In January 2016, just weeks before the Chronicle Herald would begin its still-unresolved strike, management at the paper offered Nathan Clarke a job. Clarke covers sports, and the Herald, Nova Scotia’s newspaper of record, wanted him to be its sports reporter, stepping in to fill the shoes of a striking worker—what’s called being a strikebreaker or, depending on whom you ask, a “scab.”

Clarke wrestled with the decision. (His name has been changed to protect his identity.) Steady, full-time work in journalism was—and still is—hard to come by. He had another freelance gig that kept him at the local hockey rink enough that he didn’t think it would make him look suspicious to other journalists if he took the job. But it was one of the Herald’s striking workers who recommended Clarke for the freelance job when he was an intern at the paper in 2012.

“The people who are on strike have actively helped me get work,” he says. “Here I am with the option to take a job that will give me money that, quite frankly, I really need. But at the same time I would be screwing over people that I work alongside and who have also helped me get to the point where I’m at.”

Clarke knew the risks. Kelly Toughill, now the former director of the journalism school at the University of King’s College in Halifax where Clarke studied, warned students and alumni against doing the jobs of the Herald’s striking workers. Toughill has spoken publicly about how the school doesn’t support students breaking the picket line. One-onone, when asked directly for advice on whether to take a job as a replacement worker, she’s told young alumni that the implications of working a “scab” job could follow them around for the rest of their careers, thwarting future job opportunities. That wasn’t a risk worth taking for Clarke, and eventually, he declined the offer. “I just can’t put a dollar value on that sort of thing,” he says.

But now more than ever, the dollar value bottom line dominates the newspaper industry. Papers across the country are hurting. Fewer resources, outdated business models, a public unwillingness to pay for news, and shrinking newsrooms plague print media. Unions such as the Halifax Typographical Union (HTU), which represents the striking workers of the Chronicle Herald, protect the people who propel newspapers forward and safeguard the editorial content from the market forces that newspapers’ management can’t seem to beat.

At the same time, millennials like Clarke are graduating from journalism school with thousands of dollars of debt and throwing themselves headlong into a contracting and competitive job market, where unpaid internships and years of unstable work are standard. Getting a full-time job out of school, let alone a job with a pension, benefits, and job security, is unlikely for most. Journalists are entering the workforce at a time when the five-day work week and eight-hour work day are taken for granted.

When the Herald’s unionized staff did strike weeks after Clarke’s job offer, management hired temporary replacement reporters in place of striking workers as cheap labour. Many of these reporters were young journalists and recent graduates, like Clarke, with little newsroom experience. The HTU has been ruthless in calling out these replacement journalists on social media, engaging in shaming tactics to ensure their names remain known after their stints at the Herald. Whether these shaming tactics are effective and conducive to dialogue is up for debate. Certainly, unions are in a tough position of balancing priorities: taking a stand against strikebreakers while also doing more to reach out to millennial freelancers—some of Canadian journalism’s most precarious workers.

***

The Chronicle Herald’s management locked its employees out of their offices and banished their bylines from its pages on January 23, 2016. Sixty-one members of the HTU—unionized reporters, editors, and photographers—voted almost unanimously to strike after contract negotiations fell through. As this story went to press, the strike at the Herald had been ongoing for 250 days. As the strike persists, the largest independently owned newspaper in Canada continues to operate with a skeleton newsroom of five full-time replacement reporters between the ages of 25–30. Meanwhile, its unionized workers have spent more than eight months walking the picket line every day through nearly four seasons.

The Herald strike is symptomatic of a broader state of crisis in the Canadian media industry. Recent years have brought a slew of bad news for newspapers. The same month the Herald went on strike, two other Canadian newspapers, the Nanaimo Daily News and the Guelph Mercury, folded. In August 2016, the Toronto Star announced 52 layoffs. Bell Media cut 380 jobs last year. CBC cut 400 jobs in numerous rounds of layoffs over the past two years. And this year, Postmedia announced 90 layoffs. Not even digital media emerged unscathed, with BuzzFeed shuttering its Canadian political bureau in Ottawa this summer. Media organizations continue to struggle to do more with less. “The whole business model of the penny press—supporting mass market journalism with advertising— is collapsing,” Toughill says.

