Go North, Young Worker!

by Doug Collins and Gloria Hubacker

The Free Press

illustration by Jim Gibbs

If you worked as a school bus driver for Laidlaw in British Columbia, you would have wages equivalent to about US$13 an hour and medical, dental, and life insurance benefits, regardless of how many hours you drove. If contract negotiations broke down, provincial regulations would prohibit replacement workers while you were out on strike.

If on the other hand you drove a school bus for Laidlaw in Seattle, you would start at US$8.25 an hour (and work your way to a max of $13.25), and get medical and dental benefits only if you worked 60 hours a month. Because summer hours are fewer, many of the drivers are effectively cut off from insurance coverage for months unless they self-pay. If contract negotiations broke down, as they did earlier this year, and you went out on strike, you could be replaced permanently (see "Laidlaw to Seattle School Bus-Drivers..."). Good-bye job, and maybe good-bye union!

Same company, different countries. There are indeed more differences with our northern neighbor than kilometer-per-hour signs and portraits of the Queen. Conditions for bus drivers, nurses and others in B.C. compare in most cases favorably to conditions in Washington. And even in the case of construction workers, beset by rabid union-busting in B.C., unions are still active in pushing for more innovative approaches to job security.

Much of this worker-friendly climate is due to the socialist (it's not a dirty word north of Bellingham) provincial government in power since 1991 in B.C., led by the New Democratic Party, a coalition of laborites, environmentalists, and other left groups. It's a wonder that George Bush didn't send in the troops!

The cornerstone of Canadian socialism is, of course, the Medical Services Plan, or MSP. It varies in structure from province to province. In B.C., the insurance is charged on a sliding scale, depending on income, but most employees are covered by their employers. As in all of Canada, MSP covers all charges: You won't be left recuperating with a $5,000 hospital debt for services that private U.S. insurance wouldn't cover.

Furthermore, no Canadian resident can be denied coverage due to pre-existing health conditions. And there are no private health insurers: the government is the "single payer." This eliminates the waste created in the US by numerous insurance company executives all performing the same tasks, in essence a huge private bureaucracy.

The actual unsubsidized cost of MSP is CAN$64 a month per person, about the cost of bare-bones Blue Cross insurance in the States, but covering a whole lot more. The crowning jewel is that Canadians have a longer life expectancy than Americans.

More recent legislation in B.C. has helped the labor movement rebound. The first was the restoration of card checks, or the ability of a union to form by a simple one-time collection of signed cards from a majority of workers. Under the right-wing Social Credit Party, which led the province during most of the three decades prior to 1991, an additional election was required, which gave the employer a between-votes window of opportunity to squelch pro-union voices, as in the U.S.

There is now also an anti-scab law in B.C., which forbids the hiring of replacement workers during a strike. Currently, B.C., Ontario, and Quebec are the only provinces with such a law.

The result of this legislation is a unionization rate of 38 percent of all workers in B.C. In comparison, only 23 percent of working Washingtonians are currently unionized.

Increased union activism has resulted in solid gains for various trades. Already some affiliates of the B.C. Federation of Labor have negotiated 35 and 36 hour work weeks, at a time when the U.S. Congress is considering eliminating the 40-hour work week and overtime pay. Minimum wage in B.C. is now CAN$7 an hour, significantly higher than Washington's. Following are some other gains for the nursing and construction trades.

THE CAREGIVERS
Ivory Warner, president of the B.C. Nurses Union, says the best advantage of being a nurse in Canada is that "we don't worry about turning patients away, as often happens in U.S. hospitals. Everyone is insured and the charges are simply sent to the medical fund."

On the dark side, nurses in Canada are currently under cost-cutting pressures similar to those in the U.S. Hospitals are downsizing staff. In the U.S. it's due to the spiraling costs of healthcare and insurance; in Canada it's due to governmental budget cuts, since most nurses are salaried directly or indirectly by public funds.

Despite the cuts, one thing cinches a humane and practical deal for B.C. nurses : the Employment Security Agreement (ESA) negotiated with the province in 1993, which guarantees that nurses will not be laid off. When health care officials announced downsizing in 1992, Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver and roughly 600 nurses were under the axe. This galvanized nursing unions, and the provincial government saw the value of keeping labor peace.

The ESA, in effect till March 1996, provides that nurses who lose jobs due to downsizing must be placed in another health care job within 10 percent of their former salary, or else retrained while still receiving their salary. Downsizing is achieved by natural attrition, such as retirement, and by a reduction of full-time hours to 36 hours per week.

Since the ESA also helps to smoothly shift nurses from expensive critical care facilities to growing community nursing positions, which emphasize cheaper preventive care, total health care costs in the province have been drastically cut without putting nurses on the street.

