CANADIAN LABOUR-MANITOBA:

PINE FALLS RALLIES BEHIND LOCKED OUT TEMBEC WORKERS:

The lockout at the Tembec plant in Pine Falls continues, but yesterday the residents of the town held a rally to show their support for the people affected. Here's a brief item from the Winnipeg Free Press about the rally.

Residents rally for locked-out workers:
The townspeople of Pine Falls showed up in full force on Friday to show solidarity for locked-out Tembec employees.

Organizers of a march in the one-industry town estimated 350 people came out to support the 230 pulp and paper workers.

"We had people in golf carts and wheelchairs, people from all walks of life. Everybody jumped on board when we put out the notices and went out for a walk," said Vicki Reid.

"If Tembec goes down, the town goes down."

The lockout came after workers overwhelmingly rejected a company proposal that union officials said called for wage and benefit concessions totalling 35 per cent.

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While the provincial Labour Minister has indeed appointed Winnipeg lawyer Michael Werier as a mediator the company's previous statements give no assurance that they intend to bargain seriously with the workers involved. The following article from the CBC gives a bit more detail about yesterday's solidarity rally. Generally speaking it is obvious that the vast majority of town residents have shown their support for the workers involved. No surprise there. Is this sufficient ? Of course not. The next rally should obviously take place in Winnipeg, in front of the Legislature. There should also be further effort in terms of a online campaign to pressure Tembec management to bargain in good faith.

Tembec, interestingly enough, was originally formed in 1973 via a sweetheart bailout deal of a mill in Témiscaming, Québec. It is presently headquartered in Montréal, and operates in France, Chile and the USA in addition to Canada. Despite much brouhaha about 'corporate responsibility' Tembec has shown little consideration for its workers over the years. See the Tembec Worker site for the story of one of it past actions in BC. I guess that it just goes to show that corporations that line up for government handouts will, in the end, behave just like any other corporation. Anyways, here's the story from the CBC.

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Residents walk with locked-out mill workers:
  Residents of the town of Pine Falls, Man., walked in solidarity Friday with 270 locked-out workers from the local paper mill, where the union says Tembec Inc. is pushing for a 35 per cent cut in wages and benefits.

Pine Falls is about 130 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.

The town put out a call to its citizens to support the workers, and the call was answered by hundreds of people, including elderly people in wheelchairs and a father pulling his young son in a wagon.

Clusters of people walked the 2.5-kilometre stretch of Main Street shoulder-to-shoulder with workers who have been on the picket line since Aug. 31.

Residents told CBC News the lockout doesn't just affect the employees. Several shop owners said their business is hurting and membership has dropped in local recreation programs.

Residents hope their show of solidarity will help end the lockout with the Montreal-based company and get the economy flowing once again.

On Thursday, the province appointed a mediator in an attempt to reach an agreement between the workers and management.

Manitoba Labour Minister Nancy Allan said Thursday that Michael Werier, a Winnipeg lawyer with experience in negotiation and arbitration, has been hired to try to resolve the nearly three-week-long lockout.

Werier has been asked to report on the progress of negotiations and settlement recommendations by Oct. 16.

Contract talks between the union and the company began Aug. 13, but the two sides have been unable to reach a collective agreement.

The company said Sept. 1 it needed an "immediate and significant reduction" in labour costs at the paper mill to keep it competitive in a radically changed market for newsprint.

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Tembec, however, is not the only forestry company that is either closing its doors or putting the squeeze on its workers, as the following item from the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada shows in terms of Abitibi Bowaters. Molly agrees with the urgency of the following call, but she disagrees with the proposed "solution" put forward by the CEP Union. As I have said before on this blog, the real long term solution is an expanded system of "community forests" and the cooperative processing plants that would go along with them. If government money is to be applied anywhere it should be to such a system rather than to private corporations. As noted above Tembec was the happy recipient of government largess at its founding, and the public value from that bailout has now been seen to be less than what might have been hoped for. As to Abitibi Bowater, well giving money to a local street gang would be a more rational move.

Given at least the medium term outlook for the Canadian lumber industry a community forest system that would perhaps be more geared to domestic consumption rather than export would indeed involve a certain amount of job loss amongst forestry workers. So, however, will the "accepted wisdom" of throwing more money at the forestry companies- assuming the USA allows such a thing under the Free Trade Agreement (an unlikely proposition). What the community/producer coop model of community forests would encourage, however, is a greater involvement of local workers and community members, an involvement that is far more likely to produce the magic "diversification" that conversation about this subject seems to eventually come down to. The CEP, like too much of Canadian labour, is mired in and tied to traditional solutions that have been shown over and over to be insufficient. It's time for a little imagination.

