John Padze decided to deliver his recyclables to city hall yesterday — along with a sign calling for companies contracted by the city to pay employees a fair wage.
Dave Eagles/KTW
Kamloops resident John Padze takes his protest to the steps of city hall on Wednesday (July 15).
The City of Kamloops isn’t picking up John Padze’s recycling these days.
So, yesterday morning, the North Shore resident decided to take his cans and cardboard and visit city hall.
“I need my recycling,” Padze said, sitting with his city-issued push cart on the steps leading to council chambers.
With him was a cardboard sign: “A civic worker will earn a working wage. A person working as a contractor should earn a wage above poverty.”
Recycling pickup has been on hold since the start of a strike at Emterra Environmental, which processes the city’s recycling, because the city doesn’t have anywhere to store collected materials.
With the labour dispute now in its fourth week, Padze is calling on the city to step in — and he’s not the only one.
“The real question is what’s the city going to do?” United Steelworkers local 1-417 president Marty Gibbons asked KTW.
While the union has signed a nondisclosure agreement with Emterra and expects to see its financial information this week, Gibbons said it does not have a meeting set with the company and is contemplating going to the Labour Relations board to secure a date.
Gibbons added, however, the union won’t back down from its strike unless Emterra offers to raise worker pay.
There are 10 unionized workers at Emterra’s Kamloops plant. Gibbons said most earn about $12 or less per hour.
“We’ve got a huge strike fund. We’re a huge, international union. They’re not going to bankrupt us,” Gibbons said.
“Our members are strong, our members are doing their duty. They’re receiving their strike pay, they’re getting donations from other unions in town. We’re making do and it’s not a short-term fight we’re prepared to take on.”
Both Gibbons and Padze suggest the city could find the cash to solve the dispute, but city CAO David Trawin said it’s not so simple.
“Even if we got the money and said. ‘Look Emterra, we’ll give you $10,000 more a month,’ there’s nothing legally we can do to make them pay that to their employees,” Trawin said. “They could say thank you and put it in their pocket and still be on strike.”
Mayor Peter Milobar said while the situation is inconvenient for the public, it’s inappropriate for the city to get involved.
“Emterra is a private company that has a legal contract with the union and it’s between them and their union to solve it,” he said.
“It’s a very complex legal situation for customers like ourselves to try to interject ourselves into the middle of.”
The city’s contract with Emterra expires at the end of the year and Trawin said there’s a good chance a tender will go out for the new contract in September.
For now, he said the city has gone over various options with its legal team and is sticking with the status quo.
But, if the strike drags on, Trawin believes the city will have to look at the fees residents are paying for collection they aren’t receiving.
“We’ve heard a few people saying we want our money back and things like that,” Trawin said. “For 63 cents a week, it’s not financially feasible for us to do that but, if it goes on for months, then council will have a look at that.”
Council can add living-wage rules to contracts
While the city says it can’t control what outside service providers pay their workers, there is a step it could take in future contract negotiations: a living-wage policy.
CAO David Trawin said the city does have the option to include living-wage requirements for contracted staff in tenders.
Though it’s not a step Kamloops has ever taken, the City of Vancouver recently passed a bill requiring all employees and contractors to earn a living wage.
Trawin said that move — coupled with an ongoing strike at recycling processor Emterra Environment, which has disrupted curbside recycling pickup in Kamloops — could give the issue more prominence here.
“Whether that happens in the future, whether that even happens with the new contract [for recycling processing] coming out in September, that’s something we’ll have to wait and see,” Trawin said.
Mayor Peter Milobar said his openness to living-wage policy would depend on what kind of contracts it was used, noting such a policy would come with a price tag.
“It’s not as simple as one would think to do it and, ultimately, it comes to the conversation around requests for proposals and trying to get the lowest price possible for city contracts,” he said. “Ultimately, it’ll push back to the taxpayers.”
According to Living Wage Canada, the living wage in Kamloops — the per hour wage needed to just get by for a family of four, with two parents working — was $18.34 last year.
— Andrea Klassen
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