Category Archives: United Steelworkers

Ottawa Turns Its Back on Steelworkers-Op-Ed

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Aug 23, 2013    http://www.thespec.com   https://i0.wp.com/www.thespec.com/Portals/9/Images/logo.png

U.S. Steel’s destructive agenda is tacitly condoned by Harper government

By Marty Warren, Ontario Director of the United Steelworkers

For the second time in three years, 1,000 families in Nanticoke and surrounding communities face an uncertain future, targeted again by a deliberate attack on working-class living standards achieved over generations of struggle in Canada.

U.S. Steel’s lockout of employees at the Lake Erie Works steel mill — now in its 17th week — reflects the impunity foreign multinationals enjoy to slash Canadian jobs and drive down wages, benefits and working conditions.

U.S. Steel, in particular, has ample reason to believe it has the tacit consent of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to run roughshod over Canadian working families.

In 2007, the Harper Conservatives approved U.S. Steel’s takeover of Canadian steelmaker Stelco. The deal included legally binding commitments from U.S. Steel to maintain production levels and a 3,100-strong workforce at former Stelco operations.

Time after time, the Harper Conservatives have demonstrated they stand with giant multinationals that abuse their dominant economic power.

U.S. Steel broke those legally binding commitments, with devastating results for working families and pensioners whose combined losses ran into tens of millions of dollars.

“(Their) working lives, retirement and income security have been seriously and adversely affected,” a Federal Court judge stated in 2011 after legal proceedings were launched against U.S. Steel.

The legal action was brought against U.S. Steel under terms of the Investment Canada Act, which dictates foreign takeovers must provide a “net benefit” to Canadians.

The government’s case against U.S. Steel included expert analysis that concluded the company knew full well the implications of its legal commitments. Even in the midst of the recession, fulfilling those promises “would not have threatened the financial viability” of the company, the analysis concluded.

However, rather than enforce the law and hold U.S. Steel accountable, the Harper government struck a secret deal that abruptly ended the court case. Promises of jobs and healthy production levels were abandoned. Workers, pensioners and communities devastated by U.S. Steel’s behaviour were denied their day in court.

With a nudge and a wink from our federal government, U.S. Steel was free to continue its onslaught against Canadian employees and pensioners.

U.S. Steel has now followed the same transparent, destructive pattern in three successive rounds of contract negotiations with former Stelco employees — twice at Lake Erie Works and once at Hamilton’s Hilton Works.

In each case, U.S. Steel has betrayed even the pretense of attempting to negotiate a fair deal for Canadian employees. The agenda has been to abuse the full force of its corporate power and resources to impose its will — under threat of arbitrary, lengthy shutdowns.

In each instance the workers refused to be provoked into a strike. To their credit, they proposed to keep operating their plants while pursuing a settlement through good-faith negotiations aided by government mediation.

U.S. Steel’s agenda dictated otherwise. It locked out Lake Erie Works employees for eight months in 2009-2010, then imposed an 11-month lockout in Hamilton in 2010-2011.

In April of this year, with carte blanche from the federal and Ontario governments to do as it pleases, U.S. Steel locked out Lake Erie Works employees for a second time. Four months later, the community’s largest employer remains shut down.

The locked-out employees, members of United Steelworkers Local 8782, remain committed to negotiating a fair collective agreement and are eager to get back to work.

They have received tremendous support within and outside their community, from like-minded Canadians who understand the need to resist a relentless and orchestrated assault on our middle class.

The workers, their families and supporters will continue to fight the good fight. However, it is beyond shameful that they don’t have their government on their side.

Time after time, the Harper Conservatives have demonstrated they stand with giant multinationals that abuse their dominant economic power to drive down our working and living standards and eliminate good jobs. It is part and parcel of the Conservatives’ low-wage economic strategy for our country.

Earlier this year, without meaningful public debate or consultation, the Harper government decided to arbitrarily amend the Investment Canada Act, folding the changes into its latest omnibus budget bill.

