Government Union Urges Conservatives to Cut Managers, Not Frontline Workers

The union for government employees is calling on the new Conservative Party of BC to reign in public sector management while protecting frontline workers.

Heading into the provincial election, the Conservative Party of BC vowed to bring down the government’s budget deficit to $10.8 billion.

And employee compensation is the B.C. government’s largest expense. Last fiscal year, it cost the government about $55.7 billion, while the B.C. government’s total spending was about $94.5 billion.

On the campaign trail, Premier-designate Lorne Doerkson promised to bolster the public sector’s frontlines and adjust the size of the public sector.

Now after Doerksen’s Conservatives won a decisive majority, Paul Finch, president of the BC General Employees’ Union, said he hoped the new government does just that.

“There’s a bit of anxiety from unionized workers about how this new government will approach not just the civil service, but the broader public sector and the economy,” said Finch, whose union represents more than 100,000 workers mainly in the public sector.

“We hope we’re able to sit down and give them some good advice and have some meaningful and productive conversations on how to move the province forward.”

And according to Finch, it’s management that’s ballooned — not the unionized public sector workers. He’s asking the new government to cap administrative costs and limit how much senior management is hired in relation to frontline workers.

A spokesperson for the Conservative Party of BC told The Tyee that it was too early to offer comment yet.

About one year ago, the BCGEU went on strike largely over wages. The strike lasted eight weeks, and ended when public employers agreed to an approximately 12.6 per cent wage increase over four years, plus pay adjustments for the lowest-paid public sector workers.

The deal cleared the way for about 452,000 public sector workers, including those represented by the Professional Employees’ Association and the Hospital Employees’ Union, to get similar wage increases.

The Ministry of Finance told The Tyee during negotiations that an increase of one per cent in total compensation for all B.C. public sector employees would cost $532 million per year.

In its budget earlier this year, the previous NDP government announced plans to reduce the number of public sector jobs by 15,000 full-time equivalent workers over the next three years.

And in a pre-election conversation with Global News, Doerkson said he planned to cut the size of the public service mainly through attrition — meaning retirements, resignations and contracts ending. He estimated the public service has had about a five per cent attrition rate over the past five years.

“The public sector has ballooned in the last number of years,” he said. “We believe that through attrition, we can achieve those numbers.”

Doerkson added his party would not be making cuts to frontline public service workers, like those in hospitals.

“We are absolutely committed to trying to bolster our frontlines in this province,” he said.

And it’s true that employment in the public sector has increased faster than in the private sector. Statistics Canada data shows over the past decade, B.C.’s public sector has increased in size by 39 per cent, compared to the private sector’s 22 per cent increase.

But that’s not the whole story, according to Finch. He said that while the public sector has increased in size, it has not kept pace with B.C.’s population growth — meaning hiring has not meaningfully changed the amount of work frontline workers take on.

“To be frank about it, frontline workers are doing more with less these days,” he said. “We don’t think there’s a case to lay off frontline workers.”

Finch added that what has been ballooning is non-union senior management.

“What you’ve seen is a dramatic increase in senior management,” he said. “We think that this incoming government really needs to take a closer look at that.”

Data from the last round of bargaining shows that since the NDP formed government in 2017, the public sector workforce unionized with the BCGEU, the Professional Employees Union, the BC Nurses’ Union and others rose by 30 per cent. Meanwhile, the size of excluded management in the B.C. public service has grown by 45 per cent.

“We need a strong management cohort,” Finch said. “But the rapid expansion in management, not just in the civil service, but across health, education and other sectors, is completely unjustifiable.”

His union is calling for the next government to cap management costs for the entire public sector, and limit the ratio of managers to frontline government workers.