IAM 764 Political Action

Ten key ways working in this province changed in the Campbell era.

By Tom Sandborn,  TheTyee.ca

Labour Day? At The Tyee this will be Labour Week, with labour-related special features running today through Friday. And that’s just a start for increased labour coverage in the coming months, building as we go an occasional series we’re calling Working Ahead: Labour in a New Era of Challenges.

The first, growing out of weeks spent interviewing union officers and staff, heads of local labour councils, rank-and-file members, union-side labour lawyers, employer spokespeople and academic experts. They were asked to help us identify the decade’s 10 most significant B.C. labour stories.

1. The Changing Face of B.C. Labour

In 1983, the percentage of B.C.’s work force in a union (a measure called union density) was at 45.3 per cent while by 2007 it had fallen to around 31 per cent, according to StatsCanada.

Nationally, in 1983 the density figure was 35.7 per cent and in 2007, 30.03 per cent. In 2009, union density fell slightly in B.C. Union density has grown in the public sector and fallen in the private sector in Canada and in B.C., but not so dramatically as in the U.S.

In 2009, the Canadian public sector was 71.3 per cent unionized, while the private sector was only 16.1 per cent. In the U.S., the comparative figures were 7.6 per cent in the private sector and 36.8 per cent in the public sector. While the prototypical unionized worker in B.C. in the 1960s was a white, male logger or mill worker, now the face of labour is much more likely to be a visible minority woman who works in a hospital or government office.

Think of it as the Revenge of Rosie the Riveter. (Rosie was the iconic WW II figure who embodied women’s entry into the factory work force during the war, and their being driven back out afterwards. Now she’s back and often serving as a union president or shop steward.)

2. I’ll See You in Court

It’s nearly unanimous. Almost every source The Tyee consulted agreed that Bill 29, the notorious union-busting legislation passed in 2002, was among the decade’s top stories, especially when taken together with the precedent-setting judgment by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007 that struck down some of its key provisions and established free collective bargaining as a charter-protected right.

Despite this huge win for organized labour, sources tell The Tyee, the unions representing B.C. health-care workers face almost weekly challenges as government and employers in the sector take advantage of the provisions of Bill 29 that survived Supreme Court review to privatize and contract out services.

3. Health, Safety and Lethal Workplaces

A list of tragedies prompting criticism of government policies begins with the Sullivan Mine disaster. Between May 15 and 17, 2006, two workers, Doug Erickson and Bob Newcombe, and two B.C. Ambulance paramedics, Kim Weitzel and Shawn Currier, died at Teck Cominco’s decommissioned Sullivan Mine site near Cranbrook. They were felled by oxygen-depleted atmosphere inside the tiny water-monitoring structure built over a tailings dump. The tragedy posed serious questions about whether the province adequately regulates mine safety and situations in which workers are isolated on the job site. (Find extensive Tyee coverage here.)

In 2005, Grant De Patie was killed by a drunken teenager driving a stolen car. Grant was dragged to his death in an attempt to stop a “gas and dash” theft at the station where he worked. In 2007, with much fanfare, the provincial government unveiled a new piece of legislation, “Grant’s Law,” which required pre-payment for nighttime gas purchases, but has, to date, reportedly because of retail-industry lobbying, failed to move on more significant reforms that were also called for, including safety barriers for night workers or mandatory double staffing over the night shift.

Grant’s father Doug told The Tyee last year that: “The government is just catering to businessmen. Employers weren’t doing anything to prevent gas-and-dash crime, or the dangers it posed to people like Grant working alone overnight. We need even stronger laws, not weaker.”

Deaths associated with farm work were big news this decade, with three men killed and another two severely disabled working in an enclosed space on a Langley mushroom farm in 2007 and three women killed while another 13 were injured when an overloaded and under-equipped van belonging to a farm labour contractor flipped over on a rainy highway outside Chilliwack in 2007.

