Eroding Public Services:
Canada's public services in dangerMarket Medicine:
From public providers to private proprietorsConsuming Classrooms:
Corporate control of public educationProfiting From Water:
Turning a life source into a commodityCutting Corners:
Secure profits, insecure servicesCollateral Damage:
The impact on jobs and communitiesRestucturing Equality:
Closing the door on women and minoritiesTargeting Taxpayers:
Corporate profits through public subsidiesProfiting Privateers:
Public money for private greedPublic Works!
CUPE's campaign to protect public servicesPromoting Public Interests:
Six point plan to strengthen public servicesResults From Polls On Privatization
TORONTO – A new report blows the whistle on the corporations pushing privatization of Canada’s public services – and shows privatization is costing taxpayers dearly.
The report, Who’s Pushing Privatization?, exposes the yawning gap between corporations eager to cash in on public services and Canadians bearing the brunt of privatization. Who’s Pushing Privatization? is CUPE’s second annual report on privatization.
The report includes a wide-ranging survey of decision-makers and opinion shapers. Business leaders are the least concerned about the consequences of privatization and the most eager for further services to be sold off.
In contrast to the corporate fascination for privatization, a new poll conducted by HRSG Workscans shows four out of five Canadians are clearly concerned about privatization of public services, and are deeply suspicious of why it’s taking place.
"Canadians know they end up paying the price. They’ve seen what happens when services like health care fall into private hands," said CUPE National President Judy Darcy.
According to the study of decision-makers, public officials and politicians fall somewhere between the corporate and the public views.
"But the evidence is clear and the decisions should be as well. Corporations have no place in our hospitals, our schools, our water," she added. "Governments are taking a dangerous turn down the wrong road when they hand corporations ownership and control of our services," said Darcy.
Far from saving the public money, privatization and public-private partnerships cost taxpayers more. From a New Brunswick lease-back school costing an extra $900,000 to welfare "reform" in Ontario that has meant huge cost overruns and phantoms savings, privatization is lining corporate pockets without any benefit for Canadians.
"In this report we blow the whistle on the greed motivating the privatization pushers. Take Alberta, where private health care giant MDS is backing both Ralph Klein’s Tories and the private clinic that stands to reap huge profits from Klein’s private hospital scheme. If the privatization pushers have their way in Alberta, it will open the door to two-tier, for-profit medicine across the country," says Darcy.
"We’re calling on governments to listen to the people who elect them and resist the privatization pushers. We have money for public services like Medicare – but it’s being handed to corporations. Privatization costs more and you get less in return. Money in government surpluses should be redirected and reinvested to strengthen public services. It’s the best value for our money, and it’s what Canadians want."
CUPE is Canada’s largest union, representing 475,000 women and men in health care, education, municipalities, social services, libraries, utilities, transportation and airlines. The report is available on CUPE’s web site at www.cupe.ca or in PDF format.
Union warns of lost jobs
Privatization hurts society, CUPE says
Canadians are already feeling the negative impact of privatization, and the long-term consequences will be enormous if governments continue down this path, a report by one of the country's largest unions says.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees will officially release the report, called Hostile Takeover: Annual Report On Privatization, today in Toronto.
The report details how privatization moves have hurt Canadians both in the pocketbook and as a society, especially in health care and education.
``It's meant to be a wake-up call, an alarm bell,'' CUPE national president Judy Darcy said in an interview.
Between 1992 and 1996, 121,000 public-sector jobs disappeared and that has had a ripple effect on communities, the report says. Some jobs were eliminated and other unionized jobs have turned into private-sector jobs, often with only part-time or casual hours and at much lower wages.
``What we're seeing is not only the outright loss of jobs, but we're also seeing the transformation of decent, family-supporting jobs into low-paid, insecure jobs,'' Darcy said.
Lost wages mean less money for people to spend in local stores, on housing or recreation activities, the report adds.
Darcy said it's not a coincidence that the report is being released just weeks before Finance Minister Paul Martin is to deliver the federal budget because CUPE wants to see funding levels for public services restored.
CUPE protests conference on selling off public services
(TORONTO) -- A gathering of some 600 highly-placed officials from municipal and provincial governments and corporations at a conference on so-called ‘public private partnerships’ is nothing more than a front for selling off public services and jobs.
