The Vancouver Sun Friday 29 August 1997
LABOR PEACE DISTURBED BY PILES OF GARBAGE
Ken MacQueen and Eric Beauchesne
It was a week with garbage on Vancouver streets where the buses
should have been. There's talk of a national postal strike, and some
2,000 pulp and paper workers at Fletcher Challenge mills in Crofton,
Elk Falls and MacKenzie have been striking since mid-July.
Could it be the province is sliding back to the bad old days of the
early1980s when the entire B.C. economy seemed impaled on a picket
sign?
No need to panic, say those who track B.C. labor issues.
However, some see signs of unrest on both the provincial and national
scene.
A Statistics Canada report, released Thursday to coincide with the
Labor Day holiday weekend, warns that "labor unrest may be on the
rise following a prolonged 'cooling-off' period." It says the public
sector is spoiling for a fight after years of wage freezes and job cuts,
that union strike funds have swollen in the absence of disputes, and
the number of days of work lost nationally to strikes is creeping up.
After three weeks of triple-bagging their garbage, Vancouver residents
might agree there is trouble in the air.
Several of those recent provincial disputes, including Wednesday's
wildcat BC Transit strike and the Vancouver outside workers' strike,
have landed on the desk of mediator Brian Foley.
Both are high-profile and troublesome, says Foley, head of the B.C.
Labor Relations Board mediation division. "But the number of
disputes over the past year has not been abnormal, has not been
chaotic. The majority of collective agreements are being settled by the
parties, either directly or in mediation, without the need for a work
stoppage."
This week's flurry of problems is "an accidental convergence of a
couple of isolated events." says Jerry Lampert, president of the
Business Council of B.C., which represents 155 major corporations
employing one-quarter of the provincial workforce. "Generally, since
the Labor Code came in 1992, the labor relations atmosphere has been
pretty good."
Ken Georgetti, president of the B.C. Federation of Labor, also credits
the 1992 revision of the code by Mike Harcourt's NDP government for
giving B.C. "relative peace" and the lowest number of work stoppages
since the Second World War.
Georgetti, whose organization represents 456,000 unionized workers,
wonders if the era of peace is coming to an end. He raises as an
example the 1,100 striking Vancouver outside workers whose wage
demands are only about 18 cents an hour apart from the city's offer.
"What you're seeing, although the dispute seems to be over a small
amount of money, is a level of frustration from workers that they're
not even keeping their noses above water for the last 10 years," says
Georgetti. "You're going to see more of this."
He predicts tougher bargaining from both private and public sector
workers: government employees because they are falling behind
private sector settlements, private sector workers, because they aren't
sharing any of the corporate profits.
Neither set of employers is leading by example any more, Georgetti
says. "At some point in time their hypocrisy is going to come back and
whack them between the eyes."
Many of his concerns are reflected in Statistics Canada's "portrait of
the trade union movement."
It notes that, nationally, 3.3 million person-days of work were lost in
1996 because of strikes and lockouts, more than twice the 1.6 million
a year earlier. That still falls far below the nine million days in 1980
when the country was rocked by more than 1,000 lockouts and strikes
by what was then a smaller workforce.
The B.C. ministry of labor's most recent figures show a steady drop in
person-days lost to strikes -- from 345,850 in 1993 to 295,415 in 1995.
Ernest Akyeampong, author of the Statistics Canada report, suspects
the potential for strike action is greatest among government
employees.
"With wages freezes and rollbacks, they're certainly in a mood to get
something back," he said. "There's the potential for action this year."
The report comes as Canada faces the threat of its first postal strike in
six years and Ottawa prepares to implement controversial amendments
to federal labor laws, which business critics argue will give unions too
much power and add to still high unemployment. The planned changes
include a partial ban on the use of replacement workers during a strike
and require employers to provide names and addresses of off-site
employees to assist unions in the drive to certify such workers.
B.C. has postponed changes to its labor code after an outcry from
business, but it is expected to reintroduce amendments in the next
session of the legislature.
About 3.5 million Canadians, about one-third of all employees, belong
to a union. Union membership rose fairly steadily to 3.8 million in
1990 from 2.1 million in 1967. Membership has declined slowly since
the start of the '90s, which have been characterized by a recession and,
for the most part, a jobless recovery.
The level of unionization in B.C. remains above the national average,
but union membership has suffered a dramatic decline -- from a high
of almost 51 per cent in 1961 to less than 35 per cent last year. The
decline in union membership has also coincided with increased
globalization of industry, business and government downsizing, and
innovative approaches to industrial relations by some employers and
unions.
And unionization, despite tough economic times, still offers rewards.
Statistics Canada notes that unionized jobs generally provide higher
wages, greater benefits and, in many ways, better work arrangements
than non-unionized jobs.
The average hourly wage rate of a unionized worker is higher than that
of a non-unionized worker whether the employee is full-time -- $18.87
versus $15.32 -- or part-time -- $16.68 versus $9.77.
"Not only do unionized part-time employees work longer hours each
week than non-unionized employees," Statistics Canada said, "they
also earn almost twice as much an hour."
