Please respect the working poor

We are the working poor. Spread across Canada, we’re the folks that you see everyday. We can be any age and live in any town or city.

We’re the people who work in restaurants and get up early to make sure your coffee and breakfast are ready to go. Or we stay up late, serving food and beverages, needing our tips to live. Serving and smiling, we watch while people decide how much to tip, which may have nothing to do with how well we did or how hard we worked to make sure our customers leave happy.

Many of us don’t have unions, we have no one watching our back. We get paid minimum wage and know that if we don’t want the job, there are many who do.

If working in retail, the new factories of our lives, we are gracious and we smile. Calm, while a customer has a meltdown, we long to say, “how about you do this job for $14 per hour? But never do, as we desperately need the income.

We need the job to support our families. We may come from other countries and have college and university degrees from our mother country. Our degrees may not be recognized in Canada, or we may not have the corporate networking skills to build a new career. We are the forgotten ones.

Many of us are seniors who work in retail or big-box stores and see the many products that are proudly made in the U.S.A., with images of the American flag, just in case we missed the connection. We are old enough to remember Canada’s manufacturing power in towns and cities — factories that proudly made Canadian goods.

Yes, we need this job to survive. We have food to eat and we are grateful. So when you analyze how much you should tip on your meal, or make a silly complaint to management about your expected level of service, please realize that you are affecting a real person, working hard to pay their bills, working with respect for what we do. Sara Young, Toronto So the TTC is going to save the environment with electric buses? Where does it think electricity comes from? Yes, we have some clean sources but as long as thermal plants exist and we have a grid, we have to assume that any new load will be taken up by thermal plants.

And thermal power plants are much less efficient — meaning they burn more fuel per unit of power delivered — than diesel engines. A modern diesel engine is about 40-per-cent efficient and, because the torque is generated in the bus and delivered directly to the driving wheels, that’s close to the overall efficiency.

Thermal power plants burn fuel to produce steam to turn a turbine that turns a generator to produce power that has to be transmitted over hightension lines to a transformer before it charges a battery that powers an electric motor that drives the wheels.

If we assume an average of 70-percent efficiency (an unrealistically high number) for only three conversions, we get down to 34-per-cent efficiency and, if we count all seven, we get a bit less than 8.25-per-cent efficiency. In fact, I have seen numbers from an English power plant that gets 10-per-cent efficiency from the time the coal is put into the furnace to when the power comes out of the wall — without any loss from a battery and an electric motor.

Electric vehicles have their place but it’s mostly about the year 1900. Andy Turnbull, Toronto

Diesel is more efficient than electric vehicles Re TTC gears up battery-powered buses for city’s green future, April 24