In Halifax, this collapse has played out in ugly ways. The Herald dispute has been called a union-busting drive. David Wilson, the chief negotiator for the Communication Workers of America Canada (CWA) who represented the HTU in negotiations, says management proposed more than 1,000 changes in the collective agreement, including significant salary cuts and increased working hours, reduced benefits, and the removal of a pay equity clause (which it has since agreed to put back into the agreement). The HTU and management have, however, agreed to a five percent acrossthe-board wage cut. Wilson says the Herald’s management is asking for concessions that have never been asked for by any newspaper chain. “It’s a very scripted, one-sided negotiation where the local was expected to make all the moves, and the employer would do absolutely nothing,” he says. “That does not happen—this is not typical at all.”

The unusual circumstances surrounding negotiations didn’t stop the Herald’s striking workers from rallying as a team, says HTU vice-president Frank Campbell. For the most part, he says, the Herald’s striking workers have stuck together. Many began writing for Local XPress, an independent online newspaper the striking workers founded in January. But eight months can erode the morale of even the most dedicated picketers. Over the phone, Campbell’s voice sounds worn—it appears exhaustion has set in. And in April, photojournalist Eric Wynne suffered a stroke on the picket line. “When you’re in this thing for eight months, different people are at different places in how they deal with things emotionally,” Campbell says. “Personally, I try to stay as positive as I can. Would I rather be working and earning a steady paycheque for what I love to do? Sure.”

***

On April 9, 2016, the Chronicle Herald published an article about refugee children violently abusing other students at a Halifax elementary school. The news story had no byline attached to it, because it was written by a replacement reporter—a practice that had been put into place at the beginning of the strike. The story quoted anonymous parents who alleged that refugee students had been “pushing, slapping, and verbally abusing” their fellow classmates. The Herald was blasted for the story by local and national media, including the Globe and Mail, and the story was picked up by Ezra Levant’s right-wing outlet, Rebel Media, and anti-Muslim blogs. In the days that followed, the news story was edited and amended a number of times before it was deleted entirely from the Herald’s website. An editor’s note that appeared in the paper admitted that the story “needed more work.” The story is just one example of the many dangers of relying on the paper’s skeleton staff. Campbell says the story would never have gone to print looking the way it did if professional, experienced journalists and editors had been handling it.

Lezlie Lowe is a journalism professor at King’s and was a freelance columnist with the Herald when the story was published. She’s not a member of the HTU, and when the workers went on strike, she continued to file her weekly column rather than breach her contract. She faced backlash from the HTU and the community in the form of shaming tweets and what she calls anonymous online commentary. But when the refugee story broke, she quit. “It felt like continuing with the paper in the face of that was implicitly condoning the bad journalism, and condoning the idea that it’s okay to do that, and it’s not,” she says.

It’s not just experienced writers who have condemned the paper since the story broke. David Swick, who previously taught journalism ethics at King’s and dispensed advice to journalism graduates on scabbing, says he knows of three King’s graduates from the class of 2015 who were approached by the Herald to scab and turned the opportunity down. During lunchtime conversations, Swick says he was struck by how many students spoke up against strikebreaking practices. “I don’t know if it was an appreciation of unions, or an instinct for justice,” he says. “But you’ve got young people who were heading out into a tight workforce, and who were saying they would not take a job with the newspaper of record in town because it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

But in a tough job climate, what’s stopping other young journalists from taking a much-needed job as a strikebreaker? For Toughill, it’s a matter of pragmatism: some news organizations won’t hire a journalist if they’ve “scabbed”—the media scene is small, and careers will effectively be ruined. She adds, however, that while she doesn’t think it’s a good idea, she does understand why some young journalists feel compelled to do it—it’s tough financial times for journalists and they have to pay the rent. For Nora Loreto, a freelancer and Quebec director of the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), it’s much more clear-cut: “From the perspective of someone who has been on strike for a hundred-plus days, their kids might not have clothes bought for them because someone is scabbing.”

For this story I reached out to four young replacement reporters for the Chronicle Herald. Of the four, two agreed to speak with me and then later reneged, saying they didn’t want to put their jobs at risk, or that it was their own story to tell. Two declined outright. To say the Herald’s replacement staffers are cagey is an understatement.

