In Toronto, one of the main ways that working class people find work when they find themselves out of a job and need to pay bills is through various temporary agencies. These agencies play the role of middlemen between corporations and workers. Corporations use them for a number of reasons, though they all add up to saving the corporations money. Workers hired through temporary agencies are often paid minimum wage, with the temporary agency making money off of each worker they supply to a company.

While it doesn’t immediately appear this way in any accounting books, what basically happens is that the temporary agency takes part of the money the worker would otherwise be paid for every hour of work. What is even worse about this is that this total amount is often still less than a ‘regular’ full-time employee of a company doing the same job makes per hour.

Javeed, a printing factory worker interviewed for this article, explained, “I’ve been working in this factory for eight months and still make minimum wage. The full-time packers make nearly double what I make, while machine operators make even more than that. I’m only working there as a temp so that I can get a job with the company, but it’s getting too frustrating. I have no idea how much money the temp. agency has been making off me, but i know they are making good money. I see the cars they drive there when I pick up my paycheques.”

These temporary agencies operate in different parts of the city, often on a particular ethnic, language or community basis, recruiting exploitable immigrants from all the various communities of Toronto so that companies can make an easy profit without having to worry about taking care of workers.

Sometimes, these temp. agencies attempt to take even more money from their workers by purposely not paying them for the hours they’ve worked and still refusing to pay even after a formal complaint has been made. A case of exactly this kind was brought to the attention of Basics several years ago in Etobicoke.

In this case, a worker named Mohammed was refused several days pay worth over $200 by his temp. agency after he finished working for them. This temp. agency particularly focused on recruiting workers from African backgrounds in the northwest part of the city and was controlled by one man out of a small office located in a strip mall.

However, Mohammed was able to get back his money after contacting the Solidarity Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World, who came out to his temp. bosses office with him and presented him with formal written and oral demands for the wages to be paid. This confrontation was enough to get this temp. agency to pay up.

As workers, many of us have no choice but to work for temporary agencies to pay the bills, though this doesn’t mean we should just accept their parasitical nature as natural or normal.

People should not profit off us by sitting in an office or even their own home and siphoning off money while we work in some of the most physically demanding and stressful jobs in the city, barely being able to afford to get to work each day. The same goes for the big corporations themselves and their executives and managers. All of these parasites make money off us each day and live luxurious lifestyles off the labour we provide for them, for which they pay us as few scraps as possible.

“I’ve been living here for three years, and last night was the first time I’ve seen anyone come to fix the laundry room,” says a 33-year old resident of 3400 Eglinton Avenue East.

The laundry room in the basement of the Markham and Eglinton area building is full of washing machines and dryers, but several residents have complained about them never working properly, gobbling up people’s cash for no return. On hot summer days and especially in cold winter months, when the snow piles up outside the building and on the sidewalks, they have to carry their laundry nearly half a kilometre to a laundromat.

But the night before Monday October 19, someone finally came to take a look at the machines in the laundry room. That might have been because on Monday morning, the 16-storey building in Scarborough Village was being audited by officers of Municipal Licensing and Standards from the City of Toronto.

Makeshift repair of padlock on door.

The building is in bad condition, both inside and outside. Residents frequently complain about an unresponsive management. Repairs and maintenance are rarely done in a timely manner. One couple became so tired of asking for repairs that they repainted and retiled the apartment themselves—“Not because we wanted to but because we had to. We did it to protect our family—we have two kids.”

Another resident had a broken lock on his door, finally replacing it with a padlock he installed himself after waiting months for the building management to make the repair.

The most common complaint of all residents is the dirty carpet in all of the hallways, which is stained throughout and often smells. “When visitors come, they smell it and think it is coming from our homes,” one resident said. The carpet had not been changed, according to some residents, for over ten years.

After the municipal inspectors ruled that the carpets are not kept in a “clean and sanitary condition” management is in discussion about replacing the carpet. They began to experiment with replacing the carpet on the second floor—where the building superintendent lives, and have now removed the carpet on all of the floors of the building.

A surveillance camera monitoring tenants movements in the building, surrounded by hastily repaired ceiling damaged by water leakage.

Leaks are very common in the building. On October 10, the ceiling of the 17th floor hallway was dripping water that we caught on video. When the superintendent was told about the leak, she simply denied it.On the 17th floor, residents say that leaks have led to mould growing in the carpet and floor.

