Very good take BJ. There is no winning or losing as so many of you want to declare. And just so you're all clear, when the BC government was negotiating at the table, they are doing it on behalf of us - the residents of BC and the taxpayers. There is no side when look at it that way, so no winners or losers.
And here is an interesting read about our out of control Municipal salaries:
Don Cayo: Municipal labour settlements out of control; could the province do any better?
However contracts are settled, it needs to be done better then it is now
If you care about getting value for the money you shell out for important civic services — for water and sewer, parks and roads, garbage collection and much more — who should you trust to nail down the best deal on your behalf?
Is your best bet to stick with your municipal council — which, no matter where you live in B.C., has probably not set out any underlying principles on which to base its pay scales, is apt to change course radically thanks to elections every three years, may well be inexperienced in labour relations, is inclined to cave to pressure from voters to get a deal, and has a generally weak record of financial stewardship?
Or would you be more comfortable if the provincial government — which has the legal right, and often the political will, to bully the municipalities into doing what it wants — were to step in? This would mean, as you probably don’t need to be reminded, an enhanced role for the very folks who’ve been “managing” negotiations with the province’s teachers on our behalf.
So, to put it even more bluntly, who do you want looking out for your tax dollar — Tweedledumb or Tweedledumber?
These are the questions that sprang to mind as I perused the Ernst and Young report, compiled for the province and leaked to the media by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and as I read the very good summary of it that ran on page one of Tuesday’s Vancouver Sun.
Both the report and the story paint a picture of municipal salary increases that are — although they don’t use these words — running out of control. They’re rising far in excess of inflation and at double the rate of other public sector employees, whether they work directly for the government or for one of its provincial agencies.
The report speaks of large, sophisticated unions on one side of the negotiating table and, on the other, municipal representatives who are, at best, inadequately organized and, at worst, in over their heads. They lack the ultimate power the province has to legislate their employees back to work.
As well: “The services they provide are closer to the citizenry (e.g. garbage collection, recreation centres, etc.) and thus councils feel enormous pressure not to disrupt these services.”
The report’s conclusion — that the province step in, create a municipal compensation strategy similar to the one it has for its own employees, and then centralize the bargaining process — riled the Union of B.C. Municipalities, which is generally wary of provincial meddling and protective of its members’ turf.
The UBCM president, Rhona Martin of the Columbia-Shuswap Regional District, scored a telling point when, as reported by my colleagues Jeff Lee and Matthew Robinson, she noted that consolidation into a single bargaining process is what happened with teachers back in 1994.
“And look how that’s turned out,” she added
Quite aside from her point — and it’s a good one — it’s hard to see how small, rural districts like Martin’s and big cities like Vancouver or Surrey and all the varied places in between could all be served well by a centralized bargaining process and/or a single provincewide contract. Ditto for the booming Northeast, where costs and thus wages are likely to be high, and the many towns that rely on dwindling forestry jobs.
But it seems to me the province could still use its senior government status to play a useful role in, on one hand, moderating the fragmentation and excesses that are commonplace now and, on the other, leaving local communities with some autonomy to make their own deals with their workers.
It could be — but probably shouldn’t be — something as crude as a cap on allowable increases, along the lines of how back in 2003 the province capped the tax rates that could be imposed on companies that lease port property after several municipalities let their levies rise to unjustifiable heights.
Or it could be modelled on the provincial government’s guidelines for settlements with its own employees — limits on the cost of the total settlement, with the precise breakdown to be determined by bargaining.
Or it could be a more sophisticated system of setting a ceiling based on where pay rates for individual municipalities, or for groups of municipalities, are today, and how these wage levels compare with more-or-less similar jobs across the province.
The point is that whatever the system, it needs to be better than it is now. And the mayors and councils in scores of municipalities, despite having had years to demonstrate they can be counted on to do the job on behalf of their citizens, have instead demonstrated that they can’t. Or won’t — which amounts to pretty much the same thing.
