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Gains and Pain: The Stakes for Workers This BC Election

BC unions and labour experts untangle the BC NDP’s record and parties’ pledges.

David P Ball 16 Oct 2024The Tyee

David P. Ball is a journalist based in Vancouver, B.C.

Gwenda Alexander arrives for her afternoon cleaning shift at Burnaby Hospital in pale blue scrubs, sneakers and a jean jacket.

“I've worked at Burnaby for almost 20 years,” the housekeeping employee tells The Tyee, sitting on a bench outside the emergency department.

Originally from Antigua, Alexander has worked in the hospital’s cancer clinic since 2004.

“I really like providing a good, clean and safe environment for families and patients,” she says proudly. “It’s very comforting to me, helping people.”

But it wasn’t always comfortable. Just before her hiring nearly two decades ago, the then-BC Liberal government outsourced more than 8,000 unionized public sector jobs to private contractors.

Many of those fired workers returned in the same roles — but for a fraction of their previous wages. Alexander’s starting wage was roughly $10 an hour, she recalls, just above the minimum wage at the time.

Raising her son alone, she had to take a second job on weekends. By 2022, she was earning just above $15 an hour — the minimum wage.

“It was very hard; you couldn’t make enough to survive,” she says. But that year, after the NDP repatriated her job into the public sector, Alexander found her wage rose steeply to $24 an hour — and more for some shifts — and she finally got benefits and a pension.

Alexander’s time as a precarious, low-wage health worker illustrates some of the big issues at stake in an election dominated by debate over public sector spending levels, affordability and creating well-paying jobs.

Workers under the BC NDP

Historically the party of labour, the BC NDP is campaigning on its record for workers — while warning its BC Conservative opponents could undo its gains.

Meanwhile, the BC Conservatives have appealed to workers’ anger at rising living costs, global inflation during the pandemic and declines in some resource sector jobs.

“The cost of living exploded, and incomes just haven’t kept up,” John Rustad’s platform says. “Workers and families feel exhausted just by trying to stay afloat.”

The strategy taps into “working people’s dissatisfaction,” said Kendra Strauss, director of Simon Fraser University’s labour studies program.

“We need to be honest: there are union members who support some of these policies,” she said. “We need to recognize that the working class is itself not homogeneous.”

She and other labour experts interviewed by The Tyee agreed several key reforms during the NDP’s tenure were significant and lasting gains for workers in general, and unions in particular.

“For the first time ever, B.C. ranks as the highest-wage province for employees,” said economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work. “That is, in a way, testament to the success of our labour system — including collective bargaining, but other things like a good minimum wage policy.”

Chief among their list were bringing privatized health service workers like Alexander back into the public sector; permanently tying the minimum wage to inflation; enshrining a right to five paid sick days; extending worker protections to gig workers and other independent contractors; and making it easier to unionize.

For both unions and all workers, “there's definitely been some real wins,” according to University of British Columbia sociologist Sylvia Fuller. “The NDP platform seems to be not necessarily making really ambitious promises to the labour movement... fairly cautious and incremental changes.

“There's also a sense that it could have been more ambitious.”

BC Federation of Labour president Sussanne Skidmore said five paid sick days, introduced during the pandemic by the NDP, was a particularly “huge win for working people.”

For unions, whose members generally already had sick pay, a big change came in 2022, when B.C. let workers unionize after signing a union card, without requiring a subsequent vote by secret ballot.

“There are already enough barriers for folks joining unions,” she said. “The tactics that are used when people try to join unions are pretty heavy-handed. People get scared and nervous.”

Skidmore is arguably more experienced with Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad than most in the union world. That’s because she once faced off against him directly in his Nechako Lakes riding — running for the NDP — garnering just over half his votes.

“So I'm familiar with him,” she said, “and he's never been for the working people.”

Stanford echoed the fears raised by some of the province’s biggest unions: “If the Conservatives win,” he said, “they will, I think, roll out the big guns in attacking and undoing some of the things that have supported wages and workers in B.C.”

