FROM JACK IMUNRO’S SPEECH
TO REGIONAL CONVENTION.

Last Thursday, the Premier went on TV to
offer what the media has described as an
“olive branch”. Although Bill 3, and sixteen
other pieces of legislation were proclaimed
just 16 hours later, the Thursday evening
telecast has to be seen as the first indication
from Victoria of an understanding that in a
democracy, there is some limit to govern-
ment power, and that indication has to be
welcomed,

I think I can understand why the premier
went on TV. When people have something
important to be said, it’s sometimes frustrat-
ing that only brief quotes find their way into
the media.

We in Solidarity and the IWA who, I am
proud to say is very much a part of
Solidarity, often feel the same way. But we
can’t buy TV time with public funds, so
opportunities like this speech today repres-
ent our only chance to talk to the Premier
and to all his advisors at once, his cabinet
ministers, his staff and the Fraser Institute.
So here goes.

IWA MEMBERS KNOW “RESTRAINT”

I speak on behalf of the IWA and the
delegates at this convention in saying that
we understand, Mr. Premier, a hell of a lot

better than you and your government that ~

hard economic times require restraint.
Three-quarters or so of our members have
suffered lay-offs of two months or longer
over the past year and a half, and the rest
live with that as a daily possibility.

But we believe, Mr. Premier, that many of
the measures you tabled on July 7 have
nothing at all to do with restraint, and that
most of those that do, focus upon thewrong
areas and the wrong people.

IWA MEMBERS AFFECTED
BY HUMAN RIGHTS, RENTERS
LEGISLATION

Many thousands of our members belong
to visible minorities. Our industry, never
free from racial problems, is especially
vulnerable to that problem in hard economic
times. We believe that there has to be
effective enforcement of humand rights.
That the Commission or Council has to be
independent, and to be comprised of people
with a demonstrated commitment to human
rights, people who represent the vulnerable
groups. We also believe that the educational
and promotional work of the Human Rights
Commission was invaluable, thatit stood as
a sign that B.C. society would not tolerate
racism.

Many of our members are renters, some
having become so as a result of government
economic policies of the past few years.
They are entitled, Mr. Premier, to protection
from exorbitant rent increases and from
unjust eviction. And if a politician proposes
to do away with their protection from those
injustices they are entitled to know that in
time to do something about it — before an
election.

Mr, Premier, there are delegates in this
room whose parents died of the absence of
Medicare. They do not imagine that or any
other social program to be perfect, not to
need careful monitoring. They have not
written tracts on the subject, and it is
unlikely that many.speak or write to you
about it, but you should not underestimate
their commitment to and their investment
in these programs, or their determination to
defend them against your Bills. Measures of
which until July 7, they had not heard,
much less been consulted on.

There are many other programs which we
will defend. Our children need education,
some need special kinds of education. In a

world in which government policies can
throw our people out of work for years ata
time, some have been reduced to dependence
on your welfare programs. We will stand by
those brothers and sisters.

Mr. Premier, if every last one of your cost
saving measures is fully implemented,
about $15.30 per capita annually will be
saved. If that seems like a lot of money, it
should be put in perspective. The Provincial
debt, which has tripled under your adminis-
tration, now stands at $5,748 per capita. If
that debt was financed at 10%, the charges
for each of us would be $575 per year. So all
of your so-called “restraint” measures taken
together will save less than 4% of what each
of us has to pay for servicing of the debt that
you have compiled on our behalf since 1975.

So that’s what were are trying to get atMr.
Premier, when we say that this is not much
in the way of restraint, and it is imposed on
the wrong people.

You cut services and programs for low
income people, while left untouched are
showy and costly public works such as the
Stadium and the Northeast Coal Project.
Not to mention your $17 million advertising
budget and the $35 million “bail out” of your
friends at Whistler.

$17 MILLION FOR PROPAGANDA

Now you can argue if you like, that it is
more important for us to hear your $17
million propaganda program than it is to
provide help for battered children.

You can argue that it is more important
for us to have B.C. Hydro incur another
$1.14 billion of debt this year to construct
surplus hydro capacity, (that’s about $110
million or so in debt charges) than it is to
have, say, $50 million a year more health
services for seniors and $50 million worth of
education services for our children.

You can argue if you like that it is more
important for us to bail out Whistler than it
is to ensure human and renters’ and consu-
mers’ rights. What youcannot argueis that
those who object to the values behind those
choices are objecting to restraint.

