City of Vancouver to lowest paid workers: Let them eat cuts!

The City of Vancouver council has reneged on a previous commitment to a living wage for its employees.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim making an announcement in March 2023. Credit: Ken Sim / X Credit: Ken Sim / X

Sometimes the old time-worn cliché’s convey hard truths. For example, the view that reality under advanced capitalism has outpaced  both irony and satire is sometimes conveyed in the phrases “no future for satire” and “You can’t make this stuff up. “  This view was famously adopted by the brilliant song writer and mathematician Tom Lehrer on the day the iconic war criminal and imperial consigliere Henry Kissinger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The songwriter announced his immediate retirement, the story goes, lamenting that nothing he could imagine would be as glow in the dark weird as a Peace Prize for Nixon’s  toadlike master of war.

Living in Vancouver under the current right wing ABC party’s hegemony in city government, I often think of Lehrer’s contention. Mayor Ken Sim and his minions regularly go beyond satire as they exert their best efforts to bring the city I love back to an imagined past in which the policeman is our friend and the big planning decisions belong properly in the hands of real estate developers. 

Recently, Vancouver government news broke that belongs squarely in the “you can’t make this up,” category. A decision made in a closed door in camera meeting of the council in January of this year, very soon after Sim’s Alphabet Gang took power, reverses a policy position adopted by the City of Vancouver in 2017 that required the city to pay all its direct employees and subcontracted workers at least the Family Living Wage as defined by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives  and the Living Wage for Families project currently operated by the VanCity Foundation. Annually, the Living Wage for Families project calculates a living wage for families figure, which represents the hourly wage needed for a two income couple with two kids to meet basic expenses such as food, clothing, rent, child care, transportation and minimal saving to cover illness or emergencies. Nearly 400 businesses, NGOs and governments across BC have made the living wage pledge.  

The City of Vancouver decision to back out of the city’s previous commitment will hit low wage employees of firms that provide food, cleaning etc. services to the city as contractors, but it will also have an impact on directly employed staff as well. In its febrile attempts to look like tough money managers, the ABC council majority began their cuts at the bottom of the city’s pay scale, hurting a group of workers that is primarily female and brown. When this secretive decision was finally brought to the attention of the public by researchers like the Service Employees International Union researcher Alicia Massie, the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano and the Tyee labour reporter Zak Vescera, it was greeted with outrage by many observers. The outrage level went up as the public learned that city council had OK’d a 7.3 per cent wage increase for themselves at the same time they moved to cut wages at the bottom of the city’s pay scale. 

Former city councillor and lifelong anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson told the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano in May that the decision was “disgusting.” While granting that the pay raise for her former colleagues was mandated by an external process, she argued that councillors could have and should have refused the increase.

“They could have voted to reduce it, which we voted to do during COVID,” told the Sun. (Swanson herself gave away a large slice of her city pay during her time on council.)

Alicia Massie, the union researcher whose freedom of information request first surfaced the January decision to cut the wages of Living Wage protected low-income employees and contractors, told me in early November that city bureaucrats refused to tell her how many workers would be left scraping by on lower wages after the city’s new policy was in place. I have to wonder what the bureaucrats don’t want us to know. Perhaps the highly paid top bureaucrats are emulating their political masters in their commitment to secrecy. The mayor launched a code of conduct complaint against One City councillor Christine Boyle for revealing her own vote in an in-camera meeting of council to the press. It cost Boyle $7,000 in legal fees to successfully defend herself against the complaint. 

Jean Swanson is right. This latest austerity move by Vancouver’s ABC  majority is disgusting. It also underscores how important it is that workers and their unions remain active in city politics to fight for worker interests. Without a vigorous labour response, the new wave of right-wing governance and service eroding austerity can overwhelm many of the gains we have made in the past centuries.

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Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver. He is a widely published free lance writer who covered health policy and labour beats for the Tyee on line for a dozen years,…
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