Union sees no value in highrise
Kelowna city council urged to reject proposal for tower that union says won’t provide more affordable housing
Unionized provincial government workers have registered their opposition to a 25-storey highrise in central Kelowna.
The Brooklyn project should be rejected by city council, the BCGEU says, because it will do nothing to promote affordable housing in Kelowna.
“BCGEU members are finding it increasingly difficult to afford life in Kelowna — even with secure employment and regular negotiated wage increases,” union president Stephanie Smith wrote in a letter to city hall.
“With a 0.2 per cent rental vacancy rate in Kelowna, working people are struggling to find long-term rental housing for their families, leading many to move farther away from their work and others to leave the province altogether,” Smith writes. “B.C. is losing productive and experienced workers.”
Mission Group, the Kelowna-based developer behind the Brooklyn project, has said buyers of the 178 suites in the tower will be able to rent their suites out on a shortterm basis, through online services such as Airbnb.
Since its launch in early 2016, the Phoenix system has gotten paycheques wrong for more than half of all federal civil servants working within dozens of government departments and agencies.
The problems, including overpayments, underpayments and at times no payments, have impacted some employees more than others and created a backlog of pay issues that topped 600,000 earlier this year. The backlog had dropped to about 577,000 unresolved files as of late June.
Among its five key recommendations, the committee called on the Trudeau government to set targets for processing outstanding pay requests and to better train the pay advisers whose job it is to help resolve individual pay issues.
It also urged the government to do more to help employees facing financial distress.
For employees affected by Phoenix, and their unions, the Senate report came as no surprise.
Some workers were critical of the findings Tuesday for failing to reprimand individuals for their roles in launching the system despite knowing Phoenix hadn’t been properly tested.
Pratte defended the committee’s decision to not call individual bureaucrats to testify about their roles in launching Phoenix, arguing the system’s failures go beyond a handful of people.
“If we had these three individuals in front of the committee, it would have meant that they were the sole responsible people for the problem, and it isn’t (the case),” he said.
“It is obviously a much larger problem than three individuals.”
Unions representing federal workers have demanded the government pay damages for the emotional and mental stress caused by Phoenix. Talks earlier this year aimed at achieving a compensation package quickly stalled when government negotiators said they didn’t have a mandate to proceed.