Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Show youth solidarity, not stench

By the time Pope John Paul arrives in Toronto next week, some sort of resolution to the strike by 24,000 civic workers, including garbage men, will likely be found.

But if not, Toronto will then be one of the smelliest, dirtiest and unhealthiest cities in the industrialized world. And if the strike is not settled without protection for the jobs of workers, the pope would be justified in repeating his comments about the "idolatry of the market."

The Toronto strike is not directly about wages, but about contracting out of civic services to private enterprise. The Ontario government has underfunded the city, promising money if it busts its unions.

The net effect of contracting-out is not more services for fewer taxpayer dollars, but more profits for the owners of privatized services, and less money and fewer benefits for workers. Often, there is no real justification for contracting-out; it is driven by the idolatry and unquestioning worship of governments at the temple of free enterprise.

Cities and countries that once saw privatization as the wave of the future are now turning their backs on it as they see first-hand that private enterprise doesn't provide greater efficiency and that it does erode the quality of public services.

The pope is going to Toronto to talk to youth. But youth have perhaps the greatest stake in building an economic system that provides adequately for the needs of workers' families and their community.

The pope has condemned any form of work that breaks the solidarity among working people. In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, he said, "Ownership of this kind has no justification, and represents an abuse in the site of God and humanity" (n. 43).

May he not have to deliver this same message in Toronto.

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