BC imposes three year wage freeze

Gil McGowan, AFL Staff

The Liberal government of B.C. premier Gordon Campbell is courting confrontation by announcing plans to impose a three-year wage freeze on the already-decimated ranks of provincial workers, says the B.C. Government and Service Employees Union.

Finance Minister Gary Collins says the Liberals will offer three-year contracts with no wage increases to thousands of provincial employees when their contracts expire in March 2004.

BCGEU president George Heyman said the news comes as an insult to stressed employees who are already shouldering huge increases in responsibility in the wake of the record downsizing program launched by the Liberals after Campbell was elected premier in 2001.

The province is in the process of slashing about 12,000 jobs over three years.

"It’s quite disrespectful of the finance minister to take such a broad brush to the issue of compensation," Heyman said.

"I just think that’s a bad tone to set if what you want out of the bargaining process is some co-operative discussion... They’ve eliminated huge numbers of jobs and whole programs, and now they’re saying the people who are left are overcompensated when in fact their workloads have climbed dramatically."

John Fryer, former president of National Union of Public and General Employees, now with the University of Victoria, said the province is going in the opposite direction of the federal government, which recently introduced legislation that calls for greater collaboration between labour and management.

Campbell cut personal provincial income taxes by 24 percent the day he took office, a move that disproportionately favoured the wealth over ordinary citizens.

Since then, he has imposed a series of tax cuts that disproportionately impact those at the lower end of the income scale.

For example, the Liberals announced a 3.5-cents per litre gasoline tax increase this week to finance road repairs, one of the areas previously hit by their sweeping cutback plans.