Toronto commuters breathed a collective sigh of relief Friday night after the Toronto Transit Commission and CUPE Local 2 agreed to push past a looming midnight strike deadline, with both sides signalling that a deal may finally be within reach.
The two parties have extended negotiations until 6 p.m. Saturday, buying more time to work through a dispute that had threatened to knock out a critical slice of the city’s transit workforce roughly 700 skilled electrical workers who keep subway signals running and streetcar overhead systems humming.
“This move comes as both sides believe there is enough progress to reach a deal,” the TTC said in a statement Friday.
It is a notable shift in tone from what had been, until recently, a fairly tense standoff.
CUPE Local 2 is not your average transit union group. Its members are the specialists subway signal maintainers, streetcar overhead maintainers the workers whose absence would not just slow the system down, but potentially shut critical parts of it altogether. A strike by this group would have rippled far beyond rush hour headaches.
TTC CEO Mandeep S. Lali had acknowledged as much, calling their work “important and highly skilled” earlier in the week. But he drew a firm line when it came to the union’s contract demands, arguing the proposal on the table would pile on roughly $40 million in additional costs over the life of the agreement costs he said taxpayers and riders simply cannot absorb.
“Not fair, reasonable or affordable,” was how Lali put it.
The TTC’s position is anchored in what it describes as an already generous compensation structure. Under the current agreement, workers receive overtime at double their regular hourly rate, a 25 per cent premium for Sunday shifts, and benefited from wage increases totalling 14.9 per cent over four years in the previous deal.
The union, for its part, has not publicly detailed its full proposal, but the gap at least in dollar terms is clearly significant enough that it kept both sides at the table well past deadline.
For now, subway trains are running and streetcars are moving. The TTC confirmed there is no impact to service and urged riders to keep an eye on official TTC channels for any updates as Saturday’s new deadline approaches.
Whether 6 p.m. Saturday brings a signed agreement or another anxious extension remains to be seen. But for a city that runs on its transit system, the fact that both sides are still talking and talking with optimism is itself a small victory.
