LABOR

Meat packers
set to strike

in 10 cities

EDMONTON — With a strike au-
thorization from Canada Packers
workers in 10 cities across the country
and the walkout July 6 of some 900-
members of the United Food and
Commercial Workers union at Gainers
Inc., the month-long meat packing
industry strike has escalated.

Acting on a 98 per cent strike man-
date to back contract demands, the
Gainers workers struck at 4 p.m., July 6
after the company announced it was
planning to hire scab labor at wages $5
an hour below basic union rates.

In full page advertisements in the
Edmonton and Calgary newspapers
Gainers hoped to entice some 1,200.un-
employed meat handlers in Alberta left
jobless by the closure of three plants,
earlier this year by Canada Packers and
Burns Foods Ltd.

Burns Foods has taken the lead on
behalf of the industry to slash wages
and try to reduce them to the starvation
wages paid U.S. meat packers. The
current union base rate in Canada is
$11.99 an hour, while U.S. workers are
paid about $7 an hour, (Canadian).

On June 12, Burns closed its Calgary
plant one week after 600 UFCW mem-
bers struck against the company’s de-
mand for a 40 per cent wage cut, slash-
ing wages to $6.99 an hour. The com-
pany has also said it will shut down its
Brandon, Man., plant in August.

The strike at Burns involves 1,600
workers in Calgary, Lethbridge, Win-
nipeg and Kitchener. They’ ve been out
since the beginning of June. Burns is the

second largest meat packer in the coun-

The Gainers plant in Edmonton is
owned by Edmonton Oilers boss and
right wing Tory politico Peter Pockling-
ton. It processes half of Alberta’s pork
production and its closure, in addition

to the Burns strike, would leave only

one hog plant open in the province.
The full page ads in the Calgary and
Edmonton newspapers offered jobs
starting at $6.99 an hour, possibly work-
ing up to the union rate in two years.
Spokespersons for the UFCW say
they don’t expect workers who’ve al-
ready rejected the industry’s drive to

roll back wages up to five dollars an .

hour to flock to Gainers at these scab
wages.

Negotiations between the UFCW ©

and Canada Packers, the country’s
largest meat packer began June 12. The
talks, affecting 5,200 workers in 10 CP
plants across Canada broke down over
the company’s refusal to talk wages
until the outcome of the Burns strike.

’ The union is determined that CP will

have to retreat from this position if it
wants to avoid a strike, because the
company, being the largest, in the in-

dustry has normally been the trend set-

ter in negotiations.

The UFCW has been ina strike posi- ,

tion at CP since the end of June and has

won a strong strike: mandate from its”

members in 10 Canadian cities. A
Canada Packers’ strike would mean an
almost complete shutdown of the coun-
try’s meat packing industry.

Saskatchewan
Solidarity Day
REGINA — 2,000 people took part in
Solidarity Day, June 24, at the Sas-
katchewan Legislature. The biggest
anti-Tory protest since the Devine
government won the April 1982 elec-
tion, was organized by the Sas-
katchewan Federation of Labor,
with the full support of the People’s
Budget Coalition and a wide range of
non-affiliated unions and community
groups across the province. Growing
unity against the government's
union-bashing, job cuts, social ser-
vice reductions and orientation on
making Saskatchewan “Open for
Business’, has sparked wide
discussion about the possible for-
mation of a “Solidarity Sask’.

PHOTO — C. McCANN

Special to the Tribune
LONDON — Britain's striking
coalminers have agreed to resume talks
with National Coal Board chairman Ian
MacGregor, but the miner’s union re-

mains determined that the strike will ©

end only when the Thatcher govern-
ment scraps plans for pit closures that
will throw 70,000 miners out of work.

Prior to entering the third set of talks
with the NCB, National Union of
Mineworkers president Arthur Scargill
said the NUM hopes, ‘‘the (coal)
board’s move indicates a willingness to
negotiate sensibly and withdraw the
closure plans so that our industry can
get to work.”’

The 18-week old strike has halted
production at 70 per cent of the coun-
try’s 175 coal mines and despite intense
pressure from the Tory government
and the big-business media to sow divi-
sion in labor’s ranks, solidarity with the
striking miners has steadily grown.

This was demonstrated again last
week at the Llanwern steelworks in
Wales when four of the five trainloads
of iron ore bound for the steel plant
were turned back. The National Union
of Railway workers is showing its sup-
port to the miners by agreeing to block
all deliveries to steel plants.

