Arbitration looms in firefighter talks
City says bargaining system puts contracts out of step with ‘reality’
The ballooning Toronto police budget isn’t the only pressure on city finances — firefighter salaries are fanning the fiscal flames and few expect looming arbitration to provide relief.
Municipalities, including Toronto, blame arbitra- tors for awarding wages and benefits to emergency service workers that exceed other public-sector contracts and Canada’s rate of inflation.
The process is called interest arbitration. Municipalities and unions representing employees who can’t strike turn to it when they are unable to agree to a new contract. Emergency service worker unions say it works equitably for all, but municipalities say the system is broken and they want it fixed.
“For years, we have been calling on the province to restore balance to interest arbitration,” says Gary McNamara, president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. “If interest arbitration had produced the kind of wage settlements that collective bargaining achieved for other municipal employees, Ontario municipalities would have saved about $485 million between 2010 to 2014.”
Among the long list of arbitrated awards critics cite as excessive is the one, in 2013, that gave Toronto’s firefighters a 14.26-per-cent raise over five years — costing the city $45.7 million.
“These people (firefighters) have grabbed the brass ring, and it’s got to stop,” former deputy mayor Doug Holyday said at the time. “They’ve got to be brought back to reality.”
But unions reject the notion that arbitrators are the key factor in pay hikes.
“Most agreements in the emergency services sector are not settled through interest arbitration; they are settled voluntarily between the parties,” reads a position paper prepared for the Professional Ontario Fire Fighters Association. It’s a chicken-and-egg argument. Last year, Mayor John Tory and other members of the police services board negotiated a deal giving Toronto police a roughly 8.5-per-cent wage increase over four years, compared to the 5-per-cent raise, over four years, recently given to city inside and outside workers.
The police board’s hands were tied, Tory has said, because of the prospect of arbitration, which has “historically settled on the more generous side of wage increases.”
Fred Kaustinen, executive director of the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards, says Tory isn’t wrong, but he’s also not giving the whole story. Arbitrators don’t “make up” their awards, “they base them on the freely negotiated settlements agreed to by other, similar police or fire employers,” he wrote by email.
Responsibility for double-inflation wage increases over the past 15 years should be placed “squarely on police employers who first settle high-wage agreements and thereby set the trend for every other police employer across the province (and by extension, fire service settlements, too.)”
What’s not in dispute is the fact there is a long history of Toronto firefighters receiving wage parity with their police counterparts, either through negotiated or arbitrated contracts. This includes the 2013 firefighter arbitration award, which replicated pay hikes negotiated by Toronto police in 2011.
Yet there’s an unusual twist this time as the city and union prepare to revisit interest arbitration next month, after talks broke down late last year. The city’s 3,100 firefighters have been without a contract since December 2014.
Although the police-firefighter comparison has been linked to salaries, the city wants to expand the comparison in order for firefighters to take the same concessions police did, said Frank Ramagnano, president of the Toronto Professional Fire Fighters Association.
Tory called the police deal “historic” because the union agreed to cancel the sick-bank gratuity for new hires. He calculated this will result in $200 million in savings at some point in the future. (In the meantime, the pay hike will add $65 million to the city budget by 2018.)
Last week, Tory said the city would be happy if the firefighters end up with a deal similar to the one negotiated with police, which was “probably better than what we would have got if we’d gone to arbitration.”
Ramagnano said if the city wants to take away the sick-pay “gratuity” for new employees, it should also be prepared to give firefighters the same contractual items police get.
Firefighters, unlike police, don’t get such perks as shift differentials. In 2011, an economist hired by the firefighter union found police were compensated on average $12,000 a year more than firefighters.
“We are the largest fire service in Canada, we’re the busiest fire service in Canada, yet we’re not the top paid,” Ramagnano said. “Of the three emergency services (police, fire, paramedics), we are, in total compensation, the least paid.”