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MILL CLOSURES A DISASTER-CEP UNION:

OTTAWA -- AbitibiBowater’s closure announcements today at six Canadian mills “are disasters of historical proportions for communities that have been a mainstay of the Canadian forest industry,” said Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada.

The indefinite closures at three Canadian mills and paper machine closures at four other mills affect more than 1,500 CEP members in 11 CEP local unions.

Coles said that union members today are “angry with the company and cynical about their governments.”

“These closures were preventable,” he said. “The Canadian government had only to put in place a program of loan guarantees for forest companies forced into CCAA protection because of the credit crisis. But clearly, when it comes to our forest industry, nothing is too large to fail, and no economic disaster is too large for government to ignore.”

“The governments that have done nothing to prevent this, and that will do nothing today but offer meaningless platitudes about markets, have lost their moral right to govern,” said Coles.

The closures are also the “end game of AbitibiBowater’s corporate machinations and an attempt to build an empire based on debt,” said Coles. “This company exploited the forests to buy up productive companies, but failed to reinvest. Now workers and communities are paying the price.” (So do you throw more money at somebody who has already sharked you ?-Molly )

Coles said that the company will also use CCAA provisions to deny workers tens of thousands of dollars per person in severance pay that is owed and relegate them to the back of a line of creditors. “This is an ultimate humiliation and painful blow inflicted on our members because the Conservative government believes that bankers are more deserving than working Canadians.”(Uhh-Abitibi Bowater is not "bankrupt in total", merely certain mills. This says buckets about the laxity of the bankruptcy laws in this country- Molly )

“If this government has any decency it will follow the lead of Premier Williams in Newfoundland and pay the severance owing to these workers,” he said. (I'd also say apply the bill against corporate assets- Molly )

The union is demanding that federal-provincial task forces be established with union participation in each of the communities affected by the closures to ensure that the productive capacity of the closed mills is not destroyed and to look for new, responsible ownership. (Have I said the phrase "community forests" before on this blog- Molly )

“If given half a chance, Canadians will overcome the shock, anger and cynicism left behind by the AbitibiBowater announcements and struggle to rebuild the forest industry,” said Coles. “There is no alternative for Canada’s forest communities than the sustainable development and value added processing of our primary renewable natural resource.”

CANADIAN LABOUR-MANITOBA:

PINE FALLS LOCKOUT CONTINUES:

The lockout of about 300 employees on the part of Tembec in Pine Falls Manitoba has been going on since August 31 (see previous item on this blog). The demands of the company for wage and benefit concessions amounting to nearly 35% are, of course, outrageous, and since the dispute began management has basically been stonewalling and refusing any efforts on the part of the union to negotiate. The following item from the Winnipeg Free Press tells more about the present situation of the locked out workers and their community. It also gives news of other layoffs that are affecting the area.

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LAYOFFS, LOCKOUT BLOW TO EASTMAN REGION:

The loss of 42 more mining jobs near Lac du Bonnet is another body blow to a region already staggering from a two-week-old paper-plant lockout at Powerview-Pine Falls.

The latest round of cutbacks at the Tantalum Mining Corporation of Canada mine at Bernic Lake compounds the damage done when 38 other Tantalum Mine employees were laid off in April.

"It (the loss of 80 Tantalum jobs) is a huge blow," Harold Taylor, general manager of Eastman Regional Development Inc., said in an interview Monday, noting the mine is one of the area's biggest employers.

"The one hit, they can absorb, I would imagine. But a second one? No," he said. "That area doesn't have a lot of industrial jobs anyway, so to lose that diversity leaves the local economy weaker."

The layoffs, the latest of which took effect on Sept. 4, were ordered after adverse market conditions prompted Tanco to suspend the mining and production of both tantalum and spodumene concentrate at the Bernic Lake mine. The cutbacks leave only six underground workers at the mine, which is now producing only cesium.

Taylor said that part of the Eastman region was already hurting economically from the two-week old labour dispute at the Tembec paper-mill plant in nearby Powerview-Pine Falls.

Tembec, which is that town's largest employer, locked out nearly 300 unionized workers on Aug. 31 after they overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that union officials said called for wage and benefit concessions totalling about 35 per cent. There have been no contract talks held since then, and a spokesman for the workers' union -- local 303175 of the United Steelworkers -- said the union will likely decide today whether to ask Labour Minister Nancy Allan to appoint a mediator to try and break the stalemate.

