Ontario says it won’t step in to end Drivetest strike(Published in Excalibur, Dec. 2, 2009)
Ofelia Legaspi
York student Kwadwo Gyabaa may have very well been the last person in Ontario to take a driving test in almost four months.
Gyabaa had been waiting for six and a half hours for his driving exam on a slow work-to-rule day on Aug. 21, when labour negotiations finally broke down between driving test company Serco DES Inc. and its employees, represented by the United Steelworkers Local 9511 union.
“My examiner managed to squeeze me in because I’d been waiting there since 8:30 in the morning,” said Gyabaa, who needed his G2 license to drive a car for his summer job as an audit supervisor at the Canadian National Exhibition.
Right now, almost 40,000 Ontarians whose driving tests have been cancelled have not been as lucky in beating the job action clock that has stopped driving examinations in Ontario for the past few months. Driving instructors, who are also severely affected by the examiner strike, turned up in the hundreds at Queen’s Park on Nov. 30 to urge the government to pass back-to-work legislation for the strikers.
Hamid Shirani, one of the protestors at Queen’s Park, said that, since the strike began, he and his family have been forced to live on credit cards. “My wife works in a daycare, but that’s not a lot of money,” he said. “I used to work eight hours a day, but now without that many students, I work 10 hours a week.”
“It’s absolutely the wrong time for the McGuinty government to allow a strike to go on for almost 16 weeks now,” Conservative MPP Jim Wilson said, addressing the protestors. “Over 400,000 jobs have been lost in our economy in the last year and a half and many, many jobs are being lost every day in your sector for no good reason at all other than the fact that the McGuinty government so far refuses to listen to your concerns.” Wilson introduced a bill on Nov. 23 that would force both parties to go to binding arbitration.
In the legislature on Nov. 30, Ontario Minister of Labour Peter Fonseca said he sympathizes with the innocent parties affected by the work stoppage, but believes that collective bargaining is “the most stable, the most productive, the best deals for our province and for labour [relations].”
Frank DeClara, another protestor from the Driving Instructors Golden Horseshoe Association, pointed out that more than half of the striking examiners themselves wish to go back to work. “Apparently, it’s only about the 285 members that are holding the entire province hostage,” he said.
Driving instructor Fiaz Khan expressed his surprise that the NDP, who market themselves as the party for the people, abstained from voting to pass the back-to-work legislation. DeClara agreed. “[The NDP] are not doing anything for the motoring public,” he said, adding that he is afraid the driving examiners could legally stay on strike until Sept. 2010 if the government does not step in.
Gyabaa, who remembers York’s own three-month-long strike, expressed his distaste toward the extended job action of the driving examiners. He explained that deadlock strikes become less about the issues on the table and more about who is the most stubborn.
“We don’t go into a boxing ring to decide a horse race so why are we doing these battles of endurance in order to decide who gets what. It’s backwards,” said Gyabaa.
Fonseca explained in the legislature on Nov. 30 that the government respects the collective bargaining process. “Over 97 percent of all labour relations are done without any work stoppage in this province,” he added. “That is an excellent record.”
While negotiations are set to resume without government intervention for now, Khan hopes for the strike to resolve very soon. “Before Christmas, hopefully, so we can celebrate.”
