WHY IS IT that, during a recession, workers in the "public sector" see no reason to share the pain of their brothers and sisters in the private sector?

Perhaps the two extremes we've witnessed in recent weeks have been between the unionized employees of the three North American auto makers and the civic workers in Windsor and Toronto, two cities that both have traditionally had a lot of employment in the auto sector.

Faced with the risk of losing all their jobs if their companies went under, the Canadian Auto Workers locals at Chrysler and General Motors negotiated major concessions aimed at making the companies appear viable to the federal and Ontario governments, and the Canadian subsidiaries of GM and Chrysler look healthy enough to ensure that most, if not all, their remaining plants stay open.

Elsewhere in the private sector, strikes have been few and far between, and certainly not as long as the civic workers' strike in Windsor nor as bitter as the more recent one in Toronto.

Interestingly, the strikes by workers once called "public servants" are getting little, if any, support from the general public, whose membership reasonably regards the walkouts as aimed at them just as much as at their notional employer, the municipal governments.

Although normally the easy way of ending such strikes would be to have the parties agree to arbitration, we seem today to have a situation where neither side wants it, albeit for different reasons. Unions in the public sector have traditionally opposed it as inferior to collective bargaining and certain to produce a result that will fall short of their demands. The cities, which at other times would be inclined to favour it, now see the arbitrators as too inclined to give the workers as much as had been won by similarly situated public sector workers a year or two ago.

It's no coincidence that one of the demands of the Toronto workers is for annual three per cent raises paralleling those given teachers, police and transit workers last year.

The problem, of course, is that the other awards came at a time when the provincial economy was still healthy and municipal property assessments (the main source of municipal revenues) were skyrocketing because of a prolonged real estate boom.

Today, most municipalities are having great difficulty balancing budgets without tax increases, and in the case of Toronto, new taxes, including a levy on on property transfers, aren't producing nearly as much revenue as had been expected.

In the circumstances, both Toronto and Windsor should be looking seriously at the option of contracting out some municipal services, and particularly that of garbage collection.

That's precisely what the former borough of Etobicoke did before the forced amalgamation of the old City of Toronto and its suburbs by the Harris Conservatives, and Etobicoke residents today are the only ones in the amalgamated city who continue to get their garbage collected.

We don't know, but strongly suspect, that the workers who collect Etobicoke's wastes don't get the current pay and fringe benefits of the strikers, much less what's being demanded.

Similarly, we find it nothing short of mystifying that Toronto Islands has been placed off limits to the general population of Toronto because the only ferry service is city-operated. (Ironically, the service was once provided by the Toronto Transit Commission, whose employees were legislated back to work after a brief strike and continue to work today.)

It would be interesting, indeed, to see what the response of the warring parties would be to an approach that would involve limited arbitration, the arbitrator being required to produce a collective agreement that would see the workers receive wages, benefits and working conditions that the city could provide without having to raise property taxes for at least two years.

(That wouldn't necessarily require a wage freeze, since a lot of new condominiums are coming on stream that will enlarge the assessment pie. But until such time as the economy improves, the package would provide much less than the two unions have been demanding.)

One area where there surely ought to be some compromise is that of accumulated sick leaves. Although the idea of allowing the workers to "bank" some sick leave days was probably seen as a means of encouraging employees to stay on the job, evidence that the system has led to retirees getting six months' pay on top of their pensions surely is proof that it's not cost-effective.

And since the carrot has proven too pricey, perhaps in this era of high unemployment civic workers should have to face the possibility of a stick, in this case a threat of being fired if they're found calling in sick when they're perfectly healthy.

Another approach that all municipalities ought to consider is to seek provincial legislation declaring some of their existing services essential.

One in particular is local ambulance services and the paramedics they now employ.

The partial withdrawal of their services in Toronto, particularly during last Sunday's Gay Pride Parade, seems to have posed a threat to life and limb.