VICTORIA – The Liberal government of Premier Gordon Campbell in British Columbia has passed three new laws that gut collective agreements and strip hard-won rights from teachers, nurses, and thousands of other public sector workers.

During an emergency session of the B.C. Legislature on January 27, the Liberals used their 77-2 majority to ram through three controversial pieces of legislation: Bills 27, 28 and 29.

Taken together, labour leaders say these laws represent an unprecedented attack on workers, unions and the collective bargaining process.

"No other government in Canada has ever gone into the text of a collective agreement while it’s in force and rewritten its provisions. But that’s exactly what they’ve done here," says Jim Quail, lawyer for B.C.’s Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU).

"Klein and Harris never went in and changed the terms of existing collective agreements. What’s really different here is that it’s not just freezing wage schedules, they’ve re-written the agreements and to a large extent just ripped pages out."

The main points of each of the new laws can be summarized as follows:

• Bill 27 imposes a settlement on B.C.’s 45,000 teachers – who have been deadlocked in negotiations with school boards across the province for nearly a year. The final deal is actually worse than the last offer tabled by the school boards.

• Bill 28 makes it unlawful for teachers to negotiate for things like class size and staffing ratios. It also tears up sections of existing agreements that prohibit contacting-out in areas like school maintenance and cafeteria food service.

• Bill 29 effectively guts collective agreements in both health care and social services. With the exception of nurses and other health "professionals," this bill allows the government to contract-out any health care job to the private sector. On the social services side, workers have lost contract language covering things like employment security, wage parity and severance.

The attack on unionized public sector workers came only two weeks after the Campbell government announced plans to eliminate nearly 12,000 civil service jobs over the next three years.

Another 12,000 jobs (at least) are expected to be lost in other public sector areas outside of the "main-line" civil service – such as health care, schools, colleges and universities.

Premier Campbell says the lay-offs and attacks on union contracts are necessary to bring public spending in the province under control. But union activists and other community leaders have pointed out that B.C.’s public debt (measured on a per capita basis) is actually lower than most other provinces.

They have also argued that the Campbell government created its own financial mess when it handed $1.5 billion in tax breaks to businesses and high-income earners – just as the province was heading into a recession. "The Liberals are on the wrong track," says B.C. Federation of Labour (BCFL) President Jim Sinclair. "They’re worsening the job crisis in BC communities by cutting health, education and public services to pay for tax cuts to the rich and big business."

In response to the Campbell government’s decision to tear up public sector contracts, the BCFL and other labour organizations have already taken to the streets in protest.

On Monday, January 28 – just hours after the government had passed the last of its anti-workers laws – B.C. teachers from around the province staged a one-day illegal strike. The next day, nearly 10,000 social service workers also walked off the job in a one-day protest.

The labour movement is now organizing a fight-back campaign that will include radio and television ads, rallies outside the offices of Liberal MLAs and a major rally outside the legislature in Victoria on Feb. 23.

A number of the province’s biggest public sector unions are also taking the government to court, arguing that the Premier does not have the right to tear up legally binding contracts.