Rustad’s BC Conservatives did not respond to The Tyee’s questions about their labour and union plans — including if they’d keep minimum wage tied to inflation, and if any health workers would be outsourced to the private sector, as critics allege.

But sparking more job creation and fixing struggling public services are key planks in Rustad’s platform, two areas where workers are explicitly addressed by his party.

“In [Premier David] Eby’s B.C., working people just can’t get ahead,” his platform says.

‘Emotional moments’

On the campaign trail, health and who provides it has been a top attack line for all parties.

Bringing the privatized health workers back into the public sector was a decades-long rallying cry for outsourced employees like Alexander.

And after the BC NDP came to power in 2017 backed by the Greens, they reversed one of the most controversial labour policies of Rustad’s former BC Liberal government.

“My first thought was ‘Wow!’ The government was true to their word,” Alexander said, remembering the moment two years ago when she moved to the public payroll and saw a jump in her wages with new benefits and a pension. “People cheered, applauded, everybody was just walking around on a high that day.”

Lynn Bueckert, the Hospital Employees’ Union’s secretary-business manager, said the pandemic was “super tough” for health workers, especially those in services like housekeeping, care aides and security — many of them women and racialized workers.

“They never gave up their fight,” she said. “These were very, very emotional moments.”

Another area of health earned kudos from labour experts interviewed by The Tyee: the introduction of five paid sick days a year.

That became an urgent priority during the pandemic, as workers were told to stay home if sick or exposed to COVID-19.

Combined with bringing health worker wages up to the same levels and orders requiring they work at just one facility, the moves made a difference, said associate professor Christopher McLeod with UBC’s school of population and public health.

“To a certain degree, I think the main driver was the need to shore up health-care human resources coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said. “But the NDP did do a lot on that file... and we see that as a major election issue.”

But the five sick days were only a third of what the BC Federation of Labour demanded. Skidmore agreed some union asks fell short.

“We're not always going to agree on the outcome,” she said. “It's like bargaining, right? When you're at the bargaining table, you don't always get everything you want.”

Accused by Eby in last Tuesday’s debate of planning to cut public health services, Rustad said his opponent “continues to perpetuate a lie,” repeating his pledge to spend an extra $3.8 billion on health care over three years, while relying more on non-government providers.

“We are committed to universal health care in British Columbia, where there’s one payer which is the government,” Rustad said.

A green map of BC titled 'British Columbia Living Wages 2023' shows the living wage in major cities or regions around the province.
Image courtesy of Living Wage for Families.

Minimum wage vs. living wage

Another area that saw big changes for workers under the BC NDP was wages.

In June, the government lifted the province’s minimum wage to $17.40, a nearly four per cent boost from 2023; the year before, as inflation soared, it rose even more.

When the NDP took office in 2017, the minimum wage was $10.85 an hour (equivalent to $13.45 today). It had inched up just $3.25 from when they lost power 16 years earlier.

But more significant for labour experts was NDP legislation permanently tying the rate to inflation, automatically.

That, researchers said, would prevent a repeat of the nine-year freeze in the early years of the BC Liberal government, which Rustad joined in 2005.

“Inflation would go up, costs would go up, and so the real value of that would decline,” said UBC’s Fuller. Indexing minimum wage to inflation was, to her, “a really important win for sure.”

But even after historic boosts during the pandemic, the minimum wage still lags far behind what is considered adequate.

Last year, the hourly living wage would have needed to be nearly $26 in Metro Vancouver, and between roughly $21 and $24 throughout much of the Interior, according to annual calculations by the Living Wage for Families campaign and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“There's been progress around the minimum wage, but the gap between the living wage and the minimum wage is still really significant,” SFU’s Strauss noted. “For the labour movement broadly — who are hearing from their members about the cost-of-living crisis — there's maybe a little bit of disappointment.”

A bar chart shows the minimum wage in B.C. from 1994 to 2024, with orange bars indicating an NDP government and blue bars indicating a BC Liberal government.
Chart for The Tyee by David P. Ball, based on Government of Canada data.

