The Toronto Transit Commission has a pool of spare operators ready to work, but the transit agency is choosing not to use them and instead opting to cut service, the union representing thousands of TTC workers said on Tuesday.
“For months, the TTC has artificially inflated its pool of ‘spare’ operators beyond what it needs to cover absences. These workers could and should have been used to provide regular scheduled services,” Marvin Alfred, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 113, said in a statement.
The union noted that a large number of operators were moved from scheduled service to working on an “ad-hoc basis.”
“Absenteeism has nothing to do with it. These operators have been available all along, but the TTC chose not to use them for scheduled service,” Alfred added, referring to the comments by the agency’s top official the day before.
Rick Leary, the chief executive officer of the TTC, said at a board meeting on Monday that it is seeing absenteeism at a much lower rate than what it budgeted for this year and as a result, the agency is “reinvesting resources into service” beginning with reversing planned changes to Line 1.
Among the service adjustments announced last week was longer waits for trains on Line 1, especially in the late evening. From 10 p.m. until the end of service, trains would run every seven to eight minutes instead of five minutes.
At the meeting, Leary said he heard from many riders who voiced their concerns about the proposed subway wait times.
“In the first service restoration I’ve directed is the return to the six-minute or better service late night on Line 1 and Line 2,” Leary said.
The union is pushing back against his remarks that suggested absenteeism is behind the cuts, calling them “misleading and irresponsible.”
“This is false,” Alfred said. “The TTC has imposed service cuts. These were choices Rick Leary himself made and rubber stamped by the Commissioners and the former Mayor of Toronto.”
This month’s changes were in addition to the cuts implemented last March. Researchers from the Toronto Metropolitan University found that the impacted routes would disproportionately affect the city’s marginalized communities.
A spokesperson for the TTC said the union misrepresented what Leary mentioned at the meeting.
“What we said is that because fewer people are needing to book off for COVID isolation, we are able to deploy those resources into service,” Stuart Green said in an emailed statement.
