My city stinks. You notice the smell about two feet from my front door but it dissipates as you walk down the front steps towards the street. I know that around my neighborhood the smell isn’t too bad and that there are other places in the city that are positively putrid. And it certainly looks like it would smell too. The public trash receptacles (oddly shaped bins for garbage and recycling) are overflowing with empty coffee cups and take out containers despite the shrink wrap protecting their openings that was supposed to signal their “out of order” status. People have taped extra garbage bags to the sides of the bins but those are overflowing too. This situation really shows how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go in our “enviro-consciousness” when people will carry their empty coffee cup some distance only to toss it onto a pile of other litter.

Toronto is in the midst of a garbage strike. It’s been 35 days of stockpiled trash bags, public dumps in parks and city recreation centers, and litter strewn streets. And while it appears that a deal was reached this morning between one of the two Unions involved in the massive strike (not just garbage collectors were out – so were city clerks, public daycare workers, building inspectors etc.) there will be a long legacy to this strike. You can gauge at least the mood of the city – and maybe a lot more – by listening to call-in shows even on our otherwise genteel public radio or by following comments on news sites. The vitriolic anti-Unionism has surpassed feverish pitch.    

Union workers are apparently lazy and greedy. Everyone in this city knows what they get paid, what their benefits are and has an opinion that whatever it is, it’s too much. Everyone knows the intricacies and legal minutiae of their last collective bargaining agreement and that that agreement was too generous. There have been repeated calls for the Unions involved to be “squashed”, “killed”, “crushed”… you get the idea. Everything is their fault.

How have we come to a place where Unions are society’s economic boogey men? Is it that everyone has become an armchair Economist? I’ve heard countless comments from your average Torontonian saying that because we’re in a recession, these workers should not expect to maintain the same pay and benefits (I’m sure this is a mantra repeated everywhere). The economic downturn has been blamed for everything even though most employees in our city have been unaffected. In fact, last week the Bank of Canada (equivalent to the US Treasury) said that the Recession was over in this country. This announcement effectively cut out one of the arguments corporations around the world have been using – often duplicitously – as a strong arm tactics in their negotiations with Unions.

But this has done little to abate the anti-Union virus that’s spread across the country (and has been years in the making). It appears that the economy has little to do with the sense that the Unions are a scourge that need to be wiped-out. It appears to be something far more sinister and fundamental to 21^st century culture.

We’ve come to a point where a great many people have embraced an individualism that not only shuns collective efforts but jettisons rational financial arguments as well. Corporations are no longer the enemy of the working person. Corporations have become benign institutions that benefit society at large and it’s the working person – and their exaggerated pay and benefits – that have become the enemy.  Everyone’s assessment of everyone else’s compensation for their work has become legitimate in this climate and it’s made ravenous wolves out of us.  We’re all ready to say that garbage collection (or teaching in a high school… or driving a public bus) is easy and overpaid and that we would do it for less. What we are no longer willing to do is acknowledge that the employees who work for a corporation are responsible for its financial success and should benefit accordingly. We’ve decided that a corporation no longer needs its employees, our neighbours, when it could outsource their jobs for less. We’ve decided that this is somehow better for us and that this is our neighbour’s fault and the fault of their Unions.

What we have yet to admit though is that turning on our neighbours in this fashion stinks.