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Meth Labs Create Thousands Of New Jobs

By only

Friday April 8, 2005

There are no jobs in Vancouver. Sure, there are plenty of low-paying dives that will employ/enslave you, but unless you own a meth lab you won’t be able to build a career in this godless city. This hopeless reality hasn’t stopped the Premier from spending thousands of dollars in advertising over the past few months to promote British Columbia as the new mecca of business blowjobs.

Coupled with the BC Business Council’s ironic/insulting “you’re hired” advertising campaign, the BC Liberals are touting themselves as the holy saviours of the province’s job growth. However, there is little to no evidence the Liberals can take credit for the 205,600 jobs that have been created since December 2001. Economists resoundingly reserve that honour for the exploding Asian economy. But this hasn’t stopped Campbell from sticking his dick in the employment glory hole.

In a recent ad/interview in the Kitsilano View, Campbell unabashedly claims, “During the past three years we’ve created more jobs than any other province in Canada. Even more important, British Columbians who were forced [to] leave BC to find jobs and opportunities in Calgary, Toronto and the United States during the desolate years of the NDP, are coming home again.”

But Campbell and his bukkake loving Liberals have done nothing to ensure sustainable job growth for the province. The majority of the new jobs are in the construction industry, which are dependent on the mega-projects the government doles out—a trait the NDP is usually infamous for. At the same time, there are 10,000 fewer small business jobs since 2001, which are usually the heart of any city’s economic growth. The Liberals, like the NDP before them, have been unable/unwilling to diversify the province away from resource dependent industries, like forest and fisheries, thus keeping BC trapped in an eternal boom/bust cycle.

What makes Campbell’s dick waving even worse is that he has done everything in his power to destroy worker’s rights and protections in BC. Aside from ripping up labour contracts, changes to the Workers Compensation Board and the Labour Relations Code have made it easier for employers to avoid payments to injured workers, pay less overtime and interfere with union organizing. Now that 12-year-olds can work full time, British Columbia also has the lowest child labour standards in North America. But the cruellest legacy from the Liberal term is the “six bucks sucks” training wage. Intended to help young people get into the job market and fuck over workers coming off welfare, the introduction of a $6 an hour minimum wage for the first 500 hours of service is the most obvious sign that Campbell is trying to build the province on cheap labour.

“The incidents that we’re getting from employers is that it’s actually not used widely,” says Janice Mansfield, a manager at the Ministry of Skills Development and Labour. “It’s used in very specific incidences. It’s not even used universally by all employers in the restaurant industry.”

Mansfield may be right, but it’s impossible to know since the government hasn’t bothered to keep any statistics on the training wage. While fast-food hell holes like McDonald’s and Dairy Queen are quite open about how they use the wage to “motivate” their young workers, there is a serious concern that many employers are quietly using the rollback to exploit their employees. My first job after the training wage was introduced in November 2001 was with a coffee shop on Granville Street where I was illegally paid $7 an hour to receive demoralizing obscenities from my boss for not being cheerful enough. My next run-in with the new minimum wage was with a Granville billiards/bowling alley where I was paid an amazingly illegal $4 an hour to pick cigarette butts out of plant holders—even though smoking was technically prohibited from the premise.

Welcome to the new BC economy. Forget about bragging about having the highest minimum wage in the country, wages in BC are now growing less than inflation. If you’re looking for a real career in Vancouver, get yourself a good pair of kneepads and some Japanese porno videos. That’s what Gordon Campbell did. Look where it got him.