Finally, on Aug. 31, 29 charges were laid under worker-safety legislation against two companies and several company owners and directors for offenses connected wih the mushroom farm deaths. In contrast this April, the provincial government declined to implement almost all the 18 safety-for-farm-worker policies recommended by a coroner’s jury investigating the 2007 highway deaths.)

Additionally, calls for inquests to mounting logging-industry deaths in the early part of the decade went unheeded by the provincial government. Critics argued that deregulation under the BC Liberal government had created conditions for more risky practices, leading to a string of deadly tragedies in the forests and on logging roads.

4. Changing the Rules, Moving the Goal Posts

Perhaps the biggest and most consequential labour story of the decade in B.C., many of our sources agreed, was transformation by the Campbell Liberals of the basic regulatory bodies that govern labour and labour relations in the province. Rules embodied in the Labour Relations Code and administered through the Labour Relations Board have been revised to make it much harder for new union certifications to be won, with the numbers of new workers organized into unions plummeting from an annual average of more than 8,000 during the 1990s to less than 2,000 a year in the first three full years under the new business-friendly LRB of the 2000s.

Employment Standards Act changes brought in early in the Campbell years excluded many workers from the act’s protection altogether, closed offices, almost totally deregulated work by children between 12 and 15, cut the minimum shift from four to two hours, made it harder for workers to get vacation and overtime pay from their employers and obligated workers who experience employer abuse of ESA protections to conduct their own cumbersome and daunting “do-it-yourself” complaint procedures.

And if you are injured at work in B.C., changes brought in during this decade mean that you are likely to qualify for much less compensation than you would have in the 1990s, only one element in a series of changes that critics say make Worksafe BC a much less effective support for injured workers than in times past. (Later this week in another of our Labour Week features, The Tyee will examine in detail the changes made at Worksafe BC and what those changes mean for injured workers. The news on this front is increasingly grim.)

The decade also saw a major revamping of trades training and apprenticeship programs, changes that mean far fewer young B.C. workers are getting the training they need to qualify as journeymen/women in their trades. A source within the building trades referred to this phenomenon as the “de-skilling” of the construction sector.

5. Chump Change

B.C. now has the lowest minimum wage standard in Canada, which allows employers to pay $8 an hour for many low wage workers and provides permission to pay an even lower $6 an hour training wage. These extremely low standards have been the target for ongoing campaigns by the labour movement, including the “Six Bucks Sucks” initiative.

One of the good news stories for B.C. labour this decade has been advances made in the campaign to get the province’s employers to commit to paying at least the “living wage.” The campaign got a boost in April of 2010 when the City of New Westminster took steps to guarantee that all city employees and all hired by city contractors were paid at least $18.17 an hour, the living wage figure computed by the campaign, which has been actively promoted by unions across the province and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think tank.

Partly as a result of policies linked to the persistence of relatively low wages, child poverty continues to be a major labour story, with B.C. ranking as the province with the highest levels in Canada each year since 2002, and more than half of the children living in poverty experiencing that deprivation despite the fact that one or more of their parents have full time work.

6. The Stranger at the Door: Temporary Foreign Workers

One of the stories that just kept coming all decade had to do with the controversial increases in the number of non-Canadian workers brought here as temporary workers, with critical comment focused both on the exploitation these workers were exposed to by their vulnerable status and the impact these labour imports had on the ordinary workings of supply and demand, making it easier for employers to keep wages down and unions weak.

In 2006, controversy swirled around a group of European ironworkers brought in to work on the Golden Ears Bridge project. That same year, a group of Latin American tunnel workers hired on Vancouver’s Canada Line project joined the Construction and Specialized Workers Local 1611 after telling union organizers they were being paid substandard wages and provided with housing and other benefits inferior to those the company provided European workmates.

This dispute, which has dragged on through numerous Labour Relations Board hearings, led to a BC Human Rights Tribunal ruling that held the Latin American workers had experienced wage and benefit discrimination while working on the Vancouver project.