The HTU uses Twitter and its Facebook page to shame replacement journalists, calling them out by name, and posting images of the stories they’ve written with their bylines and tagging them in it. In March, for instance, the HTU tweeted, “Congrats to a certain young scab who’s just signed [a] contract as multimedia CH journo! Enjoy my your job! #CHstrike.” Attached was a photo of a vulture and a dead animal carcass. While not part of the union, Lowe says she received her fair share of online hate: people would take photos of her from the internet and make memes. “I got baited a lot,” she says.

To people unfamiliar with labour politics, this culture of shaming might seem heavy-handed and counterintuitive to sparking dialogue about the negative effects of strikebreaking labour. While it might not be an effective way to stop people from scabbing, says Toughill, such shaming tactics have a long history, even if some might feel they’re “somewhat repugnant.” “In many cases, that’s what we do as journalists,” she says. “We hold people up to the light and say, ‘Look, this is what this person is doing. What do you think of what this person is doing?’” Toughill admits it’s a easier in the age of social media. “I would be very distressed if it were following someone’s children or their spouse,” she says, “but I think it’s a little bit naive if you’re going to work for a striking organization, to think you’re not going to be called out for that decision.”

***

It was clear to Clarke that he wasn’t being approached by the Herald back in January for any reason other than a profit-serving one. “Looking at the quality of some of the reporting since the strike began, I don’t feel like it was ‘we’re looking for the best young journalists in Nova Scotia to help us put this paper out during the strike,’” he says. “It seemed like a ‘get whatever we can’ kind of grab.” Meanwhile, Mark Lever, the Herald’s CEO, has called freelance labour a cost-effective strategy to producing content.

The CFU is in a unique position to reach out to young journalists like Clarke who are trying to carve out a living independently. Founded 10 years ago under Unifor, the union is charting new territory, but has to be careful of stepping on the toes of other locals of full-time newsroom staff. The CFU is one of a few freelancer unions in Canada, and represents a broad cross-section of people, but each of their 250 members is a precarious communications worker. “The existence of my union is an experiment,” says Loreto. “We’re not a real union, because freelancers don’t have a common employer.” While she admits unions are human, fallible organizations, she says that when we prioritize the discussion surrounding the one or two people strikebreaking and erase the fact that there are 30 people on the picket line defending the basic tenets of journalism, it’s a move that is reducing all of these complicated social issues to the individual level. “It’s making the problem about whether or not we’re being fair to this 22-year-old guy from the University of King’s College,” she says.

Recognizing this fundamental difference of understanding of “the collective” is core to being able to talk to young workers, particularly those under 40, about the importance of unions and organizing. “If you’re a young journalist,” Loreto says, “you have to be critical of the mainstream, profit-serving narrative.” Rebecca Rose, a young freelancer who has been the CFU’s Atlantic organizer throughout the strike, says she organized trips to the picket line for King’s students, spoken on panels and wrote literature, and offered outreach for students and young freelance journalists. She says the visits by current or future freelancers to the picket line meant a lot to the striking workers. “Herald management went really hard with trying to recruit recent grads,” she says, “and to see us resisting that was really important for the strikers.”

Rose says the Herald’s striking workers are people she wants to learn from. Walking the picket line with them over the past year, she says she’s gotten valuable advice from their decades of experience. “But that’s the thing: as a freelancer, do you want it to be just you, isolated, working from home and without a community of other freelancers? Or do you want to have that camaraderie?” she asks. “I want to have that camaraderie. It’s just fighting back against this individualistic mindset we’ve been sold.”

Ming Pao workers picketing outside their workplace. The paper’s 140 workers walked off the job last Wed. Sept. 21, in an effort to win a first contract- and the strike has been disappointingly under-reported in Canadian media. Photo from the Ming Pao union.

“Stay strong. Fight for justice, fight for our dignity, fight together.”

The above is a message from Simon Sung to his fellow employees at Ming Pao, a Chinese-language daily newspaper in Toronto. The paper’s 140 employees have been on strike for nearly a week, yet no English-language media outlet that we’ve been able to find has reported on it so far. (Update, 5:03 pm: via commenter Natalie below, the strike came up on CBC’s Metro Morning today.)

