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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 31, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Canada workers on the move

By G. Dunkel

GENERAL STRIKE PROJECTED IN ONTARIO

Some 400,000 government workers in Ontario face an extremely regressive and vicious attack on their union rights and living standards from the so-called Public Sector Transition Stability Act, Bill 136. Bill 136 is expected to become law in October or November of this year.

In a special convention held in the middle of July, the Canadian Union of Public Employees called for a mass agitation and education campaign leading up to a "provincial strike action," if that proves necessary.

Bill 136 will allow any public employer--a school district, hospital, city or town--to decide which union represents its employees. Any dispute will be submitted to a board chosen by the government. The board's decisions cannot be challenged in court by the unions involved.

Public-service workers who currently have the right to strike will lose it. Those who currently are not allowed to strike, like hospital workers, will lose the right to arbitrate their disputes.

The board will have the right to tear up existing labor contracts and impose settlements based on the employer's "ability to pay." Since many services provided by the province of Ontario have been delegated to much poorer political subdivisions, this will mean a drastic decrease in wages.

The campaign that the CUPE is projecting involves testifying before the provincial legislature in August, then a series of marches and days of protest in September and October, leading up to a province-wide general strike if that is necessary.

The Ontario Federation of Labor has called an emergency convention for July 27. It appears likely that other unions that represent public employees, plus unions like the Canadian Auto Workers, will join the campaign.

ALBERTA WORKERS SHUT DOWN PULP MILL

At the beginning of July, the pro vince of Alberta saw two sharp union struggles. Alberta is a prosperous, conservative province with a strong, militant union movement.

In Hinton, a small, extremely isolated city of 11,000 people in northwest Alberta, the Weldwood company rejected the union's demands to clean up asbestos in a 40-year-old pulp mill.

So the night of July 4, the union began the eight-to-12- hour process of shutting it down.

"The membership found the company wasn't willing to shut down the process and clean the building when we weren't in it. So that's when they took matters into their own hands," Glenn Taylor explained. Taylor is vice president of local 855 of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers.

Shutdowns are a big deal for a pulp mill. The CEP is on strike against another company right now and one of the main issues is the company's demand to go from 362 days of operation a year to 365.

When Weldwood took the union to court the next day, the union agreed to turn the mill back on and the company agreed to come up with a plan for removing the asbestos by July 9. Four members of the union will be on the committee drawing up the plan. No penalties were assessed for the shutdown.

The Alberta Labor Commission also agreed to monitor the removal to ensure it is conducted safely.

After the hearing, Taylor said: "We're absolutely vindicated about the actions taken Friday night. It's just a question of whether it will be followed through."

A spokeperson for Weldwood said the shutdown cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

MEAT PACKERS: 'WE ARE NOT MACHINES!'

Some 1,600 members of the Food and Commercial Workers union shut the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River, Alberta, down tight July 10. Mass picket lines in front of the gates kept Cargill from moving the beef it had stockpiled.

This plant is the biggest in all of Canada. Workers process 4,000 head of cattle a day. That's about 40 percent of the $1.1-billion worth of agricultural products generated in Alberta.

Strikers climbed on the big trailer trucks and forcibly explained to the drivers why it might be dangerous to cross the picket line.

According to a union spokesperson, about 80 percent of the members are recent immigrants to Canada. They are mainly from the Middle East, China and Ethiopia and their picket signs reflected their national origins.

But the messages on the signs--whatever script or language they were written in--were the same: "Where's the money?" and "We demand respect."

After a few days, Cargill hired scabs and got an injunction limiting massed picketing. Its hired security troops claimed the line was so intimidating it kept scabs from crossing.

Cargill complained to the cops that workers who crossed were threatened with death and that in one case a scab's home caught on fire. The union disclaimed all knowledge of such tactics.

The main issue in the strike appears to be respect. Mohammed Abamaecha, originally from Ethiopia, put it this way: "The company doesn't care about us since we are cheap labor. They don't care. This is slavery kind of work. We are not robots or machines."

STARBUCKS WORKERS WIN CONTRACT AND A RAISE

One hundred ten Starbucks workers in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia voted to accept a contract that their union, the Canadian Auto Workers, had negotiated July 15.

This is the first time that any of the approximately 19,000 Starbucks workers in North America won a union contract.

Starbucks immediately announced that it was raising the wages of all 1,700 of its non-unionized workers in British Columbia to match the $7.75 an hour won by the CAW.

Starbucks is an international corporation based in Seattle with about $650 million a year in sales.

The CAW also won improvements in scheduling and seniority, and strong language regulating harassment, although it didn't win paid sick leave.

The union spent over 10 months organizing Starbucks and hopes to use its victory there to organize other service workers. The business press in Canada treated the Starbucks signing as a major victory for the CAW.

While 32 percent of Canadian workers are unionized, less than 1 percent of service workers are.

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