The usual brinksmanship about the possibility of a TTC strike has brought out the usual rage from people who think TTC workers earn entirely too much money and have entirely too many perks.
Personally, I think the TTC workers have a very difficult job and I'm surprised they can find people to do the job for what they earn. The reason I think their job is so difficult is because driving and dealing with the public are two of the things I find the most stressful in the world. I don't consider that level of compensation adequate for the amount of stress that job would cause me. This is why I am not a TTC driver - instead I have a job where I can sit quietly in an office and hardly talk to anyone.
Now some people will obviously disagree with me on how stressful a TTC job would be. Some people like driving, some people like dealing with the public. And that's fine, we all have different strengths and skills and preferences, that's how we've managed to build a society. So these people who don't think a TTC job is that stressful may well think that they are being compensated adequately, or even that they're being compensated excessively.
So the question is, if you're one of the people who think TTC work is not that difficult and think their workers are being compensated excessively, why are you not working for the TTC?
Think of all the other jobs in the world other than yours. Why don't you quit your job and go do one of these jobs? Because they don't pay enough, or because they don't have the security, or because you aren't qualified, or because you couldn't do the job well, or because it's too much work/difficulty/stress.
But the people who think the compensation is excessive - not those who think it's adequate, those who think it's excessive - what's their reason for not quitting their job and going to work for the TTC? Obviously not that it doesn't pay enough. If it's just that they aren't qualified, they'd go get qualified. Obviously not that they couldn't do it well or find it too difficult/stressful (if these were true, they wouldn't think the TTC workers are overpaid). If I knew of a job for which workers were excessively overpaid based on the amount and difficulty of work they have to do, I'd certainly go about seeing how I could get in on it. Why are the complainers not doing the same thing?
I don't work for the TTC because the job would be too stressful for me. Why don't you work for the TTC? (Unless, of course, you do.)
5 comments:
Personally, I think the TTC workers have a very difficult job and I'm surprised they can find people to do the job for what they earn.
I love driving, but I still agree with you. But I almost always side with labour over public inconvenience.
Great post, I love the question. I hope someone answers it.
Well by the standard of it being not a nice job to have people who do other work like cleaning toilets and emptying out the trash in office buildings should be paid a lot too. You'd never see that happening though.
Fact still remains that people who worked hard at school went to University still comes out earning less than a TTC bus driver. And they are complaining because they get 75% of full pay when on disability leave? For basically a unskilled job? It's exactly the same as the GM factory worker who complains because they lost their 30-35 dollar an hour job putting parts together. What did you expect? When people with a Bachelor's degree are getting 25 or less per hour?
Every couple of year they ask for more money or more this or more that. This from a city that doesn't have enough money to pay for everything.
From what I understand the issue is not pay. It's safety standards.
Fact still remains that people who worked hard at school went to University still comes out earning less than a TTC bus driver.
How hard one worked at school is completely irrelevant. And a university education is not a guarantee of earning potential. The fact that some people earn too little when they have advanced education has nothing to do with how much public employees should earn.
I dunno, I found uni WAY easier than driving a bus would be, (and way easier than cleaning toilets, and I have cleaned toilets as part of my job before) but I can see how that might vary from person to person. À chacun son goût and all that.
Why don't you work for the TTC, gotak?
Two answers:
I wish, or did strongly prefer, to succeed - just the tiniest bit - within my chosen field where I had ill-invested many past years of study and unelevated work scale. Flat out: for just a glimmer of proof that I am not a failure.
Second, Ontario has always posessed 'an air of being a closed shop' society.
I know of many persons who have successfully 'self'-traversed mid./upper middle class Life - not just civil service workforce - primarily on the strengths of who they knew, who their parents were, etc.
It's not a strictly tangible condition such as T.O./S. Ont. was formerly identity-labelled as being Orange controlled (very Church going Protestant). And yet an African American was elected as a city councillor at the turn of the past century for approx. 15 years, and the city hall was named for a Jewish mayor - twice. Really, it is basically more of a 'don't like yer face [closed shop] thing'.
Being a non-active nobody, if WASP, myself, I could give endless examples from across all of life. This relentlessness does inevitably burnout people from continuing to try.
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