Strike | Welcome to the CPC Ontario

Archive for Strike

Restore Free Collective Bargaining – Repeal Bill 115

December 18, 2012 DM Bill 115, Education, Labour movement, Liberal Party of Ontario, Municipal politics, Ontario Common Front, Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, Strike, Wage Freeze No comments

The CPC (Ontario) today gave its full support to striking teachers who have been forced to take action because of the provincial government’s illegal attack on the free collective bargaining rights of teachers and educational workers.

If this attack is not defeated, it’s clear the government will extend Bill 115 to cover all public sector workers and contracts in Ontario, eliminating free collective bargaining and the right to strike for more than 1 million unionized workers in Ontario. Read more

U.S. Steel brings pension battle to Hamilton

August 23, 2011 admin Front, Hamilton, Pensions, Strike, Sudbury No comments

By Bob Mann

People’s Voice, Sept. 2010

Just over a year ago, U.S. Steel locked out employees at its Nanticoke Plant. On the evening of August 2, 2009, security escorted 150 members of United Steelworkers 8782 out of the Lake Eire Works to join approximately 800 workers who had already been laid off that spring. For nine months the union held out against the company’s demands, but after a long winter a deal was ratified which deprived new hires of access to a Defined Benefit Pension plan.

Emboldened by this success and hoping that the financial crisis will frighten workers into submission, the multinational giant is taking aim at USW Local 1005, which represents employees at its Hamilton Works. The corporation wants to reduce vacation time, weaken cost of living allowances and eliminate the indexing formula that protects pensioners from inflation. But, while each of these items constitutes a major concession, the real aim of U.S. Steel is to impose a Defined Contribution Pension plan on incoming employees.

There is a war against retirement today in Canada. No matter what our age or sector, we all need to understand the difference between Defined Benefit Pensions (DBPs) and Defined Contribution Pensions (DCPs). When corporations and governments push to replace defined benefits with joint contribution plans, they are trying to get workers to shoulder the risks and losses associated with market activity. Like the taxpayer funded bailouts given to big banks and mega-corporations, the DCP is a tool to place full liability on ordinary citizens for the cyclical meltdowns that come with reckless profit-seeking and financial speculation.

Until the 1950s, very few workers enjoyed any protection against poverty once they had left the workforce. Companies and governments fought tooth-and-nail against putting aside money while workers were producing profit so that they could receive a stable income later in life. Today there is still no real pension system in this country, and the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) is so inadequate that it has created a dysfunctional and inequitable patchwork of private/public benefits.

For this reason, the majority of DBPs have been established in places where militant unions have had a significant shop-floor presence. Steelworkers in Hamilton took to the picket line four times, beginning with an 86-day strike in 1958, to build a plan that continues to provide dignity to its membership in retirement. The last step forward made by USW 1005 in this long uphill struggle came with the strike of 1990, which resulted in the indexation of pension benefits. The rise of neoliberal economics has turned the pension issue into a defensive fight.

For many years corporations such as U.S. Steel tried to sell DCP plans to the public as “win-win” scenarios. The leadership of USW 1005 has had to work hard educating its membership about the “pot of gold” pitch delivered by both the media and human resources.

During the investment boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, workers were told that contributory plans would generate fantastic returns and personal freedom. According to this story, union members were hostages to secure retirement plans and therefore missing their opportunity to retire rich!

The absurdity of this story has been demonstrated by the current economic crisis. Today individuals without DBPs face a future of extreme uncertainty after many years of following the advice of pundits and brokers.

A Defined Contribution Pension is little different than a private Registered Retirement Savings Plan into which the employer agrees to shift a portion of the workers’ compensation. So, while the employee sacrifices wage increases in the present for higher pension contributions, because of market volatility there is no guarantee the money will be there at the end of the day. Perhaps even more alarming, DCPs make plan holders dependent on the destructive policies of investment companies which aim to push down wages, eliminate benefits and ignore workplace safety in order to maximize stockholder returns. This is why millions of workers in the U.S. are forced to cash in their 401(k) plans just to meet basic health care costs and mortgage payments.

When DCPs aren’t accepted at the bargaining table, the big corporations turn to bankruptcy protection, plant closures, and long lockouts. The leadership at USW 1005 has already had plenty of experience facing these tactics. In 2004 Stelco tried to use the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) as a tool to force concessions.

