CUPE Local 410 Strike Blog

GVLRA representatives have been saying through various media outlets and personal communications that the jobs in the library aren’t comparable to ones at city hall. They are ignoring their own history.

Pay equity is “equal pay for work of equal value”, and that’s what we are asking for here. That’s what the parties agreed to achieve in 1992. This process is incomplete.

Pay Equity is a two step process:
1. All jobs are scored on a single plan designed to be gender neutral, so that all jobs with the same scores are
of equal value.
2. The salary rates are adjusted so that all jobs of equal value are paid equally.

Just doing the scoring process should be enough, but in our case a third step was added between the other two, so that we could be sure of which jobs actually were of equal value. That was the 2000 joint union/management study, which determined that the results in the Library and the City were very comparable.

Now if that study had shown that our jobs had been over-valued, then our salaries would have been adjusted downwards over time to be the same as those at the city. But as it showed the opposite, namely that our jobs had been undervalued, then our salaries need to be adjusted upwards to achieve pay equity.

The GVLRA and its chair Mayor Ted Daly are now claiming that the jobs cannot be compared, but you can never have pay equity without doing such a comparison. If the plan is not good enough to determine equal value between the Library and the City, then it was also not good enough to compare City Outside workers with City Inside workers. But it was good enough for that and that has been done, so city inside workers (mostly female) are paid comparably to city outside workers (mostly male).

The GVLRA and Ted Daly cannot change the rules because they don’t like the outcome.

Filed under: Pay Equity by carol
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An editorial appeared in the local weeklies of Black Press on February 20. Titled Lock out missing voice of local leadership, the editorial challenges politicians to take responsibility for resolving the labour dispute. Here is part of the editorial, with our italics added:

The essence of the disagreement has to do with the interpretation of one line in the 1992 contract between library workers and their employer. That line states that wages paid for library jobs will be based on comparisons to equivalent positions at the City of Victoria.

The union representing workers, CUPE Local 410, has done a good job of highlighting the inequity between wages paid for library staff and those paid municipal workers.

The group arguing for the employer says the union’s comparisons aren’t realistic. Making that claim on the board’s behalf is the Greater Victoria Labour Relations Association. It’s reason for being is to put some distance between municipalities and their employees when it comes to labour negotiations. Same (but different) when it comes to the library system.

Part of the GVRLA’s argument is that municipalities are not the employers of library workers. We beg to differ.

The library board consists of people from the community as well as representatives from municipalities that use the library’s services.

Without taking anything away from citizens on the board, it’s the municipalities that foot the bill. At some point their elected representatives are the ones who are directly accountable to taxpayers.

Up until now, the board has been notably quiet about its position on the disagreement with the library workers’ union.

We really haven’t heard much from the board or the GVRLA. In fact, the only person who has spoken on behalf of the board has been its chair, Christopher Graham.

We think it’s time for that to change.

It’s time for individual municipalities to speak up about what’s going on. The best way to do that is for the de facto spokesperson of each municipality – the mayor – to add some clarity to what’s going on. It’s not enough for the GVRLA to make vague threats about job security and branch viability if wages rise.

We think taxpayers deserve to know exactly how much the union’s demands will cost.

We’d like to see those numbers made public and became part of what should be a public debate. Doing so would infuse discussion with the political will that seems to be lacking from the current negotiations.

For the full editorial of February 20 and a complete record of other media coverage on the dispute since 2007, see our link to Media coverage - links.

Filed under: Media Coverage by carol
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A report from 2005 on the CUPE National Web site, titled “Read it and weep” observes that

“When a community loses its library, it loses a chunk of its soul. It’s knowing this that makes CUPE’s library workers show up at their jobs every day, in spite of the risks and frustrations.”

And that’s really what’s kept CUPE Local 410 Library workers going ever since September, going to work nearly every day, providing most of our services, withholding a few, in the hopes that we could bring our employers back to the bargaining table without punishing the people it’s really all about - Library users.

But it was in vain. Instead of negotiation the Library Board has chosen confrontation, and has taken the Public Library away from all the citizens we served in the Capital area. They ripped out a chunk of this city’s heart and soul to “save their assets”.

That sounds rather a lot like another phrase that begins with “cover their …”, doesn’t it?

Well there are other far more important assets than money, or even books, in the Library. The number one asset is their staff, and how do they protect that? By depriving us of our incomes! That’s very protective, isn’t it? Do you feel protected today?

Maybe they don’t understand what their real assets are.  Maybe they think that Library service really isn’t very important, or if it’s important at all, certainly not as important as money.

Or maybe they think that Library workers aren’t really very valuable and don’t deserve the same pay as other municipal workers. Maybe they think that we’re just a bunch of uppity women who are just working for pin money.

If they don’t think that way, they couldn’t be doing a much better job of making it look like they do.

Filed under: Libraries by admin
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