On October 19, one resident showed BASICS her bathroom ceiling, which was caving in due to leaks from the unit above her. A few days later chunks of the ceiling and water actually fell on her, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling. On November 6, a plumber finally came to “fix” the ceiling—but just seems to have papered over it poorly, with nothing done to actually fix the source of the leak. The area is damp to the touch with bubbles coming out of it. “I can still hear the water dripping,” the resident said. She continues to remain concerned about mould and mildew in the bathroom, a safety concern for her three-year old daughter.

The ceiling of this washroom collapsed on a tenant due to an unresolved issue with water damage from the unit above.

BASICS spoke to municipal officers who said that the state of disrepair in the building was not surprising. Dozens of apartment buildings throughout the city are in horrible condition because the owners simply treat them as a business from which they want to turn a profit.

Despite the municipal officer’s attempts, there was not much they could do about repairs inside units unless they directly received complaints from tenants. But there are many problems, and bringing up units to minimum standards did not mean that they were good standards. The minimum standards require the building to stick to the old code, and not the new one.

For example, the bathrooms in 3400 Eglinton Avenue East all have a passive ventilation system, good enough for the 1950s, but no longer standard—bathrooms now require fans to actively pump the damp air out. The old system not only does a poor job of pushing damp air out, it can even bring damp air in from outside and from other units. This leads to growing problems with mould and mildew.

Many residents do not allow their children onto the balcony because they feel that it is unsafe.

The best and maybe only way that residents can bring about a change, according to the municipal officer we spoke to, is to build community among themselves. That means keeping an eye out for each other and for the building, and holding unresponsive building owners to account through collective action. Limiting actions to filing individual complaints will not push the management to respond. Only through collective action can we actually put pressure on the management and building owner to make the changes that are necessary for the building. 

by Niraj Joshi – BASICS Issue #18

We are told that the massive American, Canadian and United Nations military deployment to a battered and broken Haiti after the earthquake is for security. But the greatest threat to the life and limbs of Haitians following the massive earthquake was the unconscionable delay in search and rescue due to prioritizing military needs versus recovery and medical needs. Credible aid organizations have reported no difficulties working unguarded among a population that they say displayed remarkable calm and solidarity in the midst of chaos; and the military-led framework for delivery of humanitarian assistance has been a tragic and indisputable failure.

So what is the “security” concern of the Canadian, American, and UN occupying armies of Haiti?

With the Haitian government and the repressive (Canadian-trained) Haitian police force in collapse, and with the United Nations occupation force itself afflicted, there has been no external power to continue the containment of Haiti’s resilient social forces.  Despite their unimaginable suffering, the Haitian people have been self-organizing into popular committees to remove the rubble, recover bodies, organize and secure camps for the displaced and distribute whatever aid they can gather; all in the tradition of Haiti’s popular and powerful social and political force, the political movement and party known as Lavalas, Haitian kreyol for “the flood”.

Read more of this story here…

#9 – Liberals Cut the Special Diet – Poor Must Fight Back

John Clarke (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty) – BASICS Issue #19 – May/June 2010

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s “March on the Liberal Government” on April 15 was designed as a means of initiating a Province-wide fight for decent income for people on welfare and disability. This struggle has been taken up as a response to McGuinty’s vicious elimination of the vital Special Diet benefit.

People on social assistance today have an income that is 55% lower than it was in the early 1990s. A single person on Ontario Works would need a $300 a month increase to be back to where he or she would have been in 1993. The only means that was available to people to alleviate this worsening poverty was the Special Diet. After OCAP began fighting for access to it in 2005, it went from a $6 million a year program to being one that was providing $200 million in desperately needed extra income. At the time of the cut, one in five people on assistance were accessing it.

by Petronila Cleto – BASICS #17 (Jan/Feb 2010)

Are the Canadian political and legal systems truly democratic enough to create appropriate changes to the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), so that rights and welfare issues of the marginalized community of Filipino domestic workers can be justly resolved?

Within the past decade before December 2009, the answer has been a very dismal “no”. In Toronto, from 2001 to 2003, three caregivers were involved in court cases – two of them accused in criminal cases for allegedly sexually assaulting children in their care. They, and many others, have struggled to regain self-respect and reclaim hopes of justice and equality. They represent the precarious lives of caregivers on the fringes of society, although they work in its very heart – inside homes.