The NUR has backed up this pledge
by increasing strike pay for its members
who back the blockade.

‘While the miners favor allowing
enough material into the steel mills to
maintain the blast furnaces in a safe
condition, unfortunately the right wing
leader of the British steelworkers

union, Bill Sirs has refused to support
the miner’s cause by urging his mem-
bership to stop steel production.
However, with the growing support
to the miners from railway and print
workers, and the massive financial and
food aid being contributed to the strik-
ers from the entire British labor move-
ment the strikers’ position gathers
strength as the confrontation with the
Thatcher government escalates.

Some of that support has been.

sparked by the sickening display of
police brutality against the miners such
as the recent confrontations at the Or-
greave steel mills near Sheffield where
mounted police charged into crowds of
miners swinging specially-lengthened
truncheons.

The use of the police in an attempt to
crush the strike was present right from
the beginning. Miners were prevented
from entering cities where they in-
tended to set up flying pickets to stop
coal deliveries or try to shut down

mines in the early days of the protest

Bours, MacGregor and the NCB’s Coal
an.

In addition to the support from the
national railway union, the dockers,
printers and others, the strikers have
been the beneficiaries of a steady
stream of rank and file support. Re-
cently Fleet Street print workers from
London delivered two truck loads of

food for strikers’ families in the Welsh ~

town of Tonyrefail. The print workers

from the unions at the Daily Telegraph -
and the Financial Times recalled with |

the Welsh miners, the long-standing

British miners, coal board talk

solidarity between the printers’ and
miners’ unions reaching back to the
great miners’ strike in 1926 when the
union members refused to print an at-
tack against the miners in the Daily
Mail.

There have been similar acts of sol-
idarity and refusal to print attacks
against the miners and their union lead-
ers in this current fight.

Auto workers in a north-western
town stopped the Vauxhall assembly
line at Ellesmere Port after a foreman
tore down posters supporting the min-
ers’ struggle and calling for support to.
the miners and their families. The fore-
man had to replace the posters before
the line started running again.

The miners are determined to pre-
vent the Tories from going ahead with
their plan to let the coal industry run
itself down in favor of nuclear power.
They also see in the government’s plan
a strategy to weaken the miners’ and
railway and transport workers unions,
all of which have demonstrated militant
leadership. :

Ian MacGregor has a nine-year re-
cord of destroying jobs in pursuit of
the Tory government’s wrecking of its
nationalized sector. The NUM esti-
mates that he’s killed 140,000 jobs or 40
every day that he’s been involved in the
boards of nationalized industries. He
entered the board of British Steel in
charge of 166,000 workers and left
81,000 behind when he was finished.

His Plan for Coal would lower that
industry’s work force from 180,000 to

~ 100,000, with 20,000 to goimmediately. .

“Jobs lost
to U.S. firm

HAMILTON — WABCO workersif
Stoney Creek have called for complet®
justification by the federal government
for its decision to subcontract 50 pet
cent ofits air brake order for some 3,
Canadian Wheat Board hopper cars '
an American company.

United Electrical workers Local 558
in a letter to each federal Member of
Parliament, June 27 called on them
press Transport Minister Lloyd AX
worthy to justify the action and to com
duct a complete audit of the Canadial
content in the subcontracted airbrakes
being supplied by New York Airbraké
at its recently opened facility in Kings
ton, Ont. : d

New York Airbrake is based

_ Waterdown, New York.

The union charges that the sub:
contracting of the airbrake productio#
will see four jobs lost at WABCO fo!
every new one created in Kingston:
Noting how the feds have held up the
wheat board hopper car contract aS
example of federal government J°
creation, the Local 558 letter informed
the MPs that ‘‘as of June 26 there are 29
fewer jobs at WABCO Ltd., Stoney
Creek and more layoffs to come late!
this week when the full impact of the
loss of the order is determined by 0U!
employer ...”

Seamen
prepare
for battle

MONTREAL — Currently
working to rule, the Seafarer’s
International Union is conducting
a strike vote among its 2,280
members employed by the Cana-
dian Lake Carriers Association.
Results will be known July 18 but —
SIU president Roman Gralwiczis —
forecasting an unprecedented”
vote in favor. Negotiations broke
down over a variety of issues
including provision of drinking
water from sources other than the
polluted great lakes, where it cur-
rently comes from, and 48-hour
notice to the union before sailing
time to provide crew. Currently
the union only has three hours to
provide crew members before the
companies can hire outside the
SIU hiring hall.

—_

4 PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JULY 11, 1984