The P3 '99 Conference became the target of labour protestors at a downtown Toronto hotel today, after it was learned Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae and other high ranking government officials were attending the two-day event.
CUPE National President Judy Darcy told the demonstrators, “meeting inside this hotel today are some of the biggest corporations, bankers and consulting companies in the world – who are planning how to sell off our public services to the private sector.
“Azurix Corporation -- which is owned by Enron, which bought out Philip Services -- is not going to tell that conference that after Philip took over the waste treatment plant in Hamilton, 185 million litres of raw sewage were dumped into Hamilton harbour.”
Said Darcy, “Andersen Consulting is not going to tell the conference that it created a ‘virtual’ social assistance system in Spain with multi-media kiosks instead of people to deal with the poor. That’s exactly what they want to do with the new call centres in Ontario.
“Borealis Investment, an arm of the OMERS pension plan, is not going to tell the conference that P3 schools in Nova Scotia -- 55 of them now -- threaten the future of public education for our children.”
Darcy said, “it is also disgraceful that we have elected public officials taking part in this conference. They have no mandate to privatize public services. If they don’t believe in public services, they should get the hell out of public office!”
The P3 conference is being held by the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, a front for the world’s largest corporations. The conference attempts to find ways to privatize literally any public service -- schools, hospitals, roads, social services and even water.
As the days count down to the turn of the century, women are scrambling to protect their hard-won gains. The source of the backward push: privatization of public services, which threatens to create havoc in women's lives at home, at work and in their union.
While the government handover of our schools, hospitals, nursing homes, roads and other vital public services is eroding a way of life that men and women built and benefited from, the invasion of the privatizers has especially far-reaching consequences for women.
Corporate profiteers are devouring good jobs and services where women are the majority of the workers. Many of the jobs privatizers and contractors have set their sights on - and that deficit-obsessed governments are more than willing to wash their hands of - are jobs held by women. Clerical, health care, social services, education, cleaning and cooking jobs often top the list of candidates for contracting out. Privatization of these jobs also means services that eased the burden women traditionally shouldered at home and in their communities are now threatened with extinction.
For CUPE and other unions, the ripple effects of these changes will touch every corner of the union. CUPE is losing women members at a time when women are more active than ever in the union. The quality of the public services CUPE members provide is being seriously compromised. And for those women left behind after a round of privatization, the mushrooming workloads confronting them on the job and in the home cut into the time they have to be active in their locals.
But the effects of the restructuring being forced on the public sector reach far beyond the paid workplace. When retirement home costs spiral out of reach, when patients get released earlier than they should after surgery, or when hospital food becomes so intolerable that patients' families cook meals and bring them in, work gets shoved back where women have worked so hard to move it from: the unpaid and isolated domain of the home.
"Mike Harris can cut because he knows women will pick up the pieces," says June Muir, on the phone from the picket line outside the Windsor-Essex Community Care Access Centre (CCAC). Muir, president of Local 3626, was leading her members - the overwhelming majority of them women - in a strike she says was "about the future of health care." Local 3626 members, CCAC support staff workers, play a key role in making sure health care and support reaches patients in their homes.
The Ontario government created CCACs as an easy way to ration funding for community-based health care. At the Windsor-Essex CCAC, the first signs of privatization have begun to creep in. Nursing service providers must now bid for contracts in what Muir worries will become a race for the lowest cost, not the highest quality of service.
So while the CCAC is still in theory a public service, the stage is being set for the all-out privatization of this important point of contact with the health care system. Bidding to provide nursing services marks the beginning of a process that inevitably pushes down workers' wages while compromising quality and access. It's a pattern that's unfolding across the country.
"The public sector was a place where women could go to achieve a wage that allowed them to provide for their families," says Judith Mongrain, president of Local 87, which fought and won a lengthy battle against contracting out this summer with the City of Thunder Bay. "Now, it's harder for women to provide. They're being ghettoized back into undervalued jobs," she says. In Thunder Bay, the first jobs threatened by contacting out were men's jobs. But "the women were one hundred per cent behind the men. There was no question. Because at some point, we knew it would affect everyone," emphasizes Mongrain.
In British Columbia, CUPE workers at Langley's two newly-privatized ice arenas are picking up the pieces after losing a hard-fought and well-planned battle to keep the arenas in public hands. The union is busy trying to find placements for all the workers in the new regime, says Local 403 president Joanne Reece. The collective agreement prevents the employer laying anyone off as a result of contracting out. But as one example of the difficult transition, a woman who headed concessions may be forced to pick up garbage outside the arena. "Needless to say, morale is right in the toilet," says Reece.
