The BC General Employees Union has been on strike for close to 4 weeks now and it’s resulted in over 85 hundred public sector workers making up 19 picket lines across BC.
And while it’s been mentioned before, BCGEU President Paul Finch reiterated why this strike is happening;
“There’s many drivers of that. One of the main ones is that civil servants over the last three years of our contract fell behind inflation. But worse than that, and I think this is a better measure than inflation, the average wage in BC has been going up much higher than inflation. And so over a ten year period, we lost over 12 percent to the average wage in BC. Today, civil servants make 2.7 percent less than the average wage of British Columbians as a whole.”
While no part of the province can avoid the strike’s effects forever, Finch also went on specify how Northwestern BC was being affected by the strike;
“Right now in the northwest, we have people on strike predominantly in environment and finance and resource ministry approvals operations.”
Finch confirmed that the two sides were not at the negotiating table at the time and he wasn’t sure when that might change since another point of their job action is to try and get the government to negotiate with them;
“The fact that the price of wages across the whole province, especially in the private sector, have gone up dramatically and government has been slow to follow suit over the last decade. I think that we’re at an inflection point where it’s clear that this is no longer tenable. And that’s why we’re on strike for fair wages.”
Finch last stated that the BCGEU doesn’t think a new deal would have a major impact on BC’s deficit budget and that they strongly believe the government has the room to reach a fair deal with them.