Your Tax Dollars At Work

The poor sap didn't know what was going to hit him.  Candido Barreiro is one of 388 employees of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) who made more that $100,000 last year.  Mr. Barreiro's job?  Fare collector.  He sits in a subway booth selling tokens and collecting tickets, tokens and cash fares.  No heavy lifting is required, no education beyond high school - many collectors are drop outs - and a collector is protected from the public by a thick glass shield.  The base salary is $54,000, which even in Toronto is a good salary.  Mr Barreiro nearly doubled his yearly income by working an incredible 1,000 hours of overtime, averaging about 12 hours a day, assuming 250 working days a year.  When journalists from the Toronto Sun, the city's tabloid paper, showed up to interview and photograph Mr Barreiro he was very obliging, in turn the Sun placed the 46 year old fare collector on the front page of today's paper. 

It never dawned on Mr Barreiro that the good people of Toronto would be miffed, to say the very least, that a fare collector, however industrious, should make more than many executives at large companies.  However needful a fare collector there is not the slightest reason he or she should make more than a bricklayer, an accountant, many lawyers and executives who work twelve hour days in high stress jobs. 

Mr Barreiro is no villain here, he works within a system and his work ethic is to be commended.  It is the system that should be damned.  When Mike Harris' government promised enormous cost savings from municipal amalgamation a decade ago, they were not being wildly optimistic merely, if we may use the phrase, common sensical.  Less government means less overhead, less overhead means less expense.  Copybook stuff really.  Their flawed assumption, however, laid in assuming that costs would otherwise remain the same.  What went wrong?  Mike Harris, bureaucrat-buster par excellent misunderstood the bureaucratic-politico mentality. 

Before amalgamation each of Metro Toronto's municipalities had independent public services, save the police, fire services and ambulances which were financed jointly.  The wage rates in each of these municipalities varied widely.  In Mel Lastman's North York these wages were comparative low, i.e. near market rates for similar services.  In the city of Toronto itself the rates were usually far higher, a result of the council's leftward slant.  Post-amalgamation the public services unions demanded harmonization of wages and benefits across the new united city.  Being unions, they meant, and got, harmonization upwards.  Thus the lowly paid serfs of North York were raised to Toronto standards.  This, at least as much as downloading of social services by the province, created Toronto's current fiscal crisis.  Next time Mayor David Miller asks for a tax increase, or expanded taxing powers, pleading poverty all the while, keep Mr. Barreiro in mind.  Just a hardworking joe making a mint off the taxes of other, poorer, hardworking joes.