In Manitoba, contracting out of the Winnipeg Convention Centre's housekeeping last year meant a group of workers who were mostly women - some with over 20 years of service - lost jobs that paid a decent wage and were steady work. Local 500 president Paul Moist, says cleaning and custodial jobs "are on the front line for contracting out. And it's women that will lose out."
For CUPE 500, contracting out of housekeeping meant the loss of 36 members, including the president of the local's convention centre unit, Sue Favell. Favell, a single mother and Aboriginal woman, couldn't find other work and has since returned to her reserve. The local fought hard to save the jobs, even designing a plan to restructure housekeeping work that would have saved the Convention Centre over $200,000 a year. But in the end, the centre's drive to cut costs left them fixated on finding non-unionized workers who would accept minimum wage, and left the CUPE workers on the streets.
Stories of both front-door and back-door privatization are cropping up in virtually every community across the country. In Nova Scotia, private lease-back schools threaten cleaning, cafeteria, bus driver and teaching assistant jobs. Private hospitals loom on the horizon in Prince Edward Island and Alberta. And in Quebec, deep cuts to public services have left the province's hospitals, community health care centres and nursing homes gasping for air.
This cross-country push to privatization and the loss of jobs it represents are huge roadblocks for the inroads CUPE has been making when it comes to Aboriginal women, women of colour, immigrant women and lesbian and bisexual women. "When you start out last and are trying to gain, privatization throws a huge wrench in the works," says national staff representative Carmen Henry. "Workers of colour can easily become the target of a backlash among the workers left behind," she says. As an example, she describes a situation where registered nurses are laid off, but the lower-paid health care aides are kept on and given some of the nurses' tasks. "Those aides are predominantly visible minority women. They're kept because they're cheap labour." Henry says they become prime targets for resentment, harassment and discrimination.
"When people face a layoff, it's easy to blame the person beside you, especially if they're not like you," says Glenda Smith, a Winnipeg triage worker, Local 2343 member and a member of CUPE's Pink Triangle Committee.
"Really, people should be mad at management. I wish they would focus their energy on the right target," she says.
When it comes down to it, women are in for the fight of their lives to stem the tide of privatization and contracting out. It's a fight for good jobs, a strong union, and a healthy community. And it's a fight that can be won!
In Québec clerical layoffs at the Societé Immobilière du Québec, the provincial agency that cares for government buildings, led to a creative solution to contracting-out of electrician work. Nearly 100 members of Local 2929, mainly female clerical workers, lost their jobs in a 1995 restructuring. At the same time the employer was looking to contract out electricians' work as they retired.
So the local negotiated an apprenticeship program that gives the laid-off workers access to training and on-the-job experience as electricians and ventilation system mechanics. The majority of trainees in both fields are women, including Hélène Simard, who is training to become an electrician. Once she's completed her training and is certified, she must work her first four years with the Societé, and is guaranteed a job there as long as she wants it.
Simard had been a clerical worker for 13 years, but she was happy to make the change. "It was too routine, I wasn't happy sitting all day. It wasn't a hard decision [to enter the retraining program]," she says. Saving the electrician jobs was a part of the local's plan to find the laid-off workers jobs. It's a plan that gives women access to training in an area of work women don't traditionally take on. And while the local didn't get as many apprentice positions as it had proposed, the program is an example of one way to prevent privatization.
Often fighting back means thinking ahead. And that's exactly what Local 500 is doing in Winnipeg. The local is close to securing funding to study the future of clerical work in the city. Local 500 represents about 750 clerical employees who are "very nervous about their future," says Paul Moist.
The study will look at issues like new information technologies, and the need to retrain and update clerical workers.
"These are the forgotten class of worker," says Moist. When he discusses the project at workplace meetings the female workers are excited that their union takes their issues so seriously and are eager to participate, even though some may never have been active before.
"It's about trying to get in front of an issue instead of worrying about it after the city makes changes," says Moist.
Fighting contracting out and privatization also means rethinking how the union works. "The challenge is to create the environment where women are encouraged to participate and be active," says Moist. Often this can mean small but often-overlooked details, like paying childcare as well as per diems at membership meetings. Or holding meetings at a time when single mothers find it easiest to come. Or making sure women are encouraged to take on steward or other activist roles.