While construction workers made a lot of temporary foreign worker headlines in B.C., the majority of the over 250,000 temporary workers who were in Canada in 2008 worked in Canadian fields. One of the ongoing and important labour stories of the decade has been about attempts to unionize agricultural workers, an effort led by the United Food and Commercial Workers through their Agricultural Workers Alliance, which operates 10 store-front organizing centres across the country, including one in the Fraser Valley, where several successful organizing drives have been conducted this decade. The most recent example of ways offshore workers can face exploitation in Canada (and what unions can do to counter it) was the revelation this summer by the B.C. Federation of Labour that a group of African workers (in this case recent immigrants) employed by a contractor to do silviculture work for the provincial government were being housed in filthy conditions, subjected to death threats, worked 15-hour days and paid erratically and at a lower rate than promised.

7. The Big Get Together in the Woods

In 2004, the Industrial Wood and Allied Workers union, the industry giant that had represented B.C. loggers and millworkers for decades, voted to merge with the United Steelworkers, forming what was described then as Canada’s largest private sector union. The merger represented the end of an era, retiring the IWA identity after a tumultuous history that began in 1937, and came as a combination of difficulties created by trade agreements, struggles with environmentalists, climate-change-induced pine beetle infestations and profligate raw log exports shrank the B.C. work force in the province’s woods and mills.

8. Showdowns at the Public Service Corral

Some of our sources saw a trio of public sector strikes, taken together, as one of the decade’s big labour stories. The Ferry Workers strike in 2003, the HEU strike in 2004 and the BCTF strike in 2005 all followed a similar pattern. The strikes were defined as “illegal” and elicited strident media coverage about “holding the public to ransom,” while other unions (most notably CUPE) and community groups organized mass pickets and other solidarity actions, with some militants hoping the specific strikes could be kicked up into a general strike of all organized workers against a government seen as profoundly anti-labour.

In all three cases, union leadership climbed down (typically at the urging of the B.C. Fed) from any visions of a general strike and cut deals with the employer that were met with accusations of “sell out” from the most militant members and observers, while more centrist commentators said union leadership had settled for the best deals possible with a hostile government.

9. Family Feuds

Organized labour is like a family in some ways, and the B.C. labour movement was not without its moments of internecine conflict. In 2003 and 2004, the soon to be defunct IWA came under fire for what some observers saw as illicit attempts to sign voluntary agreements with private contractors like Compass and Sodexho that were eager to take advantage of the business opportunities created by Bill 29 and its mandate for health-care sector privatization. These “partnership” deals were viewed as collusion with the government in its attacks on the Hospital Employees Union, which had signed valid contracts with public employers to represent the workers.

In 2009, an attempt by the B.C. Nurses Union to raid the licensed practical nurses represented by the Hospital Employees Union brought down disciplinary action by the B.C. Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress, while the raid was unpopular with some of the BCNU’s own membership as well.

Several other B.C. unions found themselves in the uncomfortable role of employers enmeshed in labour disputes with their own unionized employees this decade.

In 2007, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation lived through a bitter dispute with its research and professional staff represented by local 464 of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers.

In 2009, the Telecommunication Workers Union, which represents workers at Telus, faced alabour dispute with 13 office workers represented by the Canadian Office and Professional Workers.

10. Employers Weigh in: Agenda Unfinished

In addition to conversations with union officers, members and staff, as well as union-side lawyers and academic experts, The Tyee spoke with some prominent spokespeople from the other side of the bargaining table, including Jock Finlayson at the B.C. Business Council and Phil Hochstein, of the non-union construction employers’ umbrella organization the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of BC. Both Finlayson and Hochstein agree that the decade has been remarkable for relative labour peace.

For Finlayson, among the decade’s key stories are the reductions in union density and the increased role of public sector unions in the movement.

Hochstein highlighted what he saw as the need for expanded immigration and use of temporary foreign workers to meet employers’ hiring needs. He also said restrictive labour practices enforced by B.C. union contracts were responsible for what he said were B.C.’s lower-than-Canadian-average productivity figures.