"It's a model of cooperation between labor, business, and government," says Warner. This contrasts with the province of Alberta, which has privatized its hospitals. Costs there were simply but savagely cut by forcing some 1,500 nurses onto the unemployment rolls in recent years. In the Seattle area alone at least 500 nurses have gotten the boot in the past two years.

Because most nurses are publicly funded in B.C., they have more leverage than nurses in your typical private American hospitals. (After all, if you're a government worker, your bosses are the politicians, over whom you have some amount of electoral control.)

One example: When municipal nurses in the Vancouver area went on a 54-day strike during mid 1994, they occupied city halls. Their reward was a hefty raise. Now they are paid on the same scale as nurses working for the province.

One recent bane of the nurses in B.C. has been Chilliwack General Hospital, about 100 km west of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley. The hospital introduced Patient Focused Care (PFC) in 1993, an invention of American management consultants who have promised to cut costs and improve patient care by cross-training medical personnel. In other words, nurses must sometimes scrub toilets, and housekeepers are now expected to bathe and transport patients. The Trade Union Research Bureau in B.C. took a survey of Chilliwack workers and reported that 89 percent of the staff think that PFC means more stress on the job, and 64 percent say that they would not want their families or friends cared for in a PFC hospital.

In California, where PFC has been instituted widely, the California Nurses Association terms PFC as "how to design your own pinkslip." Union activists cite many examples of PFC hospitals replacing skilled nurses with more generic, and lower paid, unlicensed personnel.

Although PFC has not taken firm root in the Seattle area, most hospitals here have increased the use of less-skilled "assistive personnel" (see "Condition Critical" by Tracy DeCroce in the Washington Free Press, Oct. 1994).

THE HARD HATS
Hammers have not been hanging high in B.C. lately. More construction unions were busted in the 1980s than pimples on a chip-chomping teenager's face. According to figures from the B.C. Federation of Labor, construction workers prior to the late 1970s were typically 80 to 90 percent unionized. Now it is around 10 percent. Legislation by the right-wing Social Credit Party allowed B.C. companies to double breast, or open a subsidiary with a non-union staff for the purpose of busting a union. Once the non-union subsidiary was off and running, wham! The unionized workers were all laid-off.

This situation has not been completely reversed. Mary Rowles, research director in the B.C. Federation of Labor notes that double breasting "has been a huge issue. We still don't have a bid process for public construction projects like in Oregon." In Oregon, if a company has a track record of labor violations, construction code violations, or cost overruns, it can be disqualified from bidding, which encourages companies to stay on the up-and-up.

"In B.C. now you find many small construction companies hiring inexperienced help. The quality of construction is often shoddy . . . and organizing the workers is like trying to hit a moving target," laments Rowles.

One sign of a rebound is Greystone Properties Ltd (formerly the Vancouver Land Corporation), the largest construction company in Western Canada, mostly financed by union pension funds. The company's goal has been to make money for the pension funds through ethical real estate development.

In a typical scheme, pension funds are invested for maximum profit in international stock speculation, often in anti-labor countries or companies. Through Greystone, pension money is kept in B.C. and invested in construction and housing, which creates union construction jobs at home. The profit is not as high as those of typical investment schemes, but a return is made for the pension funds.

"We're trying to break the cycle of this fiscal roulette that money managers and financiers keep playing with capital, where its ultimate goal is just seek a return and not seek productive things for the economy or to create jobs," remarks Ken Georgetti in the Vancouver magazine The Georgia Straight (Nov. 25. 1994). Georgetti is president of the B.C. Federation of Labour and a director of Greystone.

This "pension fund socialism" was pioneered in highly unionized Scandinavia, and has been promulgated in North America by the California business professor and author Peter Drucker. Drucker asserts that even Karl Marx would be happy with these schemes since, in effect, workers own the means of production through their pension funds.

Despite statements of ethical purpose, some of the developments proposed by Greystone have come under ethical question. Georgetti was, for instance, coordinating with an American casino developer to build a Las Vegas style casino in Vancouver, an idea which was finally nixed by B.C. premier Mike Harcourt. Others fear the risk to pension funds when labor leaders step in as money managers. At least two unions that have invested pension funds in Greystone are having some trouble staying solvent, although this may be due more to employment declines in these trades, which means loss of dues to the unions, than to the underperformance of the pension fund.

THE RED ENGINE THAT COULD
The Canadian flag is sometimes red for a reason: The nation has an off-and-on tradition of left provincial governments with strong worker and farmer support. A viable Labor Party is only now beginning in the U.S. (see "Seattle Activists Kick Off..."). The current Canadian left is the New Democratic Party (NDP), born in the early sixties as the result of a recruitment drive by an older prairie-based socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which was declining in popularity.

