Good morning. Thanks for coming out today.

My name is Leah Casselman, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. With me today is Andy Todd, our Chief Negotiator.

OPSEU is the bargaining agent for about 90,000 Ontario workers in every kind of public sector workplace in the province -- from community colleges to hospitals to school boards to community agencies right across the health and social sectors. Our largest bargaining unit is the Ontario Public Service, where we have about 48,000 members.

We've called you here today because our Central bargaining team has decided it is time to call on our members in the OPS for a strike vote.

I don't like saying this. The memory of standing on picket lines three years ago is still too fresh. So is the memory of riot police at Queen's Park.

Our bargaining teams have decided that while we can still hope to get a new collective agreement without a strike, there is only about a one per cent chance that we could get a collective agreement without a strike vote.

Since contract bargaining started November 18, we've learned more details of what the government has in mind for OPSEU members in the public service.

The government came to the table with a human resources plan designed to fit their plan to destroy the Ontario Public Service once and for all.

In 1995, the government was elected on a plan to downsize the public service by the equivalent of 13,000 workers. So far that number has reached over 18,000. As a consequence, Ontario now has the smallest per capita public service of any province in Canada.

But as we learned in November, the government now says it hopes to have reduced the public service by 30,000 full-time jobs over the next two years.

The government has stated bluntly on several occasions that it plans to get out of the direct delivery of service to the people of Ontario.

Their program is the biggest change to a government in the shortest period of time anywhere in Canada at any time. It has huge implications for the way government works in Ontario.

This government has no mandate to go beyond its original plan. And yet there has been very little public debate on the future of the Ontario Public Service.

There has been very little public debate on the impact of these changes on the quantity and quality of services the Ontario public expects.

There has been very little public debate on the loss of accountability that occurs when the government privatizes.

There has been very little public debate on whether or not privatization actually offers a better value to taxpayers for their dollars.

There have been a lot of questions, but too few answers, on the issue of how exactly municipalities are supposed to deliver more services with less money.

If you look at what has happened in the public service since this government was elected, certain things don't add up.

In 1996, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs laid off all of its Farm Products Inspectors. These were the people who monitored Ontario-grown fruits and vegetables for excess amounts of poisonous farm chemicals. As part of their work, the Farm Products Inspectors visited farms and stores and sent approximately 2,000 samples per year to Ministry labs for testing.

When questioned by a reporter about this, the Minister, Noble Villeneuve, said that if Ontarians were worried about pesticides on their food, they could send samples in to the Ministry lab in Guelph for testing.

He neglected to mention that the Ministry charges $800 to do complete tests on samples provided by the public.

So much for public safety.

In early 1997, the Ministry of Natural Resources lost a court case when environmental groups proved that the Ministry had ignored the Crown Forest Sustainability Act in drawing up land use plans for an area in northern Ontario the size of Belgium. MNR lawyers actually wrote to the judge to say that they couldn't obey the law because they no longer had enough staff!

So much for protecting public assets.

Of course we all know what has happened in the last few months.

At the Arroll Youth Centre in Hamilton, 85 per cent of the trained, experienced, professional staff decided they would quit rather than be privatized and work in a young offenders facility that was too underfunded to deliver quality services.

Yet Community and Social Services Minister Janet Ecker insists that privatization of Young Offenders' facilities is a good thing.

She doesn't say it will save money.

She doesn't say it will improve services.

She says, simply, that the government is no longer in the business of direct service delivery.

This government does not know how to manage public services. That's why they're selling them off. That's why they have high-priced consultants crawling all over every square inch of the Ontario Public Service, making recommendations about so-called "better" ways to provide services.

In all cases, these consultants have a vested interest in telling the government to sell off services to the private sector. That's why we had the Arthur Andersen fiasco, which had the government giving $180 million to one of the richest companies in the world for the sole purpose of taking money away from poor people and poor families.

When the government does get good advice, it ignores it. When they hired former Toronto Mayor David Crombie to run the "Who Does What" commission, he specifically told them that social assistance should be run provincially.

Instead, we now have a system where municipalities are being forced to set up 50 new bureaucracies to run programs that they can't afford -- especially in the next recession.

Meanwhile, we've got more homeless people in Ontario than ever before.