‘Biggest rollback of worker rights in Canadian history’

So, what conclusions can we draw from these stories and from the reflections of many seasoned labour observers? Here are a few.

The decade has seen the Campbell Liberals radically re-structure the legal and administrative bodies that govern labour relations in B.C., mainly in ways that tilt the regulatory playing field to give employers the home-team advantage on wage rates, employment standards, compensation for injured workers and the creation of new unions and union contracts.

“The removal of union members from Employment Standards protections, the exclusion of farm workers and the other changes in Employment Standards mean that at least a third of the workforce has been removed from ESA protection,” noted SFU women’s studies, economics and political science Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen.

“We are losing union density and that will continue,” commented CUPE B.C. President Barry O’Neill. “Limits on union growth have been created by changes in the Labour Relations Code.”

“One of the big stories this decade has been the destruction of employment standards in B.C.,” HEU media spokeswoman Margi Blamey said.

Bill Saunders, head of the Vancouver and District Labour Council agrees. “The new rules the Liberals have brought in favor the corporations. They want to create a desperate workforce.”

Lucy Luna, who organizes farmworkers in the Fraser Valley for the Agricultural Workers Alliance, says that one ruling by the newly employer-friendly Labour Relations Board in 2008, which made temporary workers fear that employers can now get away with punishing them for joining a union by sending them home as soon as they unionize “has made my work almost impossible.”

Sauder School of Business professor emeritus Mark Thompson calls the changes to the Employment Standards Act “the biggest roll back of worker rights in Canadian history.”

Kim Pollack of the United Steelworkers told The Tyee that changes made to the Forestry Act in 2004 created a much more dangerous workplace, with safety de-regulated, increased subcontracting and a race to the bottom on safety procedures, resulting in 43 deaths in the woods the next year.

As evidenced by testimony from Forest Workers, worker safety continues to be an ongoing and sometimes heartbreaking story, as B.C. workers continue to die or come home crippled while trying to earn a living.

And more and more temporary foreign workers are being brought into B.C. under federally sponsored programs that critics say are consciously designed to drive down local wages and insulate employers both from the law of supply and demand and from collective bargaining.

Seth Klein, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said that the explosive growth in temporary foreign worker programs was breaking a long established social contract, which offered new workers a pathway to citizenship and full rights.

“That contract has been broken, and the quid pro quo is no longer on offer, all in the name of worker discipline,” he said.

Several of the experts who spoke with The Tyee noted that the response of organized labour in B.C. to temporary foreign worker issues has been remarkably free of the racism that has blemished union response to off-shore workers in times past. This time round, instead of lobbying to keep foreign workers out, B.C.’s labour movement has enlisted the new workers into existing unions, set up store-front service centres to meet their needs and called on the government to allow guest workers a pathway to citizenship.

Meanwhile, the face of the labour movement is changing, with more and more of its membership concentrated in public-sector bodies, many with predominantly female and visible minority memberships. In another significant change, the IWA, the logger and mill workers’ union that was for many years an iconic presence in B.C. labour relations, was absorbed by the United Steel Workers this decade, while union density continued to fall.

Bill 29 and after

Some of the province’s key labour stories started in the legislative assembly or the courtrooms of the nation. At the beginning of the tumultuous decade, the provincial government passed Bill 29, a questionable piece of legislation that allowed the biggest mass layoffs of women workers (over 8000) in Canadian history, only to see the Supreme Court of Canada strike down key provisions of the controversial law. In a landmark ruling that almost everyone The Tyee contacted included in their top 10 story list, the court disallowed as unconstitutional legislative language that allegedly gave the government power to unilaterally abandon settled contracts with health-care workers and outsource their jobs to lower paying private contractors.