Fighting back also means involving the community. When corporate behemoth ServiceMaster came to Prince Edward Island hoping to gobble up cleaning, maintenance and grounds keeping jobs in the Eastern District School Board, Local 1775 members sprang into action. They made links with workers in places where ServiceMaster had taken over cleaning contracts, gathering horror stories about the chemicals that were introduced and the deteriorating cleaning quality. Armed with information about what could happen to PEI schools, the local spread the word among its members as well as to parent groups, teachers and sympathetic school board members.
"The quality of our schools would have gone south in a hurry," says Local president Marsha Arsenault. "Parents didn't want kids in a dirty school or an unsafe environment."
In small towns where schools are a focal point for community events, the threat of an ill-kept school mobilized public pressure on the school board to the point where the board backed away from its plan to contract out the jobs. If ServiceMaster had won the contract, the board's part-time custodians, who are mostly women, would have been the first to lose their jobs.
A similar, community-based approach worked well in British Columbia, where the province was moving to centralize emergency dispatching services for police, fire and ambulance.
"We focused on public safety," says Local 403 President Joanne Reece. "We showed that each community needs the skilled professionals who know the region or town inside and out. You don't get that in a centralized system."
Reece, Local 403 and other community members were able to convince their municipal council not to contract their police communications services to the centralized dispatching system.
Key to a successful fightback will be CUPE's ability to shed light on the many negative repercussions of privatization and contracting out. That includes shining the spotlight on ways privatization and contracting out hurt women. CUPE's national women's conference will help build that analysis and awareness.
And CUPE's Public Works! campaign will continue to build broader community support for strong, well-funded public services.
In the end, it's a fight every CUPE member has to take on. It's up to all of us to stop the clock from turning back on women's gains - to save women's jobs, and to keep the services we rely on in public hands.
Not only are women as a group losing work that's full-time and well-paid, immigrant, visibly minority and Aboriginal women just getting a foot in the door are now fighting to keep the door from slamming shut altogether.
In the coming years CUPE faces the twin challenge of fighting to hang on to what we have while at the same time continuing the struggle to win much-needed improvements to an imperfect system.
Competitive bidding is an employer tactic that often forces unions to compete with private contractors to provide a service. The bidding process can lead to unions undercutting wages and benefits they fought for decades to win, just so their members can hang onto their jobs.
For centuries, women's work has been under-valued or not counted at all. As our social safety net emerged over the last 50 years, women's traditional tasks were turned into paid public sector work that communities valued and funded collectively through taxes.
No longer the responsibility of individual women in their families, services like long-term health care and elder care became the responsibility of society as a whole, allowing women to enter the workforce in droves.
Recent Statistics Canada figures show the number of female union members grew from 320,000 in 1966 to 1.6 million in 1992. During the same period, union membership for men grew at a slower pace, rising from 1.6 million to 2.2 million. Within CUPE 60 per cent of members are women.
Women are the majority in the broader public sector, making up two-thirds of the unionized workforce. In 1996, 18 per cent of working women held public sector jobs - jobs that for years have provided good wages, job security, full-time hours and benefits. Twenty years ago, that figure was 21 per cent.
The 90s will be remembered as the decade of cutbacks in public sector employment. A CUPE-commissioned study found that between 1992 and 1996, 25,000 female public sector workers lost their jobs. And Statistics Canada reports that between 1990 and 1995 the ranks of full-time women public sector workers shrank by four per cent. As a result part-time and temporary work is on the rise. In 1992, the number of female part-time workers grew by 70,000.
It's the male workers who are losing their maintenance jobs to contracting out at the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing Corporation. Here the members of CUPE Local 1860 are fighting privatization of social housing. Losing the maintenance jobs is a tragedy in itself says local president Jeanne Clarke. "But the trickle-down effect is in the decline in service to our clients, who are predominantly female," she explains.
Contracting out of the housing corporation's maintenance means the residents - many single mothers and elderly women - no longer know they'll get the help they need when they need it. When maintenance was done in-house, residents knew a maintenance person was available on call if their toilet backed up or their hot water heater broke.
