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WLLL TA I

LABOR

No respite for apartheid,
B.C. Fed secretary urges

Continued from page 1
authority inducing or procuring breach or
breaches of a contract or contracts
between the plaintiffs and their employees,
customers, suppliers or any other person
and attempting to interfere with the per-
formance of a contract or contracts
between the plaintiffs and the employees
dispatched to work for them and between
the plaintiffs and their respective custo-
mers and supppliers.

@ “Unlawfully conspiring to injure the
plaintiffs and their business by supporting,
encouraging, condoning or engaging in
activities intended to have the effect of
restricting or limiting production or servi-
ces at the premises or places of operation
of the plaintiffs;

@ “By watching or besetting or causing
to be watched or beset the place of busi-
ness of the plaintiffs at the location of
Fraser Surrey Docks Ltd. on Elevator
Road and River Road in Surrey, British
Columbia and the approaches leading
thereto and by picketing the aforesaid pla-
ces of business and their approaches or
persuading or endeavoring to persuade
any employees dispatched to work for the
plaintiffs or any customers or suppliers of
the plaintiffs from entering the said places
of business for the purpose of reporting to
work and or doing business with all or any
of the plaintiffs.”

But if the order barred picketing at the
docks, it could not diminish the momen-
tum of action against the apartheid
regime. This Friday, Sept. 6, pickets will
go up for two hours, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
at virtually every liquor store throughout
the Lower Mainland. A week later, on

‘that high wages in B.C. prevent compani

Sept. 13 at noon, demonstrators will

picket the main Burrard and Georgia
headquarters of the Royal Bank to protest
its investment in South Africa. And plans
are already being mapped out to press
municipal councils to follow the lead of
Vancouver city council and refuse to deal
with any company doing business in
South Africa.

At the federal level, Prime Minister
Brian Mulroney continued to backtrack
on sanctions against South Africa, echo-
ing the familiar — and discredited — line
that sanctions would hurt those it was
intended to help.

“We will have to reflect on other
options,” he said in a television interview
Sunday, “because...these policies may
very well cripple the people we’re trying to
help.”

Any justification for that position was
stripped away last month when the Times
of London reported that 77 per cent of
blacks in South Africa supported sanc-
tions. And the pressure is mounting on the
federal government which is increasingly
isolated in its position.

That point was driven home at Tues-
day’s rally at the Surrey-Fraser docks.

“You’re known by the company you
keep — and it is only Thatcher, Reagan
and Jerry Falwell that are opposing sanc-
tions,” declared Zayed Gamiet, the presi-
dent of the Southern Africa Action
Coalition and a South African himself.

“Sanctions are what the people of
South Africa are calling for,” he said.
“They are a strong weapon to use against
the dictatorship and we should use them.”

“We’re told that sanctions won’t help,
that we shold wait for change to come
through reforms and ‘constructive engage-

CLIFF ANDSTEIN. . .take anti-apartheid campaign to.community, church and

union organizations.

ment’,” Andstein reminded the audience.

“But what change has there been —
since the Sharpeville massacre, or Soweto?
Reform hasn’t worked for 300 years and it
certainly hasn’t worked in the last 25,” he
said. =
“The only reason that Brian Mulroney
Opposes sanctions is the same reason there
are injunctions here today — because
there are people making profits from the
dictatorship in South Africa and from the
oppression of black South African
workers,” he declared to applause.

He urged supporters not to “make the
same mistake as in 1976” after Soweto
when the campaign for boycotts and sanc-
tions slowly ebbed.

“We can keep it going — through the
community groups, through the churches,
through the labor movement. We can
keep the pressure on the federal govern-
ment, keep up the boycott of South Afri-
can products and of companies doing
business in South Africa,” he said.

He also called on labor councils to press
municipal.councils to take action similar
to that taken by Vancouver city council.

“Labor councils should go after munic-
ipal councils to follow the lead of Van-
couver city council and state: no truck or
trade with companies doing business in
South Africa,” he said.

“Let’s keep up the fight to support the
South African people in their struggle.”

Unions good for economy, UBC study finds.

The myths about unions that employers
and the Socred government have perpetu-
ated in their objective of de-unionizing the
province are just that — myths. They’re
based on notions that don’t stand up to the
scrutiny of research, a new study released
last week declared.