The paper’s workers walked off the job last Wed. Sept. 21, in an effort to win a first contract. Last September, Ming Pao workers joined the Communications, Energy and Paperworks Union of Canada (CEP)’s Local 87M Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, after 65 percent of the paper’s employees voted to unionize.

Contract talks have happened on and off since January 2011, but the paper still does not have its first contract. Paul Morse, president of the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, says that key issues on the table for Ming Pao are wages, sales commission, security guarantees, reasonable work hours, and minimum vacation requirements.

Sung, a Ming Pao employee and union chair, says that Ming Pao is looking for a fair contract comparable to that of Sing Tao Daily, another Chinese-language newspaper in Toronto. Sing Tao went on strike for seven weeks before unionizing with Local 87M in 2000. Local 87M also represents World Journal, another Chinese-language newspaper in Toronto.

Sung says that Sing Tao Daily employees have higher wages, less work hours, and fairer vacation time. But for Sung, the biggest issue at Ming Pao is job security. He says that when the Ming Pao employees formed the union, more than 10 employees were laid off — mostly union supporters or union activists.

“We know that our employers did not like that we formed the union,” said Sung. “And from our perspective, that’s a punishment to the people who formed the union.”

A contract, Sung said, would give Ming Pao’s employers less excuses to lay people off—which he described as “a target to minimize the power of the union.”

Morse, along with Sung, hopes that the employers will come back to the bargaining table soon in order to negotiate a reasonable contract for Ming Pao employees.

The fact that other media outlets have either taken no notice of the strike, or noticed but decided not to cover it, has disappointing implications for the city’s rhetoric about diversity. At the very least, it points to the erosion of labour reporting at the big papers.

“The Ming Pao workers are looking for standards things that working people in Ontario have achieved over the years,” said Morse. “They’re no different than anybody else in Ontario in terms of needing to make a living, needing to work, and appropriate standards of work. So we hope the company realizes that it’s to their and our advantage to treat their workers fairly. There’s nothing that the Ming Pao employees are asking that’s outside the realm of normalcy.”

For 10 days, playing host to one of the world’s largest and most important film events, Toronto—making sure that none of the TIFF-associated signs deviate from the obligatory Helvetica font—dresses itself up as the cosmopolitan city it aspires to be (and sometimes is). Maclean’s was first, but no doubt not the last, to remind its readers that, yes, Toronto is indeed a “World Class city.”

Being a global city, however, means that you also have global problems. As much as the flashes flare, the gossipers chatter, it remains true that the entire spectacle rests on tremendous amounts of work: much of it grossly underpaid, excessively strenuous and unjustifiably tenuous. So it’s exciting to see the workers of one of Toronto’s premier hotels (the Fairmont Royal York) walk off the job today in a strike action organized by Unite Here, the same union that led the G20 hotel workers’ strike. The injuries, the poor-pay, the long hours, the mounting workloads, the tyrannical bosses today proved too much to bear (all of this while the employer harvests a windfall from the festival).

That celebrities and the local actors’ (ACTRA) and set workers’ (IATSE) unions immediately joined them reminds us that films are not just art, and film festivals not just parties, but also work. Hotel workers, actors, and on-set workers have all taken a beating these past few years and seeing them join together injects an important note into Toronto’s celebration of film: that despite the very well put together show things really aren’t going so well for a lot of people. But they’re working to change that.

Update: Monday September 13, 11:35 am

The strikes continue.  Workers at the Hyatt regency walked off the job yesterday for 24 hours.  I wouldn’t be surprised if these short strikes continue throughout the film festival.  What caught my eye most, however, wasn’t Martin Sheen but the following from one of the strikers:

“As TIFF celebrates the new Bell Lightbox with a street party for Torontonians, and the Hyatt boosts its profits with film guests this week, we continue to be treated like second-class citizens by the Hyatt owners,” said Althea Porter-Harvey, a Room Attendant at the Hyatt Regency. “We deserve better than that. We’re joining the street party today.”