USW 1005 President Rolf Gerstenberger passionately reminds the membership that, “during the CCAA process started by the old Stelco… the company and the CCAA court were trying to get Local 1005 to participate in changing the pension arrangement in one way or another. Local 1005 kept saying we had a contract and expected everyone to live up to the terms of the agreement. By opposing the CCAA process from the beginning we were successful in not losing anything.”

Prior to making its purchase in 2007, U.S. Steel carried out a complete due diligence study of Stelco’s assets and liabilities. Executive Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer Gretchen Haggerty even wrote to USW 1005 assuring them that U.S. Steel had maintained “a large defined benefit pension plan for decades” and would “honour [its] commitment to the Stelco pension plans.”

Only a couple of years down the road, when the contract between USW 1005 and U.S. Steel expired on July 31, the company announced it would dismantle the DBP. Given this dishonesty, even though neither party has called for conciliation and no strike or lockout date has been set, USW 1005 has every reason to expect an epic struggle and little sign that U.S. Steel will bargain in good faith.

Fully aware of what the employer was looking for, the bargaining team opted to refuse to present any proposals that could be manipulated by U.S. Steel into damaging trade-offs. The big question is: will the historically militant workers at the former Stelco Hilton Works will be able to hold the line this time around?

The goal of all Canadians should be the creation of a universal pension plan that provides a meaningful life after a lifetime of work for every person regardless of their employer. The model for this plan will have to come from labour rather than corporations representing the elite, which is why every workplace that loses its Defined Benefit Pension plan is a step backward in the fight for a universal pension plan. It is imperative that the union movement and working people mobilize behind locals like USW 1005 fighting to maintain the integrity of worker’s pensions which are here today, but could be gone tomorrow.

Steelworkers head to Ottawa

December 1, 2010 admin Hamilton, Labour movement, Ottawa, Pensions, Strike No comments

People’s Voice, Dec 1 2010

By Liz Rowley

A busload of Hamilton’s locked out steelworkers went to Ottawa Nov. 15 to press Local 1005 USW’s demand that the federal court grant the union intervenor status in the case of the Attorney General vs US Steel.

They also met with Tory MP David Sweet, Chair of Parliament’s All‑Party Steel Caucus and of the Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, to insist that the government must prosecute US Steel for breaking the terms of its Investment Canada agreement to maintain production and employment levels at Hamilton’s Hilton Works, and for price fixing and manipulating the Canadian market place in 2009.

The Attorney General has finally moved against US Steel, which bought the former Steel Company of Canada in 2007. But not before US Steel had banked the last furnace, locked out its unionized workforce, and is now trying to turn out the lights in Hamilton.

US Steel Admits Price‑Fixing

Local 1005 wants intervenor status to put before the court the admissions of price fixing and manipulating the Canadian steel market by closing down two Hamilton steel mills in 2009. The admissions are contained in an Ernst & Young document that US Steel has submitted to the court in its own defence. US Steel contends that it did not break its commitments made under the Investment Canada Act. In the document, Ernst & Young argue that the company’s price rigging and manipulation of the Canadian market provide a “net benefit” to Canada.

But the union wants the court to focus on the admissions of price fixing and manipulating the market, which are criminal acts no matter who benefitted, and should be dealt with by the court as such.

In fact, while the two Hamilton mills were being closed and hundreds laid off, US Steel was opening two new mills in the US where labour ‑ including unionized labour ‑ is cheaper and municipal taxes are often waived for new capital investment. In fact the beneficiary was US Steel: what a surprise.

The Investment Canada Act

The sale of the former Stelco to US Steel was widely protested by those concerned with Canadian sovereignty and independence. The transaction marked the closure of the last Canadian owned steel company, decimating any hope of a Canadian industrial strategy, and leaving workers at the mercy of powerful transnational corporations and their global institutions and governments.

Labour in particular was concerned that US Steel would close the Hamilton operation and move production and jobs to the US ‑ a concern that grew with the economic meltdown.

The Harper government responded with the Investment Canada Act, which it said protected Canada’s interests and guaranteed jobs and production levels for at least three years. Thin on details, the signed agreement between US Steel and the government was never made public.

