Posts from — March 2009

Whether the current economic turmoil is a recession or a full-blown depression, it is forcing a dramatic and permanent restructuring, not only of the BC workforce but also the province’s unions.
This may sound like good news to business, but it underlines a profound challenge to the province’s prospects for renewed prosperity.
Consider the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, apparently well-placed to ride out the storm, with its membership diversified in the forest sector, oil refining, telecommunications and the mass media.
In the last two years, CEP has seen it’s 15,000-strong BC section shrink by about one-third, with two pulp mills closed, eight saw mills shut down and two more pulp mills on indefinite shutdown at Elk Falls and Crofton.
Those losses effectively eliminated 1,000 pulp mill jobs through closure, another 1,000 where pulp mills are reducing production, and 600 to 700 sawmill jobs. Another 600 to 700 pulp workers are on indefinite layoff at Catalyst mills at Elk Falls and Crofton.
CEP’s refinery workers, a relatively small share of the BC membership, may be safe for now, but carbon taxes and the eventual exhaustion of natural gas reserves don’t offer much prospect for growth.
Telecommunications is now truly global. That Telus call centre worker may be in Burnaby, but could is equally likely to be sitting in Manila. Their wages, modest as they are, aren’t being spent at Metrotown.
Even the mass media are in crisis. CEP Local 2000, the union’s largest in the province, represents Canwest workers at Pacific Press and Global TV. Can both of Vancouver’s dailies and the large Global team survive the Canwest debt crisis and the challenge of the internet?
It’s little better for the United Steelworkers, who now represent the remaining members of the once-mighty IWA-Canada. Like CEP, Steel has seen its forest and manufacturing jobs vaporizing.
Even in retail, where the United Food and Commercial Workers boasts some of the best collective agreements in food sales in North America, average wages are low. Retailers are aggressively expanding their non-union and big box banners, reducing employment and wages. Membership is not growing.
Most of these jobs are never coming back. If capital investment ever does resume in the pulp sector, we’ll see highly automated plants, like those already in production elsewhere, that do the work of 1,200 BC workers with a crew of 70.
What kind of future does that offer BC’s hinterland communities?
These highly-paid, skilled workers earned the salaries that fuelled small business across the province. Their elimination signals an acceleration of the trend to a low-wage, low skill economy that produces great scenery but little else.
In a province with already-extreme income inequality and unacceptable levels of child poverty, that’s bad news.
These dramatic changes don’t mean the end of the labour movement. Public sector unions like CUPE, the BC Nurses’ Union and the BC Teachers’ Federation retain their bargaining table leverage.
But the private sector unions, including the beleaguered Building Trades, where temporary foreign workers have been thrown into the mix, have little to show for the boom years. They now face permanent changes to the industries that formed their base.
Those changes aren’t limited to unionized workers.
The latest BC job numbers show construction taking a beating, but serious losses as well in the professional, scientific and technical sectors, where 5,000 jobs were lost in February.
Never mind the union movement – history shows that workers generally get unions if they want them, even if it takes a long and difficult struggle.
But where are the new jobs coming from? The skilled, well-paid and stable jobs that build communities and a modern economy? Without them, BC’s downturn could last a very long time.
March 31- April 6, 2009

Ghost of the Interurban: creosoted ties on Cambie at 7th unearthed March 28 as crews finished repaving the street on top of the Canada Line.

The ghost of Vancouver’s earliest rapid transit project, the Interurban line that linked the downtown core to Broadway along Cambie, rose from the grave today as city crews laid down the new pavement on top of the Canada Line.

Excavation on the west side of Cambie between Broadway and 7th Ave. unearthed creosoted ties from the old Interurban alignment that somehow remained undisturbed throughout the Canada Line upheaval. According to Bruce Macdonald’s Vancouver, A Visual History, that line was built a century ago during the first decade of the 1900s.

Downtown Eastside residents gather around the table in the Oppenheimer Park field house to map the neighbourhood's assets: (left to right) Fred Popovich, Rocky D, Wendy Pedersen, Nick, Jean Swanson and Rudolf.

While dozens of Japantown Celebration-goers explored the historic sites around Oppenheimer Park this morning, Downtown Eastside residents were gathered around a table in the park’s field house working out the elements of a new community plan for the neighbourhood.

The mapping project, organized the Carnegie Community Action Project, is inviting residents to map the best places to get food, finding housing or find services as part of a community planning process built from the ground up. Organizer Wender Pedersen says a desire to see the share of low-income housing protected at about 70 percent of the total stock — the current level — is one emerging theme.

Ten mapping sessions have been completed so far. The results will be presented to the planning department as part of a community challenge to the city to hear residents’ wishes.

Word that Vancouver City Council might cut the budget for the city’s two 2010 live sites triggered a wave of e-mails to councillors from worried Yaletown residents and businesses.

They love the idea of two weeks of activity at David Lam Park, on one side of them, and Larwill Park, the parking lot next to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, on the other.

But council approved cuts to the two-site budget March 24  and left the door open for further reductions, including possible elimination of one site,  if reduced budget projections fail to pan out.

The next day this warning from the IOC: Vancouver is planning more downtown “activation” for the 17 days of the Games than any previous Olympic city,  summer or winter. “They’ve made the observation that we may not need as much as is being planned,” VANOC executive vice-president Dave Cobb told reporters.

Huge sections of the downtown peninsula are scheduled to be converted to free or limited access party areas, including the two city parks, a large Concord Pacific area between Science World and the Plaza of Nations, long stretches of Robson and Granville, and Robson Square. That’s not to mention the countless national “houses” for visiting teams and other Olympic-related installations.

It may not be sustainable.