The Chilliwack
Progress Thursday
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School zone speed limits are now in effect.
Forest songs return to Island 22.
16 teams in Chilliwack for the BCHL showcase.
Y O U R C O M M U N I T Y N E W S PA P E R • F O U N D E D I N 1 8 9 1 • W W W. T H E P R O G R E S S . C O M • T H U R S D AY, S E P T E M B E R 6 , 2 0 1 2
300 Chilliwack jobs ‘a huge deal’ says mayor Robert Freeman The Progress
Three hundred jobs are opening up this week at the Stream contact centre in Chilliwack - jobs that can lead to computer-related careers around the world. “It’s the kind of opportunity you get when you join a company like Stream, that’s truly a global opportunity,” said Mike Robinson, Stream’s site director in Chilliwack. Applications for the 300 jobs were being accepted at a two-day job fair Wednesday and Thursday, but more hiring will be done over the next few months. In addition to entry-level jobs providing support for a new Stream client, there will also be positions opening for team managers and trainers. Robinson said he couldn’t disclose the name of the new client, but the new employees will be answering calls for support from customers “anywhere in North America” who have purchased the client’s “cool new toys.” There is a paid three-week paid training period for the new employees. Customer-service experience, in the retail or food industry, along with some basic computer know-how are the core skills the company is looking for in new employees. Robinson said the company promotes employees “from within at every possible opportunity” and some go on to management positions. One Chilliwack employee is now the company’s resource planner for all of North America, he said. Continued: STREAM/ p6
Jessicalynn Bozek, customer support professional at Stream, leads John Jansen (left) and MP Mark Strahl on a tour of the building on Wednesday afternoon. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Employees picket outside the Service BC office on Wednesday morning. The BCGEU was on a one-day strike that day providing essential services only. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
BCGEU strike not likely the last Tom Fletcher Black Press
Provincial government employees staged their largest one-day strike so far Wednesday to press for a bigger wage increase, with two thirds of the workforce off the job at ministry offices, liquor stores and ICBC offices province-wide. In Chilliwack, workers were off the job at the Service BC office on Yale Road, as well as local government liquor stores and other government locations. Both the government and the B.C. Government and Services Employees’ Union
remained unwilling to budge from their positions after negotiations broke down over wage increases this spring. The union executive is meeting next week to consider further strike action this fall. Two earlier one-day strikes targeted liquor warehouses and selected resource ministry offices in the B.C. Interior. Government negotiators offered raises of two and 1.5 per cent for the next two years, then withdrew the offer after the union staged the first strike. BCGEU chief negotiator David Vipond said Wednesday the wage offer has been tabled and withdrawn three times since talks began early this
$1.25 1-12T CS17
year, a tactic he called “peeka-boo bargaining.” And after three years without a wage increase, he said the union is sticking to its demand for 3.5 per cent in the first year and a cost-of-living raise of about 2.5 per cent in year two. “They want us to reduce our real income over this contract, and we’ve already taken a fiveper-cent hit,” Vipond said in an interview. “So to try and chisel us again with a skinny deal doesn’t make sense to us. We want to at least keep up with inflation and gain a little of what we have lost.” Premier Christy Clark unveiled her new cabinet lineup in Victoria Wednesday as
BCGEU pickets circled government offices downtown. Both Clark and Mike de Jong, the new finance minister, said they have no intention of increasing the burden on taxpayers to provide bigger raises to provincial workers. “The government’s position on this hasn’t changed,” Clark said. “I am not going back to taxpayers for more money in order to give government workers a raise. We are in very tough economic times and we have to balance our budget.” The government estimates that the wage offer adds up to $1,700 more over two years for a BCGEU employee making $48,000 a year.