Eleventh-hour deal that averted TTC strike to cost city of Toronto $176 million

A Toronto Transit Commission sign is shown at a downtown Toronto subway stop Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graeme Roy

The cost of the last-minute deal that averted a chaotic strike by the largest union in Toronto’s public transit system is $176 million over three years, according to newly released city records.

The agreement was worth it to avoid commuter chaos earlier in the summer that could have cost Toronto’s economy millions more, said TTC Chair Jamaal Myers in an interview.

“The big achievement is that there was no labour disruption and that we were able to find an agreement that secures labour peace for three years while staying within the fiscal constraints of the city,” Myers said.

The agreement came in the midst of transit ffunding negotiations with other levels of government, including a provincial pledge to provide support for transit as ridership recovers from the pandemic, he said.

“You see this moment where the stars aligned, and to give credit to the federal government, they’ve just brought on their permanent transit fund. So you see all three levels of government working together to invest in public transit in Toronto. And I think a TTC strike would have just undercut all of that work,” Myers said.

The 12,000 workers in the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 – including subway and bus operators, collectors and maintenance workers – will get an overall pay hike of 13.04 per cent between 2024 and 2026, with increases each year of 4.79, 4.25, and 4 per cent.

The deal came in the wake of a court decision last year that overturned legislation from 2011 under a previous Liberal government that make the TTC an essential service and banned workers from walking off the job.

The increase is larger than the employees have seen for decades, and is higher than other comparable labour settlements, said Councillor Stephen Holyday, who voted against the ratification of the contract.

“It’s an enormous amount of money,” Holyday said. “We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. All of that money comes from the city tax rolls to subsidize the service. It has to be funded by the public one way or another.”

The employer agreed to not contract out bus, streetcar or subway operators for the life of the deal. It also agreed to only implement four cross-border routes from other jurisdictions, but didn’t say which ones.

Other terms of the deal include that dental exams will drop in frequency from every 6 to every 9 months, no sick notes will be required for the first five days off sick, and there will be no more dry cleaning entitlements as the service has moved to machine washable uniforms.

Meanwhile, the collector position will be eliminated and be replaced with a customer service agent position across subway stations, a position that can check fares. This resolves an eight-year-old legal dispute between the agency and the union.

A new “operator pool” of 130 positions will allow customer service agents to be pulled into operator positions as the needs of the system change.

Seven combine operator positions, first introduced in 1961 and required to be kept by an arbitration in 1992, will be eliminated.

“These positions did not meet modern business requirements, and had significant costs associated with maintaining the complement,” the report to council says.

Holyday said he worried the deal could empower other unions to ask for more. Later this year, Toronto is set to bargain with both CUPE Local 79 and 416.