One day after the BC General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) and provincial government reached a tentative agreement to end their eight-week strike, members of the Professional Employees Association (PEA) backed off the picket lines on Monday.

“We are suspending picket lines to allow bargaining to resume after making progress today on a number of the union’s key priorities,” Melissa Moroz, executive director of the PEA and lead negotiator, said in a release.

The union and province have signed a return-to-work agreement, and the union has agreed not to strike for 30 days while negotiations resume. 

“We are actively looking to book dates with the employer to resume negotiations in the next couple of weeks,” Moroz told Capital Daily. 

Moroz said the province extended to PEA “the same general wage increases as well as other key proposals” agreed to by the BCGEU, encouraging the union representing more than 1,600 licensed professionals, including engineers, foresters, lawyers, veterinarians, and geoscientists, to remove its pickets and return to bargaining.

Moroz wouldn’t rule out a possible need for the same mediation that helped solve the BCGEU impasse because “many of the significant hurdles,” such as money, have been agreed upon, and she said she was optimistic that a settlement was in sight.

There are 2 areas of concern

Two main sticking points remained, she said: the classification of civil lawyers, who recently joined the union, and overtime pay for engineers, foresters, geoscientists, and agrologists providing emergency work.

Moroz said engineers rebuilding a highway after a flood and foresters assisting with fires, for example, sometimes go without extra, earned pay.

“They're working extraordinary hours and, over the weekend, sometimes leaving their families for weeks in order to help with the emergency,” she said.

“Right now, in some cases, they don't even know if they're going to get paid any extra money for performing that extra work.”

Sunday success

On Sunday morning, the BCGEU announced a tentative agreement, effectively ending a strike—the longest public service strike in BC history— that saw 25K of its 34K workers off the job.

“For eight weeks, they held the line—standing up for themselves, their families, and the public services that make life in BC possible,” said Paul Finch, the union president.

“This deal shows that when workers stand together, we can make real progress.”

The tentative agreement, reached on the eighth day of mediation with the government under mediators Vince Ready and Amanda Rogers, “makes significant progress on key issues such as wages, affordability, and respect for frontline workers,” the BCGEU said in a statement.

The proposed agreement

It’s a four-year proposal under which workers would receive a 3% wage hike along with additional pay adjustments, as well as non-monetary improvements and benefits, including: 

• Improved telework conditions and a modernized contract to reflect today’s workplace realities
• Stronger job protections, including a new process to review excluded positions 
• A faster grievance tribunal process to resolve disputes more efficiently
• Improved vision care and counselling benefits 
• A category of fully remote workers with unique agreement protections

Finch called the proposed agreement “a first step” toward closing the gap between public-sector pay and the rising cost of living.

“It helps ensure that experienced public service workers can afford to stay in their jobs and continue delivering the critical services British Columbians rely on every day,” said Finch, who is recommending that the union ratify it when it votes on the proposal within a week to 10 days.