Toronto garbage strike talks at impasse

TORONTO, July 9 (UPI) -- Both Toronto municipal and union officials have warned the 18-day-old garbage and services strike will be long, as negotiations aren't going anywhere.

Some 30,000 members of two locals of the Canadian Union of Public Employees walked off the job June 22, demanding the same raises given to emergency services and transit workers last year, the Toronto Sun reported.

However, self-described socialist Mayor David Miller said the union isn't taking the recession into account.

"The city and the unions have a difference about the fact that the world has changed," Miller said." The unions ... are looking to settlements of the past. It's not the past. The world changed with the financial crisis, and it hit the city like everybody else.

The Toronto Star said an e-mail seen by a reporter showed the city offering no raises in the first year and 1 percent in the second, which a union official said was unacceptable.

Apart from no garbage collection, the city's ferry service is shut down, daycare, library, parks, swimming pool and licensing departments are either closed or running on skeleton management staff.