But US Steel began laying off steelworkers and cutting back production shortly after the deal was signed, citing the global economic crisis as justification for flouting their legal obligations. The Harper government refused to act, and kept the terms of the deal secret to prevent others from taking action. Meanwhile US Steel (like others in the steel and mining sectors) has been pressing its unionized workforce to make deep wage and benefit concessions, and most significantly, to give up their defined benefit (DB) pension plans.

Busting unions and pension plans

The Hilton Works in Hamilton, with 900 hourly employees still working, and 9,000 pensioners dependent on the DB pension plan, was the last Local union to come to the bargaining table. Local 1005′s efforts to achieve a joint bargaining strategy with the Lake Erie Works fell through last year, when early bargaining resulted in a two-tier pension plan for the unionized workers and new hires at Nanticoke. The new hires will get a defined contribution pension ‑ essentially a savings plan that is fully exposed to market conditions like the crash of 2008. Within 20 years the DB pension will be an artifact, and the well‑paid, indexed pension plans won over a century of struggle will be gone.

The key difference between the two Locals were the number of retirees ‑ not many in the relatively young Lake Erie Works, 9,000 in the century old Hilton Works. The company made the most of the difference.

During the same timeframe, the Brazilian-owned Vale bought out the International Nickel Company of Canada in Sudbury, and Xstrata bought out Falconbridge Noranda, also in Sudbury. The entire nickel basin, Canadian-owned and operated since mining began there, is now completely foreign owned and controlled.

There too, Harper pulled out the Investment Canada Act to justify the Inco sale. Vale, the second largest mining company in the world, pushed for massive concessions and an end to the defined benefit pension plan. The result was the longest mining strike in Sudbury history. Miners and smelter workers, supported by their community, courageously fought back against scabs and deep corporate pockets for more than a year, before returning to work for want of any other option.

Left out of the settlement by a vengeful, vicious employer, are about 100 workers at Voisey’s Bay, who remain on strike because Vale refused them the same settlement imposed on the workers at Sudbury and Port Colbourne. A large proportion of the miners at Voisey’s Bay are Aboriginal, a group Vale is known to super-exploit and oppress at its operations around the world.

A strategy to win

The fight in Hamilton has started out differently, and not only because it’s a lock‑out.

In Sudbury, the entire battle strategy was mapped out from the start in Toronto and Pittsburgh with a focus on bargaining, mobilizing local support for the strike, and holding out “one day longer” than Vale.

In Hamilton, the Local union is at the centre of the struggle, working to mobilize the whole labour movement and the Canadian public around the issues at stake: Canadian jobs, foreign ownership, the Canadian steel industry and the need for a made-in-Canada industrial strategy, Canadian labour and investment laws, and the rights of workers to live in dignity and security.

This fight is about the interests not only of Hamilton steelworkers, but of their community, and the whole country. It’s US Steel versus everyone else, and that’s how the union is placing the question to everyone who will listen.

This is everybody’s fight, says Local 1005 President Rolf Gerstenberger. He urges the public and governments to stand up to US Steel and defend the community’s best interests, Canada’s interests, and their own best interests as workers, seniors, youth, students, small business people, and community in the process.

The union has identified this fight with the 1946 Steel strike in Hamilton that involved the whole labour movement and the whole community. The 1946 struggle cemented the victory of the closed shop for workers across Canada.

The Spirit of ’46 means “all in” for a united fight on behalf people everywhere struggling for decent work and wages, job security, labour rights. It’s a fight for a country that provides social programs, creates jobs, protects labour and democratic rights, and puts curbs on corporate power.

US Steel’s tactics

The company is working hard to divide the union internally, by separating the working members from the retirees, and the leadership from the membership. A company letter to union members accuses their leadership of being “ideological” and “unrealistic”. By this they mean that the leadership refuses to roll over and is effectively mobilizing its members and the community to defend pensions, benefits, jobs and wages.

Local 1005 will be heartened to know that last month, newly organized CAW workers in car parts plants in southern Ontario won new agreements that are concessions‑free, after firmly rejecting earlier offers containing concessions.

Note: PV readers, trade unions, and supporters everywhere can support the locked out workers with food, toys, donations, and messages or resolutions of solidarity this Holiday Season. Mail to: USW Local 1005, 350 Kenilworth Ave. North, Hamilton, ON, L8H 4T3, or call 905-547‑1417 (email info@uswa1005.ca) to offer assistance. Check www.uswa1005.ca for information and updates.