Comparing the party platforms

BC Conservatives: The party’s platform taps into widespread frustration at the unaffordable cost of living in B.C., economic mismanagement and a health-care system it said is “failing British Columbians” — listing a litany of problems such as doctor and nurse shortages, not enough acute care beds and surging wait times.

“Simply put, the system is controlled by NDP ideology and politics,” the BC Conservatives declared. “The results speak for themselves.”

The party pledged to maintain “universal health care,” promising a health ministry that “increases spending each year.” It would achieve that by “delivering care through both public and non-governmental facilities” — and even reimburse patients who leave B.C. to get procedures done faster.

Building more affordable housing, the party said, is key to retaining workers.

The party also promises to “work tirelessly” to restore our once-thriving logging industry and its “family-supporting wages,” overcoming what it calls the NDP’s “contempt” for people in rural areas. And it accused the NDP of failing the 150,000-job technology sector and promised to create more jobs and local training if elected.

BC NDP: David Eby’s NDP has promised working people it “has your back,” while acknowledging the tremendous struggle many are increasingly facing to pay their bills.

“In difficult times, you deserve a government that’s on your side,” the New Democrat platform states. “Not one that will leave you to fend for yourself.”

The party boasted about its steps to bring living costs down — from a housing plan the NDP says will create “300,000 homes” to more training opportunities “for family-supporting jobs.”

BC Greens: Under leader Sonia Furstenau, the party made a number of worker-centred promises this election.

Chief among those target the health sector — with the Greens questioning the NDP’s support for public health care and seniors, while warning the Conservatives could be worse.

“Both of these two parties are aligned on corporate delivery of health care,” Furstenau said in last Tuesday’s televised leaders’ debate.

Her party’s platform vows to boost funding for publicly run services — funding more nurses, opening community health facilities and bolstering resources for an aging population.

Strauss noted many unions have previously been suspicious of the BC Greens, for instance, using their power over the John Horgan government to oppose single-step union certification and slow the pace of minimum wage increases.

Notably, unlike both major parties, the Green platform has no dedicated section on labour, workers or jobs.

Two explicit pledges are aimed at workers in resource extraction — a $20-million fund to “retrain oil and gas workers” and “address the skills shortage in the renewable energy sector,” and for those in forestry to “fund training and upskilling programs” and boost value-added timber industries by ending raw-log exports. Another section pledges training and mentorship in “food manufacturing and hospitality” sectors.

But Strauss noted their platform this election has in many ways moved further to the left, filling a void vacated by the increasingly centrist NDP — by promising spending in public sector services like transit, education and health that both are heavily unionized and serve working families.

The party has also floated some more progressive ideas, she said, that could ultimately benefit workers. Chief among those ideas are promised “pilot programs for a four-day workweek.”

“I mean, they're obviously not going to form government,” Fuller said. “And they don't have a very developed employment policy.

“But in terms of the three parties, I would say they’re the only party that's really floated anything that’s particularly new or dramatic or innovative.”

‘Elections really matter’

Without detailed spending numbers for the Conservatives’ promises to improve services while reining in costs, many unions have watched the polls nervously.

On top of that, multiple public sector contracts are heading into negotiations starting next year. Whichever party takes power after Oct. 19 will be at the table — and how government bargains could affect recent years of relative labour peace at the provincial level.

“All the big public sector ones are up for negotiation in the new year,” Skidmore said. “A government willing to work with working people on those things is a better government to work with.”

Unions say they hope voters keep workers’ rights and interests — and the public services they provide — in mind at the ballot box next week.

“We will work with every government that is in power, absolutely,” the Hospital Employees’ Union’s Bueckert said. “But it's important that we have a government that respects working people.

“The outcome of elections really matter. Put it this way: we’re watching very carefully.”

As hospital employee Alexander nears her retirement, she’s most concerned about younger workers trying to earn a living wage and save for their future — and she wants whoever wins to better fund a health system she sees falling short every day.

“All I care about, basically, with the outcome of the election is that they continue to do the work around improving health care,” she said. “Because it needs a lot of work, and seniors need more care.... There's a lot of work to be done.”


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