The last time a hotel service workers’ labour dispute and that ol’ showtime razzle-dazzle collided, it resulted in the “Bad Hotel” video, seen below. We can hope today’s strike results in a similar explosion of social justice and jazz hands:

Unite Here local 232 hotel workers strike in San Francisco. Photo cred: Steve Rhodes

Things just got a little more complicated for Toronto in the buildup to this month’s G20 summit.  If the 10,000 uniformed officers, 1,000 or so unlicensed private security guards, airport-tight surveillance and checkpoints, the much debated “sound cannon” and the expected thousands of protesters didn’t promise enough drama, the largest hotel workers’ union in the city has voted to give strike authorization should contract negotiations for a renewed collective agreement break down.

Unite Here local 75, representing 5,500 hotel and hospitality workers from 32 hotels in the Toronto area, voted 94 percent in favour of striking if a new contract is not established. In a press release on their website, “declining working conditions and other draconian measures” are cited as causes for the strike: shortened and split shifts, increasing reliance on part time workers and contracted out services such as food prep have all resulted in a loss of income and benefits for the workers.  While hotels are coming out of the recession and enjoying the economic recovery, many forecasting promising years ahead including substantial profits from the G20, hotel workers have been locked in the recession.  The major issues, according to union reps, are job security and workplace conditions.

The strike comes at a particularly inopportune time for the city of Toronto, as nearly every hotel room is booked to accommodate the expected 15,000 visitors.  While this has many opposed to the G20 excited at the prospect of world leaders performing their own turn down service, concerns over Toronto’s hospitality industry grinding to a halt during a strike were quickly laid to rest by Unite Here; the only hotel that stands to be affected be a strike before the G20 is the Novotel Toronto Centre where workers will walk off the job on June 23 or 24 if a new collective agreement is not accepted.

Paul Clifford, president of the local, said that no other hotel will be in a “legal striking” position before the summit but that other hotel workers would join those picketing at Novotel; “that’ll be the focal point of our attention prior to the G20,” he said.  Cifford continued, “we want to both act responsibly for the G20 but also show that we are really determined to win a better standard for hotel workers, so that’s why we’re possibly engaging in a very limited strike action at the Novotel Toronto Centre.”

While the impact of the strike may not be as far reaching as originally thought, some French delegates and media personnel staying at the Novotel may be forced to navigate picket lines—as well as G20 security measures—during the summit.

La Journal de Montréal/ Rue Frontenac employees picket La Journal's offices in Montreal. Quebecor Media Inc. locked-out 253 employees nearly one year ago.

Reporters sans frontières has now waded into the mire that is the lock-out of employees at Le Journal de Montréal.

Unlike many public figures, who have thrown their hats in the union’s ring, RSF’s secretary-general, Jean-François Julliard, sided with press freedom, and the public’s right to know about the day-to-day business of their elected politicians. The Montreal Gazette wrote about about Julliard’s Nov. 30 letter to the President of Quebec’s National Assembly:

Julliard says he was surprised to see Vallières side with the National Assembly press gallery’s decision to delay the accreditation of two Journal de Québec reporters because the owner of the paper, Quebecor, is embroiled in a lockout of reporters at the Journal de Montréal. Both are Quebecor-owned papers.

Montrealers are all too aware of the battle raging between Quebecor, Canada’s largest newspaper publisher, and the employees of the french-language daily, but the drama has only been popping up in the English papers recently, leaving les anglophones a little out of the loop.

Nearly a year ago, Quebecor media locked out 253 employees. The reasons for the lock-out varies, depending on who you ask. Pierre Karl Peladeau, Quebecor’s chief executive, says the lock-out resulted from employee resistance to out-sourcing all but editorial and production jobs in an attempt to make the Journal more web friendly. The union cites proposed contract changes, which included staff and wage cutbacks, and the especially contentious removal of a clause promising staff 100 percent job security, as their reason.

NDP, Bloc and Liberal politicians, most notably Michael Ignatieff, said they would not grant interviews to the paper until the dispute was resolved.

Le Journal de Montréal’s journalists and other employees banded together to form the online news site Rue Frontenac. The site’s name, cannon logo and tag line, “Par la bouche de nos crayons!” are a play on Governor Frontenac’s retort, memorialized in a Historic Minute,  that he would respond from the mouth of his cannons. A healthy union strike fund is estimated to be enough to pay employees 76 per cent of their salary for two full years—at which point Rue Frontenac may have enough advertisers to  stand on its own feet.

