: Wednesday, March 19, 1986
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Newsstand Price 40¢

Vol. 49, No. 10

PACIFIC

Trades
Strike

_ balloting

| underway

— page 12 —

Changes to CSP seen

as gov telection pioy

e the South Moresby” was the
ize some 1,500 demonstrators
ht to the provincial government in a
and march through Vancouver’s
s Saturday.
ironmentalists, Native activists and
nionists participating in the event,
marked the Vancouver stop of the
outh Moresby Caravan 1986, a 16-
in trek across Canada which began
lohn’s early in March. © =.
ally outside Canada Harbor Place

da elder Eva Yanovich (seated), along with family members and Council of the Haida Nation chairman Miles Richardson
and Burnaby NDP MP Svend Robinson (c), are surrounded by supporters following arrival of cross-country caravan,
testing logging of South Moresby island chain, in Vancouver Saturday.

South Moresby chain packed Thornton
Park to greet caravan participants arriving
at the adjacent CN station.

Included in the caravan were Haida
elders Watson Price, Ethel Jones and Eva
Yanovich, who are among the 10 people
facing criminal charges in B.C. Supreme

_ Court for the blockade of logging opera-
tions on Athlii Gwai — the original name
- for Lyell Island. —

of Burrard Street, SkeenaNDP
Fulton read greetings from
vironmentalist and marine biol-

TRIBUNE PHOTO <> DAN KEETON

“These people are the leaders of our
nation and (those) who our knowledge of
our traditions are passed on through.
“When they’re being pulled in front of the
courts of this province, and they knew
very strongly they have a responsibility to
protect this land, and when they’re called
criminals it makes it very difficult to deal
with,” he said. —

Richardson also objected to an Expo 86

publication that described B.C.’s Natives _

as “a once rich and colorful culture.”

“Pd like to tell Bill Bennett and I'd like’
_ to tell the rest of them that the Haida

Skelly Adrien
NDP’s support
land

Changes to the Compensation Stabiliza-
tion Program (CSP) introduced last week,
offering a phoney promise of job security in
return for a wage freeze for provincial
government employees, have underscored
the Social Credit government’s intention of
making public sector wage bargaining a
central issue in the next provincial election.

Finance Minsiter Hugh Curtis intro-
duced changes to the CSP guidelines March
13, extending the wage controls for three
more years and laying out two restrictive
approaches to pay increases in the public
sector. One offers what one unionist called
the “illusion” of job security in return for a
three-year agreement in which annual
increases are limited to zero, one and two
per cent.

The alternative approach would tie
increases to the prevailing private sector

_ Fates, the clear assumption being that they

would be well below the 2.8 per cent maxi-
mum now permitted by CSP commissioner
Ed Peck.

Significantly, the changes come only
weeks after provincial government negotia-
tors demanded concessions from the B.C.
Government Employees Union and the
same day that negotiators for Health Labor
Relations, representing B.C. hospitals,
tabled demands for massive contract roll-
backs from the Hospital Employees
Union.

Those concession demands, coupled with
Premier Bill Bennett’s repeated claim that
job security depends on wage controls, has
indicated that the government hopes to
engineer a phony election issue and to make
public employees the scapegoat at a time
when virtually every major public sector
contract is up for renewal.

“The Socreds have been casting around
for issues — and I think it’s clear they want
to make public sector bargaining an issue,”
Cliff Andstein, secretary-treasurer of the
B.C. Federation of Labor, said in an inter-
view.

The government is hoping to create the
impression that job security is possible
through wage controls and that any attempt
to get more money will only take jobs away
from others, he said.

“It’s part of the Bennett big lie, that he’s
been repeating since February, 1982,” he
charged.

But the government’s ploy was expected
by the labor movement, Andstein noted,
and it was one of the reasons that unionists
pressed for a co-ordinated approach to bar-
gaining. “We're proceeding along that
course and the meetings among the various
unions are taking place,” he said.

The issue of co-ordinated bargaining was
given renewed importance last week when
Hospital Labor Relations Association
(HLRA) tabled demands for major con-
tract changes to the 25,000-member Hospi-
tal Employees Union. :

The rollbacks include demands that
employees pick up 50 per cent of the premi-
ums for medical, dental, extended health,

see HEU page 5