Talks between the B.C. Government Employees Union and the province have collapsed again, according to the BCGEU.<\/p>\n
For the first time in two months, both sides met Monday morning to end job action that forced the closure of dozens of B.C. liquor stores and government offices.<\/p>\n
In a statement, BCGEU president Paul Finch said, \u201cWe came to the table ready to negotiate but the government presented an offer that was barely different from their last one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finch says the province came to the table offering a wage increase of just two per cent a year over two years, totalling four per cent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no point in calling us back to the table if you\u2019re not going to present something materially different. We know where the parties are at. This was totally unacceptable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Finch says the union will \u201cescalate sharply\u201d its job action after the government showed \u201cdisrespect\u201d by presenting an offer that was little changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t just call people to the table to say, Oh well, we\u2019re negotiating, that\u2019s not negotiations. The public are fed up of this. The public are fed up with governments in action with their failure to bargain with their failure to come to the table with a reasonable offer that our Members will support,\u201d Finch explained.<\/p>\n
The union has asked for wage increases totalling 8.25 per cent over two years, while the government has said it was looking for a fair deal for both taxpayers and its workers.<\/p>\n
The talks had resumed today after four weeks of job action, but pickets remain up, including around about a third of provincial liquor stores, at liquor and cannabis distribution warehouses and at government offices around the province.<\/p>\n
The union says about 15,000 of its 34,000 members involved in the contract are conducting some form of job action, from an overtime ban to picketing.<\/p>\n
With files from The Canadian Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Talks between the B.C. Government Employees Union and the province have collapsed again, according to the BCGEU. For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-179517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}