Delicious work if you can get it

Let’s hope the government read all the details in the huge community-benefit agreement it signed with trade unions for future public-works jobs.

Because workers in camps have a mouth-watering assortment of entitlements, and it’s going to be government’s job to fulfil them.

The 336-page deal the NDP has inked with an alliance of 19 trade unions carries over negotiated requirements for work camps that have accumulated over the years.

Private contractors agreed to them ages ago. But a new Crown corporation — B.C. Infrastructure Benefits Inc. — will eventually be the official employer on major job sites. It’s going to need some haute-cuisine expertise, and a big grocery budget.

“The size of individual servings may be limited (but) free access must be provided for those who wish to return for additional servings,” says the section on catering specifications.

If they run out of first-line meat choices (roast, chops, steaks, etc.) during a serving, it “must be replaced immediately by another first-line choice.”

“Dinner plates are to be kept warm in a warming space prior to serving.”

A dessert/fruit table will be provided for both lunch and dinner, with a minimum of cake, cookies, pastry, ice cream and Jell-O. The salad-table rules have six specific minimum requirements to do with pickles, devilled eggs, salad dressing and so on.

And there won’t be any skimping on dining hall ambience.

“Settings at the table shall not be less than 76.2 cm per person.”

Those are the kind of details buried in the pages of the master agreement that puts the government and the trade unions in charge of hiring on big jobs.

The goal of the agreement is to promote the hiring of local workers (within 100 kilometres of the job site) and increase the numbers of women, Indigenous people and members of equity-seeking groups.

But, if there aren’t enough people available within that range in the Interior, workers from farther away will get room and board or a living-out allowance ($105 a day).

The level of detail makes you wonder about the government’s estimate of how much the deal is going to add to the cost of big public-works jobs. The catering costs, for example, are already part of project budgets, since the requirements were set years ago.

But, government doesn’t usually do anything by half-measures, and there are dozens of other hiring stipulations. So it’s not going to be any cheaper with a Crown corporation as the designated employer.

A loosey-goosey estimate of four to seven per cent cost increases was provided this week, but there wasn’t much to back it up. On the $1.38-billion Pattullo Bridge project, the government says the additional costs are already in that budget, even though the figure came out well before the agreement was announced.

Also raising doubts is the fact that the agreement on the Pattullo Bridge job comes with automatic two per cent raises every year for the next six years.

It’s a lowball estimate of additional costs that has nowhere to go but up. The NDP will be insulated from criticism to some extent because public-sector projects nearly always jump over original budgets.

The NDP’s immediate comeback was that the extra cost is worth it, because of the social benefits that will accrue. But that’s not quite accurate. It’s the measure of any additional progress on the social goals over and above the status quo that will determine if this deal is worth it.

Local hiring is just common sense, and is prevalent on current jobs such as the Site C dam. The push to hire more women and Indigenous people has been a professed goal for years. The need for more apprentices to deal with the skill shortages is already universally accepted.

Since it’s hard to measure current shortfalls and put values on meeting those goals, taxpayers won’t know if the agreement is worth it.

The one thing that’s clear is that B.C. Building Trades Council is the big winner. Its unions now represent a small fraction of construction workers. It will soon have thousands of mandatory new members, and they’ll all pay 35 cents from every hour of wages into various union funds. The council has just hit the jackpot.