Vol. 47, No. 8

Newsstand Price 40°

Wednesday, February 29, 1984

‘Historic’

—page 6—

launched at AFL meet

Pickets from the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada braved the rain Feb. 20 outside MacMillan Bloedel’s White Pine lumber mill in
Vancouver. The pickets, from Powell River, are one of several teams which, jointly with the Canadian Paperworkers Union, have used
Secondary picketing to close plants owned by the companies whose bargaining agent, the Pulp and Paper Bureau locked out pulp
employees at mills around B.C. three weeks ago. The Labor Relations Board has upheld the.unions’ right to picket most plants. White
__ Pine workers, members of the International Woodworkers, respected the picket as have |WA members at most mills. Story on page 12.

ee ee ee S

The provincial budget tabled by Finance
Minister Hugh Curtis is only a little more
than a week old but already its implications
are Ominous for the future direction of the
province,

Editorial, page 4

A closer analysis of the budget docu-
ments reveals that the Socred government
has not only introduced a form of double
taxation for health care but has also pre-
pared the way for total removal of resource

Analysis

revenues from the operating revenue of the
province.

And the direct elimination of employees
from the government service and from
government-funded bodies such as schools
will make the province the largest single
contributors to unemployment since Com-
inco temporarily closed its smelter in Trail.

According to estimates tabled with the
budget Feb. 21, the provincial government
service will cut by 4,447 “full time equival-
ents” over the 1984-85 budget year.

Since full-time equivalents are based on
the total hours, including overtime, for all
paid employees divided by the normal
working hours for one employee, the figure

— below, page 3

Mass actions to protest the provincial
government’s Feb. 20 budget are in the
works as B.C.’s jobless, trade unions, and
student and community groups mull the
impact of the Socred’s worst cutbacks
package.

Saturday, Mar. 31 has been set fora mass
protest following a meeting of Operation
Solidarity, the trade union coalition,
Monday.

Momentum for action has been growing
since last week, when the Vancouver and
District Labor Council’s unemployment
action committee launched its Jobs or
Income Now campaign and met with other
organizations Friday to map the JOIN
campaign.

In one of the first post-budget actions,
students demonstrated Monday in Victoria
and Vancouver. :

Some 200 students, organized by the
Canadian Federation of Students, Pacific
Region, gathered in Robson Square to pro-
test the closure of the David Thompson
University Centre in Nelson and cuts of five
per cent and 3.5 per cent to the budgets of
unversities and colleges respectively.

Students are also angry over the cancella-
tion of the grant portion — up to $2,000
yearly — of the province’s student financial
aid package.

The CFS has set Mar. 12-16 as tentative
dates for further, as yet unspecified actions
said spokesman Donna Morgan.

The anti-budget protests have been
backed in spirit by several University of
B.C. academics, who at a recent two-day
public conference belied the Socreds’ ratio-
nale for the cutbacks budget.

Economist Gideon Rosenbluth, William
Schworm and Robert Allen were among
those who gave papers showing that
investment in B.C. was high and that the
government deliberately excluded several
revenue sources from its books to create the
false impression of a massive deficit, and
grossly overestimated furture expenditures.

Rosenbluth and Schworm criticized cut-
ting services during recession times, since
“this worsens the economic situation. . .by
increasing unemployment and reducing
consumer expenditures.”

does not translate directly into layoffs. But
the number of government employees to be
cut is still in the thousands.

In addition, the biggest single cut in a
ministry budget is in education, which will
lose $61 million. Of that, $42 million will be
cut directly from local school boards —
which will be forced to lay off both teaching
and non-teaching staff to meet the reduced
provincial grants.

B.C. Teachers’ Federation president
Larry Kuehn has estimated that 2,000

see TAXPAYERS page 3