Thank you.
With the obvious problems associated with this proposal, why would the employer insist on this type of approach of adding 200 people? We'd say that the BCMEA's solutions would conveniently achieve a goal the employer has had for a long time: to gain control of the dispatch system and to diminish seniority rights. It would seem that the employer is prepared to do anything to achieve this goal, even at the risk of perpetuating gender inequality on the waterfront.
So what are the answers? What does the ILWU propose to overcome the barriers that are keeping women from working on the waterfront and staying there once they join our workforce? Let me give you a sense of what the ILWU has been doing.
We are working actively with Susan and the B.C. Human Rights Coalition to address issues raised in a report commissioned by the largest ILWU local, Local 500 at the Port of Vancouver, to try to get to the bottom of gender discrimination on the waterfront. During the current round of bargaining, we've also tabled proposals to address the absence of maternity, child care, and eldercare benefits, and access to benefits for new workers.
There has been a public outcry, and justifiably so, about barriers that prevent women from working on the waterfront. These issues will be addressed much more quickly if we're allowed to bargain solutions at the negotiation table.
Concerning recruitment on a local-by-local basis, our workplaces are vastly different from one another; I already went through this. In recognition of these differences, we have proposed to collaborate with the BCMEA on a local-by-local basis to search for the best way to bring more people into the workplace and more women into the workplace.
For our part, we can see immediately recruiting at least as many women into the workplace as the BCMEA's proposal for 200. Our approach would respect the seniority rights of our current employees and the goal of fifty-fifty hiring. Unfortunately, the BCMEA's agenda is such that they rejected this approach out of hand.
On raising employment standards for women in the workforce, we also have put forward a proposal. Approximately 1,000 women are working in administrative jobs in the offices of the BCMEA's member companies, jobs that have low wages and few benefits. The ILWU has made it a priority to organize these women into the union membership in order to raise their wages and working conditions. We pledge to do that.
The union has also spent a vast sum of money in arbitration to try to protect the work of some our sisters out on the waterfront. Currently one of those cases has run the union a cost of almost $1 million. I'd just like to say that the employer has fought us at every turn on that arbitration to try to set that aside.
I'll give the last word to Sister Byers from the CLC.