They've got a deal, at long last. On the afternoon of April 2, the Greater Victoria Labour Relations Association ratified a new four-year contract that will, both union and management sources agree, settle a dispute about pay equity for South Island librarians that has festered for decades.

The GVLRA, which acts for the region's libraries and municipalities in labour relations matters, agreed to contract language that will, within the course of the four-year agreement, bring library wages in the regional system into line with those paid to city employees doing comparable work in Oak Bay and Esquimalt.

Late in the afternoon of April 2, some workers were already back at Victoria area libraries, which had been shut down when management locked out unionized workers on Feb. 17. All nine libraries will be open to the public again by April 8.

"As far as we are concerned, this contract fully achieves our pay equity goals," CUPE local 410 president Ed Seedhouse told The Tyee. The terms of the new contract had been overwhelmingly approved by the Victoria library staffers in his union earlier in the week.

"We think this agreement is even better than the one signed by Vancouver library workers," Seedhouse said.

A long battle over gender and wages

Pay equity for women workers and workers in traditionally female occupations such as librarians has been a contentious issue in Canada for decades, and featured prominently in last year's Vancouver library strike. During that strike Simon Fraser University professor and pay equity researcher Marjorie Griffin-Cohen told The Tyee that a comparison of average wages between men and women working full time all year in Canada shows women making only 71 per cent of men's wages.

"Pay equity issues are particularly important for unions in B.C., which is one of the only remaining Canadian jurisdictions that does not have legislation in place to enforce pay equity," she said.

Seedhouse said that in addition to gains on pay equity, the new contract also improved long term disability payments and lowered premiums deducted from wages, as well as making substantial improvements in wages for auxiliary workers. Nine of 35 auxiliary positions in the system will be converted to regular full time work at $17.81 an hour.

'Feather in caps of all'

"This is a victory for the public, and a feather in the caps of all involved in a tough negotiation," said Chris Graham, Greater Victoria Public Library Board chair late on Wednesday afternoon.

The successful ratification votes on both sides of the labour management table bring to an end a long and sometimes bitter struggle. Pay equity first became a contested issue for Victoria area librarians in 1978, according to Graham. Postings on a website sponsored by CUPE 410 say that area librarians were promised pay equity in a letter of understanding attached to their contract for 1991-92, but the promise remained unfulfilled a decade and a half later.

The demand from union members that their next contract commit to implementing pay equity was one of the key reasons, sources tell The Tyee, that librarians went more than 450 days without a contract, a period roiled by job actions and work stoppages by librarians and disciplinary suspensions of workers by management.

The latest drama in the library struggle saw Victoria area CUPE members locked out for more than a month and a half when the library board shut down the nine branches that normally serve nearly 300,000 patrons in 10 South Island communities on Feb. 17.

What took so long?

Some observers, including a local newspaper, blame the indirect structure of the Greater Victoria Labour Relations Association for the protracted struggle at local libraries.

Local 410 president Seedhouse said, "The library board has no say! They must go along with the GVLRA, on which they have only one vote." Similar criticisms of shared employer bargaining structures were voiced during the Vancouver municipal strike last year.

Ron Brunsdon, manager and chief negotiator for the Labour Relations Association, did not reply to several phoned requests for comment on this story from The Tyee.

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