Minister mum on details of contract negotiations
VICTORIA — Premier John Horgan’s government has scored a series of early deals with public-sector unions — and suffered one major rejection — under a new bargaining mandate that it has so far yet to explain publicly.
The province has inked tentative collective agreements with the B.C. Government and Services Employees’ Union, Health Employers Association, and the unions representing community social services workers. While there are only five tentative deals out of 183 collective agreements so far, they represent some of the most important benchmark deals and include 91,566 of 326,372 unionized public-sector workers.
One of those tentative frameworks was thrown into doubt late last week when a proposal was rejected for almost 30,000 K-12 support workers, including education assistants, secretaries and bus drivers. The group, represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), had a tentative three-year deal that offered two-per-cent annual wage increases. But it was not endorsed by the union’s “presidents council” on June 22 and so will not proceed to membership for a ratification vote. Instead, negotiations continue.
The CUPE vote mars what was otherwise a quick and successful start for the Horgan government on public-sector contract negotiations.
The early deal with the BCGEU would appear to set the yardstick for future contracts, and follow the general formula of a three-year agreement with a two-per-cent annual wage increase. BCGEU members have yet to ratify the agreement, and the union did not return a request for comment on Monday.
The tentative contracts were negotiated under what the Ministry of Finance describes as “the sustainable services negotiating mandate.” It’s not known what that entails because Finance Minister Carole James has never explained the mandate publicly, and her office said she won’t until the deals are ratified.
“Our government respects the hardworking members of the public sector, and the sustainable services mandate is about our shared goals of better services for the people of B.C.,” James said in a statement Monday. “We are being responsible, fair and focused in reaching freely negotiated agreements that help make services better for the people in B.C.”
A one-per-cent wage increase across the public sector is estimated to cost government an additional $291 million. That means three-year contracts with two-per-cent wage increases would cost an extra $582 million in year one, $1.164 billion in year two, and $1.746 billion in year three. James has set aside $2.6 billion in unallocated funding over the next two years to accommodate union contracts and other unexpected spending priorities.
Government won’t officially release the cost of the contracts until they are ratified. The fact that millions of taxpayer dollars could be at play, under a bargaining mandate the government won’t explain until the contracts are finalized, is troubling, said Liberal MLA John Martin.
“We have a legitimate reason to be concerned,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of public money that will be dedicated to these contracts.”
Martin said the NDP has the added complexity of the “smell test” because public-sector unions have traditionally been the party’s largest political donors. The BCGEU, for example, has donated almost $1.3 million to the B.C. NDP since 2013 — although future union and corporate donations have been banned by the NDP government.
The previous Liberal government was more forthcoming with its bargaining mandates, often explaining in advance the expectations behind its economic-stability mandate in 2014, cooperative gains mandate in 2012, or net-zero mandate in 2010.
But that was also a Liberal strategy to warn unions that wage increases were not forthcoming, said Mark Thompson, professor emeritus of industrial relations at the University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business.