HOTEL VANCOUVER STRIKER international. Labor scene oe Ss Hotel (# Vancouver . ANCE whey PUBLIC PAR ee . the courts have limited their pickets but their support is ITF backs hotel strikers Hilton hotels around the world may be faced with an international boycott by the London-based Inter- national Transport Workers Federation if management at the Hotel Vancouver does not come back to the bargaining table and negotiate a satisfactory settlement for its 475 workers. : Don Nicholson, national president of the union at the hotel, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers, said Tuesday that he would press for the boycott at the Federation’s convention in Dublin next week should there be no progress in reaching a settlement. : Already Hilton hotels in Canada are on the “donot patronize” list of the Transport Workers Federation. Hilton, which manages the Hotel Vancouver for-~ its owners, Canadian National Railways, forced the strike June 9 following its refusal to put a wage offer on the table. Initially, it sought to maintain VRB efficiency upheld Cont'd from pg. 1 before the Bill is passed into law. “They are engulfing us in bureaucratic red tape from Vic- toria,’’ Fenwick charged at a press conference Tuesday as he released documents showing interference in VRB operations, ‘‘and the legis- lation has not yet passed. I guess it is a sign of things to come.” Fenwick said he agreed with the charges of Liberal leader Gordon Gibson that the actions of Vander Zalm’s department showed “contempt”? of the democratic procedure. VRB manager David Schreck released statistical data this week that proves false Vander Zalm’s allegations that VRB workers were over paid and under worked. Two VRB fact sheets comparing salaries and caseloads showed VRB workers to be paid equivalent salaries to their counterparts in the department of human resources, but showed VRB workers to have a heavier caseload than their counterparts in Burnaby or Rich- mond. A different comparison can be made in child welfare cases, however, where VRB workers have much smaller. caseloads. Outside of Vancouver, Vander Zalm’s department forces child welfare workers to deal with case- loads of 200 plus, allowing an average of two and one-half hours per month, per case. “Clearly the worker can only intervene at a time of crisis,” Schreck explained. ‘‘There is in- sufficient time to deal with child problems in the home and avoid taking children out of the home.” The VRB, by comparison, has caseloads of 20 for child welfare workers, allowing more than eight hours per month with each case. Schreck also defended the “efficiency’’ of the VRB by comparison to the bureaucracy in the department of human resources. He pointed to a lease that required signing for a group home in Vancouver — a routine matter for the VRB staff. Under orders from the deputy minister Schreck was forced to send the lease to Victoria. There, he said, it was sent to senior administrators, then to the ministry of public works, and then to the B.C. Building Corporation. ‘‘When they give it top priority, it takes weeks longer than business as usual at the VRB,”’ he explained. Vander Zalm is reported to have four objections to the VRB: alleged high salaries, low caseloads, and lack of co-operation with the ‘fraud squad’? and job-finding program. The VRB fact sheets answered the first two charges and Fenwick has noted a provincial government report that shows the incidence of fraud in Vancouver to be only half the rate in other provincial offices. On the fourth charge, Schreck pointed out that the job-finding program is administered directly by the department of human resources. : It is doubtful that the minister has acted on ‘‘bad advice’’ as the VRB people suggest. It is more likely that the Social Credit government is intent on destroying every creation of the former NDP government, and is determined to cut social services spending in Vancouver through the scrapping of the VRB and the introduction of punitive measures against the poor. In its haste to victimize the poor, however, the Socreds have taken on a much more formidable op- ponent in the broad movement against Bill 65 — a movement which on July 24 has the potential of not only defeating Bill 65, but of seriously weakening the minister of human resources and the government itself. PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JULY 15, 1977—Page 8 some services in the hotel with strikebreakers but was compelled to close down June 24 following two demonstrations mounted by the. B.C. Federation of Labor. Last week, a Supreme Court order limited the number of pickets at each of several en- trances to the hotel to.two although Justice Craig Munroe, who made the ruling, threw out demands by hotel management for com- pensation for alleged injury and property damage. Talks in the dispute are to proceed this week under the guidance of an industrial inquiry commission, expected to be ap- pointed Wednesday. CBRT regional representative Bill Apps told the Tribune that talks werescheduled for Thursday, Friday and