Some 20,000 members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 79 are participating in the walkout. Many sport union buttons demanding "Equity & Respect," as part of their fight for "harmonization" of wages for union members and for the rights of part-time workers. Some of the many services shut down are day-care centers, public health, welfare, community recreation centers, and building inspections.

CUPE officials walked out of the negotiations and called the strike, scuttling hopes of Toronto mayor Melvin Lastman to bog down the union in endless behind-the-scenes contract talks. At a late night press conference on March 30, the mayor angrily stated, "The union is trying to hold the city hostage. We begged them this morning: 'Please don't strike.... Yet they had the nerve to walk out with no notice at all."

Equalizing wages, called harmonization here, is a central issue in the strike. There are a range of pay scales for municipal workers as a result of the creation of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) out of Toronto and six other towns two years ago.

CUPE is now bargaining its first contract for the GTA workers and wants wage scales to match the old city of Toronto's union pact. The mayor says the GTA cannot afford such a settlement. Strikers on the picket line say the old city of Etobicoke had the lowest pay scale and that the mayor wants to set their wages at this lower level.

CUPE negotiators proposed to the city that the issues of harmonization, job security, benefits, and seniority rights be decided by a government arbitrator. The city refused to do so unless it could first define how the 2,800 different jobs at city hall would be classified before an arbitrator intervened. According to press reports, CUPE had agreed to the city's hourly wage increase offer.

Strikers on the picket line say more than 65 percent of union members are women. Patricia MacLeod has worked for the Public Health Department for 12 years. At the picket line at a garbage transfer plant in the north end of the city she spoke about an earlier union fight that she had been part of to win pay equity for women workers doing similar jobs to men. "My wages were raised because of pay equity and now Mayor Lastman wants to harmonize my equity away," MacLeod said. Having already won pay equity based on gender she says it's now a question of "principle" to win regional pay equity.

In the south end of the city on the edge of Lake Ontario, Debbie Edmunds, a licensing officer, walked the picket line at a water filtration plant in the old city of Etobicoke. She said that prior to city amalgamation the Etobicoke workers were not unionized. By joining Local 79 they had a lot to gain in the strike. "Our wages were really low. We hadn't had a wage increase since 1989. We had no union and had unbelievable overloaded job combinations," she stated.

Of the 12,000 full-time workers in Local 79 about 10,000 of them are from the former municipalities outside the old city of Toronto. This means that half the strikers are looking to have their wages raised upward to achieve equal pay.

The 8,000 part-time workers also have a lot at stake in this strike. Linda Klocok, a part-time child-care worker has been employed by the city for five years. She had to wait more than four years to qualify for dental work because of the inferior benefits package that part-timers have.

Anne Dubas, the president of Local 79, said that the rights of part-time and temporary workers are important issues in the strike and that the union "cannot continue to allow our part-time and temporary workers to be used as a cheap labor force."

Daily CUPE strike bulletins are available on the picket lines. On the first day of the strike a bulletin entitled, "We Are Making History" began with the sentence, "This is the largest city strike in Canadian history."  
 
 
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