[URBAN NOTE] The Toronto Public library, on strike

[rfmcdonald]

The workers of the Toronto Public Library are now on strike.

Toronto library workers are on strike after failing to reach a deal with the library board.

No branches will be open and workers will hit the pickets lines on Monday.

The strike results in the closure of 98 branches and affects approximately 2,300 workers.

Maureen O’Reilly, president of Local 4948, the Toronto Library Workers Union made the announcement.

"Despite our best attempts...negotiations have stalled," O'Reilly said. "We find that we are left with little choice but to take job action."

[. . .]

The library is asking borrowers to not try and return books and materials for the duration of the strike, adding that no overdue fines will be charged.

CUPE Local 4948 represents more than 2,300 Toronto Public Library workers. About half of those workers are part-time, and about three-quarters are women.

The workers accuse the Library Board of making unfair and impractical promises to the city this year regarding budget cuts.

Steve Kupferman's post at Torontoist, "A Perfect Day For a Picket Line", starts by emphasizing that at least the weather's great. Small comfort, that.

It couldn’t have been part of their strategy, but CUPE Local 4948, the union that represents Toronto Public Library’s 2300 workers, picked a great day to stage the first rally of the first strike in their history as an organization. The union—which formed in 2009 when members voted to separate from the city’s outdoor workers’ union, CUPE Local 416—was fortunate enough to have negotiations with the TPL board break down on the eve of an uncharacteristically balmy March morning. Call it beginner’s luck.

As a few hundred union members marched and chanted in Nathan Phillips Square, some turned their eyes from the sun to reflect on troubles ahead.

“I definitely think the union has the back of the part-timers,” said Melissa Kitazaki, who works in customer service at TPL. “I think it’s ridiculous that in August I will have been at Toronto Public Library for ten years, and I still can’t get a full-time job. That’s how few full-time jobs there actually are in the system.”

Kitazaki is the personification of one of the most contentious issues in the union’s negotiations with the TPL board. The union thinks TPL has too many part-time workers, and that those workers don’t have the same opportunities for advancement they may have had in better-funded days.

Maureen O’Reilly, the president of Local 4948, summarized her concerns for reporters when she arrived at Nathan Phillips Square around noon.

“We just want really, quite frankly, a decent living standard for our part-time workers,” she said. She added that since TPL shed the equivalent of 107 full-time positions last budget season (many of them belonging to workers made redundant by the rollout of new automated checkout systems), there are now more part-timers working at Toronto’s libraries than there are full-timers. A TPL spokesperson said that excluding part-time pages, many of whom are students, the current split is thirty percent part-timers to seventy percent full-timers.

Representatives of city council, including budget chair Mike Del Grande, have gone on the record as saying that the advance of technology means that there's no need to upgrade jobs from part- to full-time. So, this may be a long strike.

Library workers may soon at least have company. CBC noted that more city workers could follow suit next week, some twenty-three thousand.