quote:

---

Imagine getting a new job, only to discover that your co-worker, who has been with the employer for a while longer than you, is paid seven dollars an hour more than you to do the same task. Welcome to the world of two-tier wages, a surreal zone entered by a small but significant minority of Canada's unionized workers in the past two decades.

Now a contract won by a Teamster local in Richmond is being viewed as a possible first step toward eliminating two-tier agreements from B.C. labour's future, and the union that represents supermarket clerks across the province is gearing up for a struggle next spring that will try to do just that.

Teamster Local 213 signed a new contract with the Richmond Ikea on Sept. 9 that reverses a two-tier wage agreement a union spokeswoman said was "forced down our throats" in 2004.

The new agreement will run for six years, and by the end of that term, Teamster official Anita Dawson told The Tyee, wage gaps between Ikea veterans and 125 new workers hired under the 2004 contract (which in some cases were as wide as seven dollars an hour) will be closed.

The deal came at the end of a strike by the Ikea outlet's 300 employees that began on Aug. 20 this year.

Requests to Ikea management for comment on the new contract had not been answered by the time this story was filed.

Grocery workers emboldened

This news was welcome over at the headquarters of B.C.'s United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1518, where union leadership is anticipating tough negotiations next spring on contracts expiring then with the province's Safeway and Save-On-Foods/Overwaitea operations.

The contracts with the supermarket giants involve nearly 19,000 workers across the province in agreements that have imposed two-tier wage regimes on them since 1997, union sources told The Tyee.

The Ikea workers "won on this fight because they stuck to their guns. We hope to do the same next spring," UFCW communications representative Andy Newfeld told The Tyee, claiming that two-tier systems "are fundamentally unfair to workers" and "fly in the face of fundamental justice."

---

In many of those contracts the pension benefits the baby boomers will get are fuelled by compulsary donations from "part timers" making significantly less money than the union members who were employed at the introduction of two-tier. Like all these low end jobs the turn over is very high and in many of the pension plans the vesting provisions are at the max allowed meaning a whole lot of captured contributions from low wage earners being used to offset the Employer's obligation to provide a Defined Benefit pension.

My son as a student has a part time job at a union grocery store and he is looking for jobs at other non-union retail chains because they all pay better than the slave wages negotiated for the union's underclasses. And they don't have to send a "union" money for the privilage of being exploited.

quote:

---

Originally posted by robbie_dee:

The Tyee article also reported, somewhat to my surprise, that two-tiered contracts are actually a violation of the labour code in Quebec.

---

Yeah - since 1999. And guess who championed this cause and fought the loudest for it (outside of the labour movement and youth groups that is)?

quote:

---

Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
As well they should be. When faced with a conserted effort to destroy the power of unions, in the grocery industry in particular, the union members voted for,"I'm alright Jack."

---