John Valley, Tembec's executive vice-president of business development and corporate affairs, refused to comment Monday on whether the company would agree to the appointment of a mediator. He also declined to comment on the details of the company's demands, other than to say it needs to achieve immediate and significant reductions in its labour costs to improve the competitive position of the Powerview-Pine Falls plant. (It seems management is unlikely to say anything other than repeat its demands-Molly )

Meanwhile, the owners of two Powerview-Pine Falls businesses said Monday the Tembec lockout is taking a toll on many area businesses, including their own.

Ed Papineau, who co-owns Papineau Motors along with his brother, Ron, said their revenues are down about 20 per cent because of locked-out workers cancelling orders for things like new tires or non-essential repairs to their vehicles.

And Papineau fears it will get a lot worse if the dispute drags on for a long time -- a fear that is shared by Tonya Kemball, owner of the local Chicken Chef restaurant.

Although Kemball couldn't put a number on it, she said her restaurant has seen a significant decline in business volumes since the dispute began.

"Last week and this past weekend we really noticed it. It's just a scary situation all around."
Powerview-Pine Falls Mayor Ted Pichor said the impact on local businesses has been offset to some degree by the recent bout of warm weather, which has kept cottage owners coming to town to buy groceries and other supplies.

"But if it (the labour dispute) lasts a long time... it would definitely have an impact (on the town's economy)," the mayor said.

Kemball, whose husband, Daniel, works at the Tembec plant, said she remains hopeful the dispute won't drag on for too long. Taylor is also optimistic it will get resolved and the Tembec mill will also survive the current newsprint-industry crisis, which has seen the North American demand for newsprint plunge by 50 per cent since 2003.

But even if it does, Taylor said the latest woes at Tembec and Tantalum should serve as a wake-up call for local municipalities. He said they need to be a lot more proactive in trying to lure new industries to the area, which still hasn't recovered from the closure 11 years ago of the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. research facility in Pinawa.

"That created a huge hole, and that's still the case," he said.

A spokesperson for Tantalum's parent company, Boston-based Cabot Corporation, could not be reached Monday for comment. ( I guess he drinks in the same bar as Tembec management-Molly )
murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

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MOLLY NOTES:

This is your classic David and Goliath story. The workers involved are few in number, reside in an isolated rural community and are facing an international corporation with far more resources to play a waiting game than they have. Their union, the United Steelworkers surely has more than enough on its plate right now with major disputes in Ontario and Newfoundland, and they can hardly be faulted for not going "over the top" in support for these workers. The Tembec workers are also over a barrel in others ways. While small the area is an actual community where people have put down roots. It's not a "lumber camp", and the people involved have been raising families in the town and have a significant amount to lose, perhaps enough that they may eventually see no other way than to cave in to the company's greedy demands.

There is, however, an alternative. It would be up to the members of local 303175 to initiate it themselves as the union leadership is preoccupied by other matters. Very few people outside of their local area are fully aware of the situation, and solidarity rallies in nearby cities (Winnipeg and North West Ontario) would do a lot to bring the public over to their side, especially as such rallies would see the support of many community members who are not members of the local. It would do wonders to convince the provincial government to actually pressure Tembec to come to the bargaining table.

Beyond that, however, there is the larger question of the situation of these almost one-industry towns. The latter paragraphs of the above article illustrate the problem very well, and it is a problem that many small industrial communities are facing nationwide. It is important that an area's economy be diverse enough to withstand either the misfortunes or the simple greed of one corporate employer. The situation is not as dire as it may seem for towns whose basic industry is forestry. Throughout the world there is a movement for 'Community Forests', forests that are owned and managed by community co-ops. These outfits have the interests of local residents more in mind than some industrial dinosaur, and they draw on a pool of local talent, initiative, ideas, community spirit and creativity of the sort that makes schools of business look like kindergartens. They furthermore create an economy whereby the revenue generated stays in the community, and the plans for development are much more integrated with the communities needs-including the issue of sustainability.

These are not some pipe dream. There may be hundreds of these co-ops worldwide, and there are many Canadian examples as well-The Revelstoke Community Forest Co-op, The Whistler-Squamish-Lil'wat Community Forest, The Harrop-Proctor Community Forest, the Acadian Forest Families, to mention just a few. When the present situation at Tembec is resolved, one way or the other, citizens and workers should begin to look at alternatives to the corporate control that places them is such a position of helpless jeopardy. Community Forests are the alternative to corporate lumber giants.