Despite the fact that we're at the top of the business cycle and we can supposedly afford a $5 billion tax cut, the government decided to get out of the housing business -- at a time when the experts are saying it's time to build more social housing.

Some rural roads are no adequately longer plowed in the winter. Why? Simply because the province downloaded responsibility for secondary roads, but not the money to maintain them.

And last but not least there is Chris Hodgson, the person who represents the "employer" to OPSEU members in the public service.

In October, Hodgson quietly backed away from a plan he had been promoting to build Ontario's first private jail in his riding, in Lindsay. Obviously, his polling told him that Ontarians do not support turning correctional services into a growth industry.

But Hodgson is still a very strong supporter of all forms of privatization. Two weeks ago we got hold of government documents showing how much his Ministry, Management Board of Cabinet, intends to pay private companies to maintain 5,500 government buildings.

Turns out it costs more to do it privately.

Once again, so much for saving money.

The Ontario Public Service has been the victim of a hostile takeover by a political party that puts private profit ahead of public service, whether it makes "common sense" or not.

These guys like governing, but they don't like government.

That is what Ontario government employees are up against.

The government has made it clear that they intend to pick up where they left off in the last round of bargaining.

The proposals that the employer has tabled with us are designed to make it easier for them to destroy the public service.

They want to do this, first of all, by laying people off. They have proposed various ways to make that easier.

But they want to do more than eliminate jobs. They also want to destroy them, in the obvious hope that they will scare people away from a career in the public service.

The employer has tabled a proposal to allow short-term layoffs of any employee for a period of up to six months with two weeks' notice.

As workers, we do not have the luxury of not paying the rent and not paying grocery bills during these short-term layoffs.

If this proposal made it into our next collective agreement, basically every OPSEU member in the public service would be a temporary, contract worker.

As it stands now, about 22 per cent of our members in the OPS are already temporary, contract employees. They're called "unclassified" workers in government jargon.

These members work on short contracts, or on an on-call basis. Some weeks they work 40 hours, some weeks they work 14.

Many of them work in the hope of one day being converted to full-time public service employees with pensions, benefits, and all the rights of employees.

Under the current collective agreement, contract staff can be converted to full employee status if they put in the equivalent of two years' service, under an article entitled, "Conversion of Unclassified Positions."

Under the employer's proposal, that article would now be called, "Termination of Unclassified Employees."

This is the government's way of saying to contract employees, "You can forget about a real job in the public service. You will never get one. We will get rid of you first."

The government's plan for OPSEU members is that the size of the OPSEU bargaining unit in the public service will fall to 36,000 workers or fewer, not counting cuts that could still be announced. Under the government's plan, there will be two kinds of workers in the public service: those who have jobs, but no work; and those who have work, but no jobs.

We do not accept this proposition.

We do not accept that a modern democracy can function without a modern public service.

We do not accept that a modern public service can not provide real people with real jobs.

That is our central demand in this round of bargaining: real jobs and a real future.

When this government was elected, OPSEU members in the public service were called on to make a major sacrifice to pay off the provincial deficit.

We made that sacrifice -- the equivalent of 18,000 full-time jobs.

We are not interested in making any more sacrifices for this government.

We gave at the office. We gave in the psychiatric hospitals. We gave on the highways and in the maintenance yards of the Ministry of Transportation. We gave in the courts. We gave in the correctional facilities. We gave in the forests. We gave in the labs.

OPSEU members gave in every corner of this province. We've had enough.

We intend to defend real jobs, not only for ourselves, but for all working people. Because this government is setting a bad example for all Ontario employers.

In Canada today, about 12 per cent of workers are temporary. In the Ontario Public Service, it's 22 per cent. If the provincial government has its way, it will be 100 per cent.

That is this government's ideal labour force: workers who are so scared of being laid off at any moment that they will accept any amount of abuse to keep their jobs.

It is the classic cheap labour strategy.

We do not accept this. We will not accept this.

Holding a strike vote is the next step in our fight for real jobs for OPSEU members in the public service. "No job loss" is our goal for the next contract, and we intend to get it.

In the weeks ahead, I and the members of our bargaining teams will be travelling around Ontario, talking to members, and making sure every member knows exactly what is at stake so that when we hold the strike vote, it will be a strong one.

Thank you very much. We’d be pleased to take your questions now.

Leah Casselman, President

Return to News Release