An open letter to Mark Ferguson, the president of CUPE Local 416, from Jutta Mason, CELOS, 2009:

I’ve been a booster of outdoor rinks for about 18 years. For the first ten years, an outdated provincial regulation required a Local 416 RCO (Refrigeration Compressor Operator) to be at the each outdoor rink continuously for 8 hours a day. These rink operators had a special “ticket,” allowing them to write down some meter readings from the rink’s machinery gauges twice a day. That took ten minutes each time. The RCO also drove a tractor fitted with a “Champion” ice-resurfacer. If he cleaned the ice twice during his shift, that took another hour. The rest of the time the RCO sat and talked, or read the paper, or played cards with a few regular rink visitors. If it snowed, the RCO couldn’t do any ice cleaning until the plough came to clear off the snow. There was a plough on the front of each tractor, but back in those days, using a plough was a different job classification, so according to the collective agreement the RCO wasn’t allowed to use the plough to get the snow off.

During the first decade of my involvement with Dufferin Rink, Local 79 recreation workers collaborated closely with me and other rink users to dilute the youth ghetto at the rink – to add families back into the mix, and older skaters, and women shinny players, and newcomers learning to skate. Our efforts paid off, and Dufferin Rink became more and more popular. Sometimes the recreation staff were just running to keep up with all the hubbub. The RCO’s, however, continued to sit throughout much of their shift, in their normal way. Having such an idle worker was hard on morale, and it certainly made a poor impression on the people who came to the rink.

One year we got lucky. The rink operator assigned to Dufferin Rink was a caretaker in the summers. He kept the building and the ice well-maintained, and he got the older kids to help him with various small tasks around the rink, which made them proud and kept them out of trouble. If anything was broken, he fixed it, and he was friendly and agreeable to everybody. We thought our problems were over.

But the next year he was gone. He had only eight years of seniority. We were told we would never get him back. Putting him at Dufferin Rink in the first place had violated the collective agreement. People with twenty years’ seniority were bidding on the RCO jobs. The RCO’s that followed him went back to their narrow job definition.

When I asked CUPE members about the RCO job, I got different answers. Some guys said, “it’s up to management, not us, to assign the proper amount of work.” Which was true, of course. The fact is that, for a long time, management took very little action to enlarge the scope of the RCO’s work. Other CUPE members said they were embarrassed to have their union be associated with such a lax work situation, on display to the public every day, at the rinks. “They’re bringing us all down.” Which was also true. We went to the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) and asked them: “why do modern rinks need RCO’s to babysit the compressors?” They said, “you’re right, they’re redundant, lots of towns with arenas are unhappy about it, and we’re changing the regulations.” But that change took three years. If I remember right, CUPE representatives lined up with vendors of RCO training courses to lobby against the change. Your union wanted to save your members’ jobs, even in a case where a job was no longer necessary.

When it finally came down to the crunch, and RCO’s were no longer required by the provincial regulations, management made some changes to the job requirements for winter rink maintenance. The changes were made with a broad hammer, on a citywide scale, one-size-fits-all. Tricky.

By then, CELOS had established the popular cityrinks.ca website, to reflect the views of rink users (the third element: citizens, taxpayers). But there was no room for us at the discussion table, as there was no room for the union. Management was sure they knew best, so they consulted neither the workers nor the skaters. Some of the city’s most experienced ice maintenance staff were moved out of rinks completely, and the union brought a grievance against the whole process.

The outdoor rinks are one small piece of the giant conundrum of municipal governance. But the larger themes are all there: narrow, inflexible job descriptions, seniority-trumps-all, the collective agreement as a shield against dialogue, unilateral “we-know-best” action by management, the exclusion and frustration of the citizens. All are problems that need to be addressed.

On top of that, the union and the citizens face a related, urgent problem now: the apparent willingness of some of the city’s many managers, and some of our elected representatives, to hive off pieces of our public goods to private companies that need to make a profit. Your message, Mark Ferguson, says that the union intends to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the public” to “protect our great services.” Over the years, CUPE Local 416 has not always stood shoulder to shoulder with us at the rinks. Your members’ services have sometimes been far from “great,” and in some instances the deficiencies have been highly visible. And yet, your members include thousands of hard-working people, whose ingenuity and experience have long been under-valued by managers who are preoccupied with enlarging their turf. Will CUPE 416 open the door to practical collaboration with citizens who approach you? Will you come and visit Dufferin Rink before Christmas, Mr.Ferguson, for a cup of fair-trade coffee and a cookie prepared by a CUPE Local 79 member? Some members of the public would love to talk to you about the issues I’ve raised.

Mark Ferguson never replied, and stopped being the union president sometime in 2014. The union was then without a president and was put under the administration of the national union.