B.C.’s five largest public-sector unions teaming up to aim for liveable wages

After the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of frontline workers, the biggest public-sector unions are working together to push for higher pay and better working conditions.

The “Union Unity,” made up of The BC Teachers Federation, BC General Employees Union, Hospital Employees Union, Health Sciences Association and CUPE BC are all in the midst of negotiations with the province and late last week published a joint ad in local newspapers.

These five unions include employees in health care, teachers, people employed by municipalities, health sciences, liquor store workers amid other frontline workers.

Teri Mooring, President of the BCTF, explains these sectors are falling behind in B.C. as they are paid less than other jurisdictions.

“We’re all living in a province with the highest cost of living. And we all have the expectation that this government will do right by their public sector workers,” she said. “This collaboration has been really important in terms of highlighting the importance of frontline workers.”

Each public sector is in different phases of their negotiations; however, Mooring emphasizes British Columbians witnessed how critical grocery store workers, teachers, health care workers, etc. were to the province. So she says it’s “important that kind of respect and appreciation shows up at the bargaining table. We just wanted to put that forward in terms of our commitment to getting a fair and reasonable collective agreement for our members.”

Only speaking for teachers and school staff, Mooring says the focus for the BCTF is to raise wages to make it more appealing for people to teach and mitigate the ongoing teacher and teacher assistant shortage.

“If you don’t get a wage increase … that keeps up with the cost of living, in effect you’re getting a rollback. And so this is something that’s been going on for a long time in education, where it’s been really challenging to achieve those types of salary increases that even brings us up to something fair, even middle of the pack, nationally.”

Mooring says the most vulnerable students will ultimately pay the price without addressing the staffing shortage.

“The students that need a little extra counselling, the student that needs a little extra support because they have diverse learning needs — those are the students that suffer the most when there’s a teacher shortage. That has an impact on students, that has an impact on families.”

For the first time in more than 30 years, in January, Canada’s annual pace of inflation topped five per cent.

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