As if that wasn't bad enough, earlier this year the housing corporation sold one of its complexes to a private company with grand plans to convert the Linden Court units into high-priced condos. The corporation barely gave enough notice for residents to pack their toothbrushes, let alone their furniture. The sale threatened to turn seniors who'd lived there for 30 years out on the streets. What came next was a stunning display of how high the tab for privatization can run. Under intense public pressure, the corporation was forced to buy back some of the condos and then subsidize rent for seniors who were unable or unwilling to move or buy a condo.
The housing corporation's decision had a significant effect on women. For the female tenants of Linden Court, it was an incredible shock at a time in their lives when, given the number of elderly women who live alone and in poverty, most would be ill-equipped to deal with the situation. And for the tenants' families, some women faced the extra work that may well have come from an elderly family member moving into their home. Local 1860's fight is the Newfoundland focus of CUPE's Public Works! campaign.
Stress, overwork and low morale are all common for workers after a bout of privatization or contracting out. Hospital kitchen staff in Saint John know all about what happens when their work gets handed to a huge corporation. When the employer decided to contract out food production to corporate giant Bitove, all hell broke loose. Patients were getting "glorified TV dinners that nine times out of ten were either still frozen in the centre or totally dried out," says Donna Kennie, Local 813's chief steward. The meals included now-infamous 'rethermalized toast' that was flown from Toronto to be re-heated in New Brunswick, while the hospitals' toasters sat idle.
Displaced kitchen staff, part of a bargaining unit that's 80 per cent female, all managed to find jobs elsewhere in the hospital system. But local president Mitch Jackson says the employer's attempts to privatize were ill-planned, despite the $13 million pricetag. Employees left behind in nutrition and food services are logging huge amounts of overtime doing food delivery and preparation work.
"Everyone left is overworked, stressed out and pushed to the limits," says Kennie. She recalls one day where a supervisor collapsed on the job while trying to deal with the shortfall created by 16 staff people getting sick at the same time. "It's massive burnout." Kennie is quick to point out that stress leave and sick leave are also costs for the employer.
The new food delivery system has also become a health and safety hazard. When the frozen food is ready to be delivered, it's loaded onto reheating carts that are bigger, heavier and harder to maneuver than the old carts, leading to an increase in back and shoulder injuries.
Kennie says many staff don't eat the food, and that many patients get meals brought in by their families - especially long-term patients. Last year a provincial adjudicator ruled the hospital violated Local 813's collective agreement when it contracted out food preparation. Since then, work has slowly come back into the unit. But the rethermalized food remains. "We stopped it from getting into any other hospitals - for now," says Jackson.
Jackson sees profit margins and the bottom line taking over the hospital. "It's like a business now. You're a customer when you come in the door. For example, the priority in building cleaning is cleaning the front entrance. Well appearances don't help people or save lives."
The British privatization experience holds many lessons for Canadians. One important lesson: the impact of competitive bidding on women.
In the late 80s the British government passed a law requiring local governments to seek bids for services delivered by public sector workers, including building cleaning, education catering, garbage collection, street cleaning and grounds maintenance. Women held the lion's share of the cleaning and catering jobs. Government-imposed Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) had a dramatic impact on them.
A 1995 study by the Centre for Public Services found women's employment dropped by 22 per cent because of the tendering process, while men's employment fell by 12 per cent during the same period. Women part-time workers suffered the most from cuts in wage rates, reduced hours and worsening work conditions. And many women now hold two or three part-time contracts so that they can piece together a living wage.
One manager told researchers CCT was "a tragedy for women. They have taken the brunt of government legislation and it has hit the poorest paid from day one."
In the area of cleaning, the 14 local governments surveyed reported that 9,200 women had lost their jobs. At the same time, men desperate for employment moved into the newly contracted-out jobs. And while three quarters of the cleaning contracts were awarded in-house, jobs and hours were cut in the pre-tendering process to make the in-house bid competitive. Women lost full-time or steady part-time work, and in many cases saw their base wage drop at the same time - in some cases by up to 21 per cent. The story is similar for women who prepare and serve school meals - with the added insult that in some cases school meal prices went up.
The Centre's research demonstrates that far from saving the government money, CCT actually ends up as a drain on the public purse when the costs of things like unemployment benefits and lost income tax are factored in.
For women - like men - privatized services mean less quality and less access, higher taxes and increased user fees. But for women, privatization is likely to pack an extra punch. Here are twelve questions to help identify whether women bear the brunt of the impact.
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