The Conservatives’ changes weaken the Act. They allow for more foreign takeovers to be rubber-stamped. Secret deals will remain the norm. Neither the government nor multinational corporations will be required to consult with, or be accountable to, the Canadian families and communities directly affected by foreign takeovers.

It has never been clearer that only a change in government can reverse this disgraceful trend.

Cheap labour and the lessons of the Plaza Hotel strike

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Robyn Benson By Robyn Benson on August 23, 2013   http://www.aec-cea.ca

 

plaza hotel strike.JPG

Who are those people pounding the pavement outside Toronto’s Plaza Hotel, whom the owner called “animals?” They are workers with little or no hope for the long-term, decently-paid jobs that many of us take for granted, living a precarious existence. If you want to know how many of them there are these days, take one Plaza Hotel and multiply by a very big number.

The low-wage workers at the Plaza are at least unionized. Largely due to their Steelworkers Union and to the Ontario Federation of Labour, the public is becoming more aware of the appalling working conditions there.

But this is just the tip of the cheap-labour iceberg.

I’ve posted before about the Temporary Foreign Workers program, a part of this new race to the bottom, in which the Harper government has been complicit. A victory or two have been won in that area, but there is much more to the problem than offshore workers entering Canada on a government program. In some ways, that was just a matter of domestic Canadian cheap labour being edged out of jobs by foreign cheaper labour.

Take the North American fast-food service industry, for example. It used to be that this was a good sector for young people to find a job for a while, and then move on. Now more adults than teens are asking if you want fries with that, and they’re in it for the long haul.

The new employees of this largely non-union sector are more experienced and better educated than formerly, but their wages and benefits don’t reflect that. Small wonder, as we have seen recently in Halifax with coffee-shop baristas, and in the US with employees of McDonald’s and other franchises, that these workers are beginning to look to unionization—and a substantial increase in the minimum wage—as a way of making their circumstances comparatively less precarious.

Would this make hamburgers, coffee and fried chicken too expensive? That’s always the scare-story put about by the anti-union types. But it’s not founded upon fact:

Several studies show that raising the minimum wage would have minimal effects on the industry as a whole. One letter signed by more than 100 economists and published by the University of Massachusetts said that raising the minimum wage to $10.50 would increase the price of a Big Mac by a nickel. Another study shows that doubling the salaries and benefits of all of McDonald’s employees would add 68 cents to each Big Mac.

Perhaps one of the more comical aspects of the corporate fightback was the spectacle of McDonald’s solemnly informing its low-wage employees how to budget. The bosses’ scheme works perfectly—if the minimum wage is doubled, and you can do without water, clothing, gas, heat and child care.

Are low wages the natural cost of working for a living wage in the service sector these days? Well, no:

Consider Costco and Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club, which compete fiercely on low-price merchandise. Among warehouse retailers, Costco…is number one, accounting for about 50% of the market. Sam’s Club…is number two, with about 40% of the market.

…A 2005 New York Times article by Steven Greenhouse reported that at $17 an hour, Costco’s average pay is 72% higher than Sam’s Club’s ($9.86 an hour).

On the benefits side, 82% of Costco employees have health-insurance coverage, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart.

…In return for its generous wages and benefits, Costco gets one of the most loyal and productive workforces in all of retailing, and, probably not coincidentally, the lowest shrinkage (employee theft) figures in the industry….Costco’s stable, productive workforce more than offsets its higher costs.

A cheap labour strategy doesn’t work. It costs just about everybody. Costco knows this from experience, and has resisted calls to lower its wages and benefits.

So the push-back against impoverishing workers is not only a union concern, although we can certainly play a lead role in it. But we in the labour movement can’t do that by focusing too narrowly. We need to be part of a wider movement to defend the right to a living, dignified wage and secure employment for everyone. After all, it’s our whole society that is at stake here—and surely that makes it everybody’s fight.