possibly throughout the weekend. * * * Pulp workers throughout the province will be voting this week and next on the last offer from the industry as talks in both the wood and pulp sections enter a critical stage. . The industry offer — set at $1 an hour over two years but without COLA protection — goes to the membership with a recommenda- tion of rejection from the joint CPU-PPWC negotiating team and the 13,000 pulp workers are ex- pected to reject it by an over- whelming majority. Union spokesman and Canadian Paperworkers ' president Art Gruntman said that the rejection recommendation was based on the lack of COLA protection in the proposed offer. He accused forest employers of reneging on an earlier understanding that COLA clauses would be part of any two- year contract. The expected removal of wage controls has prompted most unions to press for one-year contracts but forest unions earlier indicated that they would consider two-year agreements — if they provided some cost-of-living adjustment. The industry offer — claimed by employers to be the final one — is without such adjustment provisions. | ACOLA clauseis also a key point for the International Woodworkers of America as is the establishment of a single, portable pension plan covering all woodworkers in the province. The IWA has already taken a strike vote to back up its contract demands although talks are still proceeding. Combines charges seven in UFAWU Combines investigators have apparently renewed the attack against the United Fishermen and - Allied Workers Union, filing an information in provincia}, court Monday charging seven union members with ‘‘wilfully impeding an inquiry under the Combines Investigation Act.” Although the seven — former president Homer Stevens, president Jack Nichol, secretary George Hewison, welfare director Bert Ogden as well as Walter Tickson, Dave McIntosh and Ken Robinson — had not yet been served with summonses at Tribune press time, news reports indicated that a hearing hadbeen set for July 29; : f The Combines investigator named in the information was Simon Wapniarski, one of those who carried out the original raid on UFAWU offices in 1975 to seize union documents. The charges apparently stem from the hearings scheduled by the Combines branch last December before which UFAWU officers had been ordered to appear. The union, charging that the closed hearings constituted ‘“‘star chamber’’ persecution of the union, sought to have them held in public and were supported in their demand by the B.C. Federation of Labor. The glare of publicity ultimately forced postponement of the hearings but the postponement touched off another series of Combines actions as investigators raided newsrooms in search of evidence. The filing of charges against UFAWU ‘members is the» latest episode. Significantly, the charges come at a time when the multinational fish companies seem to be int creasing their monopoly control over the B.C. fishing industry. The UFAWU earlier demanded an inquiry into the fishing industry to determine whether monopoly pressure by the two giants, Canadian Fishing Company and the Weston-owned B.C. Packers, was in any way connected to a rash of closures by smaller processing companies, including Queen Charlotte Fisheries. 5 Despite repeated indication of monopoly control of the fishing industry, however, the Combines has carried out no investigation, training its attack instead on the” UFAWU. ; B.C. Fed maps program Cont’d from pg. 1 still pending, then. we will take action.”’ “If this Socred government believes that ithas the right to take away the most basic of trade union rights workers have had in this province for so many decades, it has made a very great mistake,” he said in emphasizing the Federation’s program of op- position. Both Bills 65 and 68, introduced into the Legislature within a week of each other, areunprecedented in that they supersede the established labor code of the province and long-establish rights of trade union representation. Apart from doing away with the Vancouver Resources Board, Bill 65 would terminate the certificates held by the three unions in the VRB — the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Municipal and Regional Employees Union and the Social Services Employees Union and would terminate the collective agreements negotiated by the three. Bill 68 would dissolve Local 1728 of the Association of Commercial and Technical Employees which represented the faculty at Notre — Dame University. In addition, it would leave the union members with no successor rights even though such rights have been set out in labor law virtually since the turn of the century. Both Federation secretary Len Guy and president George John- ston stressed the threat to all trade unionists inherent in the two pieces of legislation. “The Socred government has, through these two bills, made the most insidious attack on the trade union movement to date,’ Guy said. “The 240,000 members of the B.C. Federation of Labor will not stand idly by and see the most basic of trade union rights disappear.’’