Friday, September 3, 1982

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Vol. 44, No. 34

Rankin:
UCBM

knuckles

under
— page 2 —

Gov't employees picketing
under shadow of restraints

Faced with government negoti-
ators who only reiterated that the
wage offer would not go beyond
the wage control figure of 6.5 and
five percent, the B.C. Government
Employees Union broke off nego-
tiations Aug. 30 and launched a
24-hour full-scale strike at mid-
night Sept. 1.

The one-day strike will be
followed by rotating sirikes in var-
ious regions of the province until
the government returns to the bar-
gaining table with new initiatives.

Although negotiations had. been
progressing in the 10 days since
they were resumed Aug. 18, theim-

movability of the Government Em-
ployee Relations Bureau on the
wage and productivity issue indi-
cated that Bennett was merely buy-
ing political time in the dispute and
had no intention of putting more
money on the table.

“We were told at the bargaining
table this morning that the govern-
ment would not be making any
more moves to improve fringe
benefits for our members, that
there would be no more money
other than 6.5 percent and five per-
cent and the demand for increased
productivity in the form of an in-
crease in hours of work or the re-
moval of our hours of work clause
from the contract is still the govern-
ment’s position,’” BCGEU general
secretary John Fryer said in a state-
ment following the breakdown of
talks.

He also cited government rejec-
tion of a 16-page union paper sug-
gesting ways of increasing produc-
tivity and government refusal to
deal with the issue of auxiliary em-
ployees as reasons for the break-
down.

‘All of these issues . . . have led
us to believe that the government
has no intention at this point of ne-
gotiating a fair and equitable col-
lective agreement with its employ-
ees,’’ he charged.
g° The Socred government’s rejec-
Stion of any further increase in
4 wages — a stand reaffirmed in a
5 £ provincial treasury board meeting
= this week — made it increasingly
Z evident that Bennett intends to
\2 make the BCGEU the target for a
™ wage control plan modelled after

Scores of BCGEU strikers line up to sign for picket duty at Robson Square courthouse complex in the federal guidelines.
©wntown Vancouver as the union launches its 24-hour walkout Wednesday morning. See GOV’T page 8

_ .
REE gS mre <—

Battered and discredited,
Reaganomics may be on its way
to abandonment in the U.S. But
in this province, it has found an
even-more ardent proponent in
the Social Credit government
which has been wielding its bud-
get-slashing policies with a po-
litical vengeance.

And amid mounting specula-
tion-of an imminent provincial
election, the Socreds have stak-
ed out their ground in far right
field.

Rumors persist that Bennett
may drop an election writ as
soon as Labor Day, Sept. 6. But
whatever the date, Bennett and
his newly-aligned cabinet have
clearly determined that the
theme of any election campaign
will be ‘“‘restraint’’ — defined in
Socred terms as wholesale cuts
to health, education and muni-
cipal budgets and tight controls
on public sector wages.

ANALYSIS

With increasing vehemence,
the Bennett government has
been announcing new “‘re-
straint”’ actions, making it clear
that ‘‘balancing the budget’’
any cost will probably be the
cornerstone of the campaign:

Those actions have become
more punitive in recent weeks:

@ The first provincial gov-
ernment to institute wage con-
trols for its employees, it has
now tightened the guideline fig-
ure following the federal gov-
ernment’s program and appears
determined to impose the fed-
eral control figure on B.C. gov-
ernment employees;

@ It has moved three hard-
line ministers to key government
posts — Robert McClelland to
labor, Jim Chabot to provincial
secretary and Bill Vander Zalm
to education. Its new ministers
installed, it has given one of
them, Vander Zalm, the most
notorious budget-slasher, the
task of stripping yet another $60
million from an already emas-
culated education budget.;

@ It has arranged meetings

See BENNETT page 8