Appendix · Appendix A3

The Workforce and the Union

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

TTC workers won back the right to strike in 2024 after a thirteen-year legal fight — and the clearest lesson from cities that have handled automation well is that the no-layoffs commitment has to come before the technology conversation, not after.

Transit service is produced by people, and Toronto's transit workforce carries two live stories at once: a labour-relations history that took over a decade to resolve, and a skilled-trades retirement wave that hasn't been resolved at all.

The labour story first. In 2011, Ontario designated the TTC an essential service, stripping the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 of its legal right to strike. The union pursued a Charter challenge for more than a decade. In May 2023, the Ontario Superior Court ruled the essential-service designation unconstitutional; the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in May 2024; and in August 2024, the province declined to pursue a further appeal, ending what the union's president called "over a decade-long fight." With a 98%-plus strike mandate in hand, ATU Local 113 and the TTC reached a new contract at 4 a.m. on June 7, 2024 — minutes before a legal strike deadline — that the union describes as its strongest deal in years: stronger job security and contracting-out protection, wage gains, and new apprenticeship pathways the union itself proposed into the TTC's 2025 budget before that budget was adopted. That sequence — union proposal, then budget adoption, not the reverse — is worth naming as a template, because it's the one place this record shows the relationship working proactively rather than defensively.

The defensive pattern showed up too, and recently: in May 2026, ATU Local 113 and the independent rider-advocacy group TTCriders issued a joint statement opposing Bill 98's transfer of TTC fare and service authority to the province — an unusual alignment of worker and rider interests against a shared governance risk, alongside TTC management's own public objections. It didn't stop the bill. It does show that when an outside authority threatens to restructure both revenue and service unilaterally, labour, management, and riders converge fast — a pattern any future governance change should plan for rather than treat as a surprise each time.

The skilled-trades story is quieter and, on the evidence available, more urgent. Thirty to forty percent of TTC's skilled-trades workforce — coach technicians, HVAC specialists, general body repair, the people who actually keep the fleet running — are expected to retire within five to ten years, with some departments nearing half. An ATU–TTC joint application for apprenticeship funding through Ontario's Skills Development Fund was rejected by the province in 2026; the union says it will keep pushing. This sits directly beside the state-of-good-repair backlog this book documents elsewhere, and beside the eBus transition specifically, which national research ties directly to maintenance-workforce capacity.

On automation, two international cases offer the clearest transferable model. When Nuremberg's VAG converted its U2 line to driverless operation, it made an explicit, contractual no-layoffs commitment before the conversion began: existing drivers retrained as onboard service staff, with headcount falling only through attrition on the new automated role, never through layoffs of incumbents. Paris's RATP converted Metro Line 1 to full automation more gradually between 2007 and 2013 — but the same case also shows automation can reduce a union's bargaining leverage, not just modernize a line: during a 2019 pension-reform strike, the automated Line 1 ran normally specifically because it no longer depended on human drivers. That's the reason Nuremberg's explicit commitment is the model to bring to any future TTC conversation about automatic train control, not an afterthought negotiated once the technology decision is already made.