From a union perspective, a second good news story related to Bill 29 and its partial invalidation is that the HEU has been successful in re-organizing almost all the jobs that were privatized and contracted out under the bill’s flawed mandate. So, while health-care workers continue to face challenges, including government supported de-accreditation and contract flipping in the long-term care sector, whatever dreams the Liberals may have had of creating a system free of unions have not been realized.

“Not a week goes by that we aren’t still dealing with the consequences of Bill 29,” said HEU secretary/business manager Judy Darcy told the Tyee. “The Supreme Court decision, while a huge win, didn’t give successorship rights when work is contracted out to private sector employers and still allowed contract flipping and pressure on workers to grant concessions to prevent contracting out. Public sector bargaining in B.C. is now the most restrictive I have seen, and I have bargained in jurisdictions right across Canada.”

Changes to laws, regs hurt organizing

Other key Liberal legislative and regulatory initiatives which are still in effect revamped Employment Standards legislation, the functioning of Worksafe BC (the agency formerly known as the WCB) and the Labour Relations Board, all in ways that critics say privilege the agendas of management and employers over workers’ rights.

These changes, say the critics, have created a province in which it is shamefully possible to work full time and still not be able to house and feed yourself adequately, where the government has given up on any serious attempts to regulate child labour and worker safety, where child poverty is higher than anywhere else in Canada, where foreign workers are brought in by the thousands to flip burgers and harvest crops but denied a right to settle and make a life in Canada, and where it is harder and harder for workers to organize for better conditions via trade unions.

Within those unions, some rank and file activists are expressing impatience with a leadership they see as insufficiently militant, a story that has been a hardy perennial all through the history of the movement.

Gene McGuckin, for example, a retired CEP member, shop steward, local executive member and contract negotiator, was one of the founders of the Prepare the General Strike organization. He is critical of B.C. Fed leadership during the decade, and identifies as one of the province’s key labour stories this decade the “linked defeats and union-brass sell-outs of the ferry workers’ strike in 2003, the HEU strike in 2004 and the BCTF strike in 2005.

“In each case the defiant workers had significant-to-huge public support,” asserted McGuckin, but the eventual settlements were in his view “capitulations” that cost union members wages and benefits and hurt B.C. citizens by resulting in higher ferry charges and poorer levels of health care and education.

B.C. Fed president Jim Sinclair says he has a different view of history than McGuckin and other critics of his leadership. “The disputes he mentions showed real increases in solidarity.”

CUPE B.C.’s Barry O’Neill, while not endorsing McGuckin’s criticisms of Fed leadership, did point out that his union had organized the largest solidarity walkouts since the 1980s during the HEU and BCTF strikes McGuckin cites.

“We’re in time of transition, with some weakening of militancy,” he said. “Times are different but we should be moving toward more militancy. We have been too dependent on friendly governments.”

Living wage breakthrough in New West

Darryl Walker, president of the B.C. Government and Service Employees Union, while, like O’Neill, declining to endorse McGuckin’s critique of union leadership, said that critical views like those expressed by the veteran rank and file member were “not necessarily unhealthy. We need to hold on to views like this. Sometimes we don’t go far enough. However, in 2003-2005, I think each struggle was pushed to the right level. You can be damned in hindsight, and maybe mistakes were made, but I think most members were happy with the decisions made by officers and leadership.”

If B.C.’s labour movement took a beating from BC Liberal government policies in the past decade, it gained a victory this year within the council chambers of New Westminster. The campaign for a living wage in B.C., which has been actively supported by organized labour, got a big boost when New Westminster became the first municipality to make a commitment that all its direct employees and all those who work for significant city contractors must receive a living wage of over $18 an hour.

“New Westminister was a win, and a good one,” said the B.C. Fed’s Sinclair. “It is only one of the many pieces of evidence that the labour movement is still alive and kicking, and fighting on many fronts, from strikes to regulatory reform to municipal byelaws.

“The Fed has moved more to seeing that we represent all working people, not just our members, although they are, of course, very important,” said Sinclair. “We are there for working people in general. Just look at our campaigns to increase the minimum wage and protect public services.”