Through the Public Sector Employers Council, the provincial government has imposed a two-year wage freeze on all 250,000 public sector employees. Those affected will see a roll-back in their real wages over the next two years, as inflation outpaces stagnant incomes.
In early April the IBEW Local 258 signed a rollover agreement with BC Hydro.
Local 258 is the latest union to either roll-over an existing agreement, or negotiate a "net-zero" renewal agreement with a public sector employer. A rollover means the existing collective agreement remains in force. All wages and benefits are in the deep freeze until 2012. Net-zero means that some actual bargaining took place between the parties, but with no overall cost to the employer. For example, the government might give a wage increase under "net-zero" negotiations but only if the cost could be funded through clawbacks in other parts of the collective agreement.
The government says MLA's are subject to a similar wage freeze for the next two years. This is a bogus comparison since those same MLA
's saw their salaries balloon by a heart-stopping 34 per cent in 2007, jumping from $76,100 to $101,859 overnight. After that massive handout, who wouldn't agree to a wage freeze.
But the bad news for the public, including pubic sector workers, just keeps coming. The HST is looming and there are recent hikes to ferry rates, camping fees, and BC Hydro just raised its rates by nine per cent. Local 258's membership is behind a hydro rate increase if the money were earmarked for infrastructure, the creation of home-grown, green technologies, or to improve the quality of service to rate payers. But it's not. Nor will it be used to off-set the impact of inflation on workers' wages.
The increase is undoubtedly destined for the public treasury. Over the years, billions of dollars from BC Hydro and ICBC are quietly siphoned off to the public purse. These crown corporations are supposed to operate at arm's length from the government, but in practice these entities are annually required to cut the government a whopping 50 per cent dividend from their net profits. BC Hydro and ICBC are effectively large cookie jars that are regularly hijacked to bolster sagging government revenues.
In reality the rate hike at BC Hydro will just become a transfer payment from BC Hydro to the public treasury, and it is from that purse that those lucrative MLA pay increases will be paid. Moreover, the recent increase in the number of MLA's (79 to 87) means their overall base salary cost grew from $6 million in 2007 to $8.9 million in 2009.
That's an overall base salary increase of 48 per cent.
Whenever Finance Minister Colin Hansen speaks, all I can hear is self-serving, self-preserving, double talk. There is no integrity.
Doug McKay, business manager,
Ed McEwen,
IBEW Local 258
Prince George