The NDP scored its first big victory when it won control of Saskatchewan in 1964. Since then, it has at various times held the reigns in Manitoba,Yukon, Ontario, and British Columbia. Ron Stipp, a spokesperson for the B.C.office of the NDP calls it a "party of the center-left, similar to your Rainbow Coalition."

The largest single partner in the party is labor, which has special representation rights at party conventions. The NDP also attracts support from environmental and civil rights groups, which allows it to round out its support to victorious percentages.

"We have a natural base of about 30 percent of the voters," notes Stipp, "but we need to appeal to about 41 percent of the voters to win." Canadian provincial elections are won by plurality, not by majority, so the party which wins the most seats in the legislative assembly is able to appoint the premier, who is similar to a U.S. governor (although generally wielding more power because of the decentralized Canadian system).

Having the NDP in power in B.C. is crucial for labor. The other two major parties in B.C., the Liberal Party and the Reform Party, have both vowed to gut the current anti-scab law. Ivory Warner of the B.C. Nurses Union comments that "If we had had any other party in power, we wouldn't have gotten the Employment Security Agreement."

So why do Canadians have a stronger left arm than Americans? One reason is that campaign spending is small there. With only a 28-day period in which campaign advertising is allowed, candidates simply don't have time to spend as much as U.S. counterparts. Furthermore, Canada allows outright caps on spending. A candidate for the Legislative Assembly in B.C. may now spend a maximum of about US$60,000 on a race, a pauperous amount for Washington candidates for state senate, who average more than $90,000 per campaign, according to the Public Disclosure Commission. (Spending caps were ruled illegal in the US under the Supreme Court decision Buckley vs Valeo in 1976.) The NDP further hampers its own fundraising ability by refusing all corporate contributions, which probably gets the party more than a few extra votes at poll time.

Perhaps because money is less a factor than in the U.S., Canadians are more interested in voting. Federal elections attract 73 percent voter turnout, according to the Canada Year Book, as opposed to about 50 percent in recent U.S. presidential races.

Since the wealthy are more likely to vote, higher Canadian turnouts generally mean greater opportunity for left parties.

Despite a firm niche in Canadian politics, the NDP is now suffering from the Bill Clinton syndrome. It's not able to quite please many of its presumed constituents, and there have been scandal allegations (a la Whitewater) against the NDP premier in B.C.

Many on the left view the NDP as too conciliatory to business interests. In fact, some NDP actions are surprisingly unleft. In Saskatchewan, the NDP removed rent controls and reversed its opposition to uranium mining. In Ontario the NDP government endorsed workfare and reneged on public auto insurance (it also just lost the last election).

B.C. premier Mike Harcourt has done nothing more egregious than losing his soul according to Rick Salutin, a writer for the Canadian magazine Saturday Night (May 1993): "Back in the sixties and seventies as a city politician [Harcourt] led protests against developers or highway projects and 'We stopped them cold!' But look, Premier: what a difference in language when you talk about those days. 'We'-collective. 'Stopped them'-active, confrontational. 'Cold'-vivid and strong. Compare your language now: 'fiscally prudent', 'getting our financial house in order'. . ."

NDP spokesperson Stipp seems to concur but doesn't find the difference negative: "We're more of a mainstream party now . . . I guess that's what happens when the reality of power rears its head."

Another ugly head has also reared up in B.C. In March of this year, the provincial Conflict of Interest Commission opened an investigation of Harcourt's dealings with an advertising company owned by a long-time supporter. Harcourt's government had awarded some CAN$5 million in contracts to the company, though Harcourt denied any role in the decisions. Still it is nothing compared to malfeasance apparent on the part of the Social Credit Party four years previous, in which former premier William Vander Zalm was forced to resign after a number of blatant violations, such as personally accepting $20,000 in U.S. funds from a Taiwanese businessman in a late night hotel meeting.

But even before this year's investigations, the NDP's popular support had been sliding. In February, a Marktrend poll gave the party 25 percent voter support, compared with 34 percent each for the opposition Liberal and Reform parties. Recent poll figures obtained from the NDP show a rally to about 31 percent popularity, but the Liberals, comparable in ideology to U.S. Democrats, still have a lead at 39 percent. The Reform Party, similar to U.S. Republicans and with the same Christian Right overtones, has plummeted to 20 percent.

Elections will be held in BC next year. If the NDP has lost its ability to tap into popular discontent against big-business-as-usual, and has nothing more to brag about than fiscal prudency, it will probably lose power. So if you're planning on going on strike in B.C., you'd be safer to do it soon.


Please see the chart that accompanies this article.

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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