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Strike Actions Continue in Vancouver and Victoria Library Systems
Library Journal, 11/10/2007

After almost three months on strike, Vancouver Public Library (VPL) union members overwhelmingly voted Oct. 9 to reject a mediator’s recommendations. Some 78.1 percent turned down the offer to push some library workers up one pay grade on top of a regular increase. According to a statement on the CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) Local 391 bargaining blog, the mediator’s offer failed to address 55 percent of the union’s members, lower wage earners who didn’t receive any wage adjustments as part of the offer. Some 300 of VPL’s 775 staffers would have gotten an increase of four percent. The union has maintained that pay equity and improved rights for part-time and auxiliary workers are the key issues in the strike, which this recent offer didn’t address.

With the strike ongoing since July 26, the VPL remains closed, but staffers have been busy maintaining pickets at several branches, collecting funds for a hardship committee, making potluck meals, and garnering support from neighbors (discounted coffee for VPL staffers) and celebrities (journalist Naomi Klein) alike. Picketing has become quite organized; participants sign up for 20 hours a week, choosing library locations or other city sites in solidarity with other striking city workers.

The same day Vancouver librarians rejected the mediator’s offer, 100 library workers in nearby Victoria held their fourth strike action in a month to protest what they say is a decade-long delay by municipal officials to redress the lack of pay equity for library workers. On Oct. 9, the eight branches of the Greater Victoria Public Library were shut down for five hours as library workers attended a board meeting held at the Central Library. The first walkout came on September 7, after eight months of contract negotiations between city and library officials and CUPE Local 410, which represents 220 library workers, failed to produce an agreement. According to the union, there is a wage gap of 20 to 30 percent between equivalent jobs in the city and in the library, which largely affects women. Speaking for city and library officials, municipal negotiator Ron Brunsdon told the Victoria Times Colonist that the pay equity issue was resolved in 2005 with a 9.5 percent wage increase over the last decade. CUPE 410 president Ed Seedhouse told the board that the union will agree to third-party binding arbitration about pay equity, according to another article in same newspaper.