In the months that followed, employees picketed the Journal building, and management staff alleged they had been threatened. Quebecor responded  with a court injunction dictating the maximum number of picketers allowed at one time, and banned locked-out staff from entering the building, which didn’t stop them from rushing the building on the six month anniversary of the lock-out.

Flash forward to November, when things  got really dirty: Lyne Robitaille, a Quebecor Editor, called for two Rue Frontenac journalists to be stripped of their access to the National Assembly. The charge was that they were writing under Le Journal de Montréal accreditation—but not writing for the paper—because they were locked-out by Le Journal de Montréal management, which includes Lyne Robitaille.

Around the same time, the National Assembly denied Quebecor’s request for immediate accreditation for two Le Journal de Québec journalists, the idea being that accrediting them would allow Quebecor, and by proxy, Le Journal de Montréal, to work around the lockout and Quebec’s rules against replacement workers.

Where and when the lockout will end is anyone’s guess, but it’s not likely to be anytime soon. The National Post reported last week that the two sides have only sat down once since the begining of the lock-out.

Le Journal de Montréal is still publishing under the steam of management, freelancers and copy from Quebecor’s other holdings like free daily 24 heures and TVA television. And Rue Frontentac is building its own readership with no signs of giving up the fight. Given that Le Journal de Montréal was originally born out of the 1964 typographer’s union strike at another French daily, La Presse, the writing may already be on the wall.

[Photo credit: Rue Frontenac’s Facebook group]

Solidarity forever. Or until the litterbox is full. Illustration by David Donald.

It’s hard enough to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort in this world, but to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort and be mildly inconvenienced? It’s too much to bear.

As I write this, Toronto is several weeks’ deep into a civic workers’ strike. The issues on both sides are complex, and neither side, the city nor the union, have behaved with grace or consideration. Swimming pools are closed, city-run daycares are closed, you can’t get a permit of any sort, and nobody is picking up the trash. As someone who hates to swim, has no children, and would need to own a home before I could consider renovating it, the strike means only one thing to me—how long can I get away with not cleaning my cat Poutine’s litterbox? How many little mountains of clumped clay does Poutine have to stumble over before I officially become an animal abuser?

Like most apathetic Torontonians, I figure ignoring the garbage problem is the best solution (actually, sneaking out in the middle of the night and cramming the cat crap into an overflowing street bin is the best solution — illegal, yes, but what are they going to do, get Poutine’s DNA from a turd?). And, like most no-way-would-I-do-that-job Torontonians, I am not unsympathetic toward the “garbage guys” union—at least not until their needs collide with mine.

Like most events in our publicity-mad era, the stalemate between the city and outside workers is really a battle over good versus less-good PR. The clever people signing the cheques at Toronto City Hall well know that the public employees’ union can’t muster the same sentimental attachment to waste management as their brother unions can to policing or firefighting. Firefighters have cute dogs, for god’s sake! And cops are sexy. Garbage guys have no adorable mascots and wear baggy uniforms that are about as sexy as wet tarps.

Nobody grows up wanting to be a garbage collector. No heroic texts sing of triumphs in trash removal, and there are no long-running television dramas examining the soul-destruction endured by people who empty recycling bins. No one has ever run into a burning building to save bundles of old newspapers. Thus, the city can hold out as long as it likes, because there is no glamour in rubbish.

I will admit to having impure thoughts about my local litter wranglers of late, and I am not talking about wondering what’s under their oilcloths. The first week into the strike, I caught myself thinking such unprogressive, uncharitable thoughts as, “I have never been in a union of any kind, so I wouldn’t know a banked sick day from a snow day,” or, “I went to school for six years, and I still make less than my local scullery lout, the guy who always chucks my empty green bin in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking pedestrians, seniors in walkers, large dogs, and children on trikes.” Shame, you dapple my rainbow.

In week two, I began to question my previously automatic support of unionized labour. Specifically, why do people behave like it’s 1932 whenever they go on strike? As if the diverse world of work today — wherein few people share the same mix of labour, pay, and benefits agreements — can be reduced, when it’s metaphorically convenient for both parties, to “bosses versus workers.” I’ve been my own boss my entire adult life. Who do I get to sing antiquated folk chants to? Where do I file a grievance when my house smells like the dumpster behind the Humane Society?

