Strike OVER! Council Ratifies the Deal!

The Toronto council finally ratified the collective agreement tonight, finally ending the Toronto civic workers’ strike.  The vote was close, but not a surprise:  21 in favour, 17 against.  Watch for all the 17 dudes arguing in the media about how tough they are, and how the others who actually wanted to end the strike are cowards.  Nonsense.  The union’s gains here were very modest, lower than most other recent collective bargaining settlements. 
And remember that many of the 17 who voted against the deal because the employer didn’t eliminate the sick pay benefit right away were insiders with Mel Lastman’s governments, who never even attempted to bargain out the sick pay benefit during earlier rounds of bargaining.  Where were these councillors then?  Concillor Case Ootes in particular is deserving of contempt.  He was directly involved in bargaining for the City during Mel Lastman’s days and he never tried to bargain out the benefit, let alone achieve anything near what Miller did here in bargaining its phase out.   It’s shameful that Ootes is leading the charge against Miller for ‘only’ bargaining a phase out of the plan he now calls outrageous.   Any one else see any hypocracy in that?
Here is the Memorandum of Agreement with the Local 416 bargaining unit.
Here is the Local 79 Memorandum of Agreement.
Someone will now go back to the old collective agreement and incorporate the changes in these Memos to come up with the new collective agreement.