The 60-page study, prepared for the B.C.
Economic Policy Institute by University of
B.C. economist Robert Allen, found that
union wage rates are not a factor in interna-
tional competitiveness, that B.C. does not
have an excessive record of strikes and

unionization, far from diminishing produc-
tivity, actually increases it.

Allen, who wrote the paper in conjunc-
tion with retired UBC professor Stuart Jam-
ieson, the author of an extensive 1979 study
on industrial relations, said he was promp-
ted to investigate the subject by the anti-
union offensive launched by the Socred

government.

“What the research showed was that the
anti-union attitude of the government just
isn’t supported by the facts,” he told repor-
ters at a press conference Aug. 28.

Citing the most often-repeated claim —
this province — the study pointed out that
the actual wage differential between B.C.
and the main manufacturing centre, Onta-
rio, is only four to five per cent. And in real

_ terms — adjusted for the cost of living —
B.C. manufacturing

: Wages are actually
lower than those in Ontario and are closer,
in fact, to those in the Prairie provinces.

Similarly, wage levels in many U.S.
States, including Alaska, Washington and
California, are higher than in B.C.

Only in the resource industries are wages
igni higher in B.C., the study

_ Showed. It noted that the difference arises

because B.C. unions have succeeded in cap-
turing a portion of the extra profit that goes
to the resource companies as a result of low
royalties, stumpage fees and other “resource
rents” that B.C. companies pay.

Yet despite the high wages, in forestry,
for example. B.C. lumber is still very com-
petitive in the U.S. — so much so that
“U.S. producers are agitating for a quota to

lower the B.C. share of the market,” the

study-said.
Moreover, it noted,
. .

if low. wages were a
significant factor in
location of manu-
facturing industry,
the Maritimes should
be heavily industrial-
ized because wages
there have consist-
ently been 20 per
cent below those in
Ontario.
/ In fact, it is not
3 wages, but “proxim-
ROBERT ALLEN _itytothe huge Amer-
ican Midwest market (that) has been the
decisive factor in determining industrial
location in Canada,” the study said.

Nor do claims of “volatile industrial rela-
tions” and an “excessive record of strikes”
stand up to close examination, it noted.

Using statistics on worker days lost due
to strikes and the incidence of illegality and
violence — the so-called “magnitude” and
“intensity” of strikes — Allen and co-
author Jamieson emphasized that through-
out the post-Second World War period,
B.C. has had less strikes and with a lower
incidence of violence and illegality than
either Ontario or Quebec.

Jamieson noted, however, that before the
Second World War, B.C. had “a dispropor-
tionate share of the strikes across Canada”

_ 12 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1985

and that combative tradition helped build a
stronger and more unified trade union
movement in this province better able to
maintain standards and conditions.

The most effective statistical ammunition
in the study was aimed at the non-union
contractors and others who have contended
that unionized companies are “inefficient
and unproductive” because management
rights are constrained by union collective

agreements.
That simply isn’t so, the study emphas-
ized

Allen said that the recent advent of large
database computers has made it possible
recently to compare productivity in union
and non-union firms and several studies
have now been completed in the U.S.

“Virtually every one of those studies has
found that unionized firms are anywhere
from six per cent to 25 per cent more pro-
ductive than comparable non-union firms,”
he said.

There are several reasons why that
Should be so, he added, citing union
apprenticeship plans and a lower turnover

of workers as well as a higher morale among -

unionized workers and greater incentive for

senior workers to pass on their skills since :
their own jobs are protected by seniority _

rights.

In fact, the increasing encroachment of
non-union contractors into major construc- ~

tion has got nothing to do with their “effi- _

ciency,” despite the contractors’ claims, the

study said.

Before the current economic crisis, non- _

union firms could not compete because
their lower wages did not provide enough of
an advantge to overcome their lower pro-
ductivity. “With the collapse of construc-
tion in the current depression, wages have
been driven so low that the difference pro-
vides the advantage necessary to overcome
lower efficiency,” Allen said.

“But no economist could see that as a
healthy development,” he warned.

Whether they come from media com-
mentators, government members or the
Fraser Institute, the “common arguments

against unions...are either false or irrele-

vant,” the study concluded. “Indeed, there
is considerable evidence that unions
improve the performance of the eco-
nomy...by raising productivity, reducing
inequality. ..and curbing discrimination.”

. TRIBUNE

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