Now in week three, I don’t care anymore who’s right or who’s a greedy, overprivileged layabout (although I would dearly love to see my local councillor, a do-nothing in the sunniest of times, heaving bags of fetid refuse into the maw of a maggot-encrusted truck, preferably while being pecked by seagulls). I just want to breathe deeply again.

I’m tired of taping aloe-scented antiseptic wipes across the bridge of my nose when I run past the cat’s “go (and go, and go) zone,” through the increasingly dense, bluish mist surrounding the feline rest stop. I’m fed up with feeling surrounded by my own bad habits, by pizza boxes and sour wine bottles, fly-specked candy wrappers and spore-spawning coffee grounds. I’m sick of the dust, the entombing dust, and the raw, sweaty, eye-watering acidity in the air, the farty tang of it all.

If I wanted to wallow in filth, I’d pick up trash for a living.

CUPE workers on strike in Toronto. Image source: Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC

[Disclosure: CUPE is a This Magazine advertiser]

Toronto is now about half a day into a municipal workers’ strike, and the usual braying chorus has sprung up on radio, television, and the op-ed pages, alternately condemning or defending the strike action. Generally, there are three viewpoints expressed:

1. This is inconvenient, but overall I support the union’s strike;
2. Unions (all unions) are “extortionists” that are “holding us hostage”;
3. I don’t really care who’s to blame—what am I going to do with my garbage?

Already the sentiment that seemed to be gaining media traction this morning was “In this Post-Global-Recession World, shouldn’t CUPE just suck it up and accept that the benefits they negotiated are no longer viable, and they should just give them up now so we can all get on with our lives?” It’s one of those arguments that’s appealing to centrist media, because they get to slap the “Irrelevant!” sticker on the union, without being anti-union per se. It’s just that this strike crosses, you know, some arbitrary threshold of acceptability, and look, all these easily agitated people who like to call talk radio shows are worked up about it! Well, sorry, that’s not how it works. It’s not CUPE’s job to roll over and die every time management has a cashflow problem. The union exists to preserve existing benefits, negotiate for new ones, and stand up for their members’ job rights. That’s their job—they’re not running for Miss Congeniality.

And, despite their grumbling, many Canadians believe that collective bargaining and the right to strike are not negotiable based on the convenience or inconvenience of this particular strike, or the next one. The benefits of the union movement—even for those who don’t belong to one—outweigh the occasional frustrations.

I linked to this essay, “In Search of Solidarity” by Christopher Hayes on Twitter last week, but it’s stuck with me over the weekend and seemed particularly apt today. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a great excerpt, related to the New York transit strike in 2005. Keep this in mind in the next few days.

Among liberals–people who loathe Bush, oppose the war, favor national healthcare—there’s an ambivalence about the strikers’ demands: Who gets to retire at 55 with a half-salary pension? The New York Times editorial page calls the strike “unnecessary,” the union’s account of negotiations “ridiculous,” and bellows that [the union] “should not have the ability to hold the city hostage.”

But despite the near-unanimous condemnation by the city’s mandarins and negative round-the-clock coverage, New Yorkers, astonishingly, support the strikers.

I get an inkling of this when I walk past an MTA bus depot in East Harlem on the strike’s second day. Instead of a riotous mob shouting insults, cars honk approval as they zip past the picketers.

Polls commissioned by local news outlets bear this out, though you’d hardly know it from the coverage. One, commissioned by a local ABC affiliate and conducted by Survey USA on the first day of the strike, asked the question: “In the transit strike…whose side are you on?” Fifty-two percent of respondents said the union. Forty percent said the MTA. A poll from local radio station WWRL found that 71 percent of respondents blamed the MTA for the strike and 14 percent blamed the union. A poll by local cable channel NY1 found a majority of New Yorkers thought the union’s demands “fair.”

The real story of the strike is not the epic hassle it created. It is the fact that despite universal condemnation from opinion makers, millions of New Yorkers were in solidarity with the strikers.

“In Search of Solidarity” by Christopher Hayes [originally appeared in In These Times] [image source]