Now a few words about labour law.

Just 16 hours or so after your TV appear-
ance, Mr. Premier you had Bill3 proclaimed.
Now I know that the current regulations
have some reference to seniority, and I know
that there is a Section in the new law that
permits negotiated exceptions.

But the law asit stands, Mr. Premier, is an
assault upon the principle of seniority, and
we have to have that fixed in the law, notin
the regulations, or in a provision for
exceptions.

Let me explain-to you about Seniority, Mr.
Premier, what I don’t have to explain to the
delegates here today. In the first place,
seniority is the provision in union contracts
that expresses the obligation that an
employer has to a long-service employee.

This is an industrial society in which,
people devote decades of their lives to
certain employers in certain industries. If
someone goes to work for a B.C. forest
industry company at age18 and works there
for 20 or 30 years, it is then pretty hard for
that person to go out and take up a different
career. he has given up a lot of other
opportunities to stay that long, to become
that skilled. Something is owed to him, and
we call that “seniority.”

There is an even more important thing
about seniority. It prevents employers from
picking and choosing when it comes time to
lay-off; prevents them, for example, from
getting rid of job stewards and from destroy-
ing the union.

There are delegates in this room, Mr.
Premier, whose fathers, mothers,.aunts or
uncles languished for years on black-lists,
victims of the unrestricted power of manage-
ment to hire and fire and lay-off. The
delegates in this room, and their friends and

relatives before them, saw an immense
injustice in that, and struggled for decades,
and in ways of which you have heard, to put
an end to it.

It was not just the exercise of that power,
often in arbitrary and even frivilous ways,
though that was bad enough. There are
people in this room who remember a major
forest company firing people for voting for
the CCF. : ;

But even worse than the factual firings,
Mr. Premier, was the constant threat, the
reign of terror, the sense that any resistance
against the most blatant injustice could be
met with a firing.

There are delegates in this room, Mr.
Premier, who remember the days in this
industry when employees with decades of
spotless service missed promotions because
somebody’s nephew applied for the job.
That is the human, the real context, in
which you propose by force of law, to
radically diminish seniority rights. We
know, Mr. Premier, that you consider your-
self, and those who make these decisions, to
be of goodwill, and that these things should
not therefore happen.

DEFEND SENIORITY

But abuses creep in, Mr. Premier, and
become systematic. And that leaves a popu-
lation determined never to rely on goodwill
for the preservation of fundamental rights.

We are not now asking you to agree with
these views. We ask only that you try to
understand the depths of emotion and
commitment associated with them. u

You have suggested that there are radical
differences between the interests of public
and private sector workers. Such sugges-
tions are not new in B.C. Your government
is not the first, B.C. employer to remind its
employees that others are worse off, and to
seek to‘exploit some division. The labour
movement, from its beginning, had to learn
to deal with that argument, Mr. Premier, for
its acceptance would bar any improvement
at any time. Testing our capacity to deal
with that argument is not @ wise course of
action, especially for a Premier.

All the delegates here, and every member
of the IWA, is painfully aware of the insecur-
ity of forest industry employment, and we
hope that your recently-expressed concern
for that will soon take more substantial
form.

But there is a vast difference between
insecurity caused by fluctuating markets
and insecurity caused by an employer’s
unrestricted power to discharge. ~

Our employers cannot use reduced
markets as an excuse to pick which of us to
lay off. We can be active in our union, wecan
in off hours say what we think about our
bosses, we can and do have large political
differences of opinion, and not worry about
being chosen on those grounds for firing.

But beyond that, Mr. Premier, our own
struggle for improved security of employ-
ment, especially our current one for a decent
contractor’s clause, is not assisted, but
damaged by other workers in B.C. losing
security. We have been around for too long,
engaged in too many struggles, to take any
comfort from the losses of other workers. We
know how quickly they become our losses,

There are delegates in this room who over
the past 40 years and more have partici-
pated in a dozen or more major struggles,
lost perhaps a year’s wages, given up
thousands and thousands of their hours to
the shaping of a union, of a labour move-
ment, of a set of limits to what the employer
can do.

Mr. Premier, people of wealth often speak
of their investments. Think of the invest-
ment that these people have made, in what
you now challenge.

SEE MUNRO, PAGE SEVEN

6/Lumber Worker/Winter,, 1983