point in time, the City of Sault Ste. Marie decided to act as a contractor by hiring construction workers to perform construction work on various city projects. Doing so allows the workers from that community who perform that work to choose if they are to be represented by a union and if so, by the union of their choice which in this case includes the Carpenters’ and Labourers’ unions, respectively.
Ms. Renkema and the Progressive Contractors Association claim that "local workers can’t work on jobs that their tax dollars are paying for" is completely unfounded because it is precisely local workers who perform city work, and those same local workers who chose union representation.
The right of workers to choose representation free of employer interference and intimidation is one that has been fought for by generations of workers in Canada and was recently constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court. However, as evidenced by this municipal decision, this Constitutional right is under assault.
Redefining the city’s employer status as a roundabout way of pursuing decertification to then be able to hire low-bid contractors does absolutely nothing to save taxpayer money. Instead, it does everything to enhance the bottom line of those unscrupulous contractors who are eager to win work by under-bidding their counterparts among legitimate contractors who do pay competitive wages, benefits and for skills training and upgrades. Those investments, in-turn, help ensure that work is performed safely, on-time, and on-budget with the quality and craftsmanship that the people of Sault Ste. Marie expect and deserve.
A recent report featured in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that unionized contractors in Ontario were 23 per cent safer than their non-union counterparts. If Sault Ste. Marie implements a system of ‘open’ construction tendering, will the city achieve 20 to 30 per cent cost savings (as claimed by the right-wing Cardus think-tank) by having a less safe workforce?
On any given construction project, there are fixed and variable costs involved. Generally speaking, the cost of materials is fixed. Purchasing machinery, wood, steel, concrete or rebar does not involve massive price fluctuations for contractors, which leaves the only other category to be targeted for a reduction in costs: labour.
If the city councillors were deeply concerned about saving taxpayers’ money, why would they not set an example and take a pay cut themselves, or reduce the wages of the city manager and staff? Instead, they want to extract savings from the women and men who build and maintain the city’s infrastructure.
At a time when the provincial government is moving forward with an increase to the minimum wage, and when hard-working Ontarians expect fairness from their politicians (including municipal leaders), we need to be looking at ways of strengthening people’s skills and potential, not beating them down with regressive policies like this ill-conceived review in Sault Ste. Marie. The citizens of that community, like all Ontarians, deserve better, and this is reinforced by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Patrick J. Dillon
Business Manager of the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario.
Recent Comments
comments for this post are closed