Why is such a situation maintained?

Read more here…

#4 -Toronto School Board: Selling your local school

by Errol Young – BASICS Online February 2010

Over 100 community public schools could close in Toronto and the land sold to developers in three to five years.

This development should be of great concern to us all. First there is the economic scale of this thing. Selling 100 sites for about five millions dollars each means that over half a billion dollars will be exchanging hands. Second – and more importantly – these sales will result in a significant loss of publicly owned resources.

To sell off these assets, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is holding school-closing meetings in 10 areas of the city that they are calling Accommodation Review Committees (ARC). Any recommendations made by the public favouring keeping schools open can be and will be ignored by the TDSB, the body that has the final say.Read more here…

#3 – A brief history of cuts to social housing in Toronto

by M. Cook – BASICS #17 (Jan / Feb 2009)

Regent Park, Toronto 

Patrick LeSage, former Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Ontario, has been conducting public forums investigating Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s (TCHC) eviction policies after the death of a former TCHC tenant. We, at BASICS, want to provide tenants with another space to share their experiences and to organize to make changes. This article is intended to provide a brief overview of social housing and we hope to continue a series on social housing based on tenants’ experiences.

Canada has never had a national housing strategy. After WWII, the Canadian government began to construct public housing as a response to the struggles waged by strong labour unions and community organizers. Regent Park was one of the first public housing projects, built in the 1950s. The ruling establishment liked it because it was seen as a way to control a potentially radical collective force, the working class. The project resulted in the destruction of a previously working-class neighborhood (Cabbagetown) and the displacement of its residents.

Read more here…

Riot police confront G20 protesters earlier at Queen/Spadina June 26 

#2 – Police move in to arrest 300 peaceful protesters outside Novotel Hotel

TORONTO 11:40pm, June 26 — G20 Police have threatened to mass arrest 300 peaceful protesters outside the Novotel hotel on The Esplanade in Toronto, according to a demonstrator at the protest. Since 10:30pm they have been snatching protesters one-by-one from the crowd and “the rest of us are just waiting to be arrested,” said the experienced activist, who has asked not to be named.

Protesters were sitting outside the hotel peacefully, when dozens of police in full riot gear with teargas guns marched in from the east side of the narrow street and then on the west side, enclosing the protesters.

According to the demonstrator, most of the protesters are young people who have little previous experience in demonstrations and have not been involved in any previous G20 demonstrations on June 26 or earlier. Moreover they have no legal information because they were not expecting any kind of trouble. “These are simply members of the public who want to make their voices heard,” the demonstrator said. The peaceful protesters include many who joined a march which earlier proceeded down Yonge Street after being brutally forced out of what was supposed to be the “free speech zone” at Queen’s Park.

Read more here…

#1 – Story of the Year

18-year-old Junior Manon Beat to Death by Toronto Police – May 5

by S. da Silva – BASICS Online – 6 May 2010

Editorial Note: This story received almost 40,000 hits at basicsnews.ca in 2010, 20,000 of which came within the first 24 hours of its publication.  The story was posted elsewhere all across the web and widely read through social media. We can safely speculate that the hundreds of thousands who read or heard about this story from BASICS within the days of Junior’s murder served as the main counter-punch to the pro-cop corporate media lies that Junior died of a heart-attack. The success of this story speaks to the necessity of building a strong people’s media apparatus.

Running from the police is not a crime punishable by death in Canada.  Yet this is the sentence 18-year-old Junior Alexander Manon received on the evening of May 5, 2010 when he ran from the police near York University in Toronto.  And by looks of what became of the young Dominican teenager, it’s no surprise that youth like him run when confronted by Toronto police.
Around 6:30pm, Manon jumped out of a car and fled police after a random pull-over on Founders Road and Steeles. Police claim that Manon spontaneously collapsed and died of a heart attack while trying to run from them, despite witness testimonies and a pool of blood to suggest otherwise.

A witness on the scene and another passenger of the vehicle reported that: “They beat him up, he was on the floor, he wasn’t resisting. Two officers on him, punching him in the face, one kicking him in the ribs… And then five more come and jump on him… He’s not that big for seven boy’dem [cops] to be on him like that.”

Read more here…