@ A local 500 me:

mber puts together plywood and lumber crate in Tillsonburg.

Local 500 represents over 300 workers at packaging plant

by Denyse O’Leary ost people think that they know everything there is to know about boxes. Six sides, right? Anyone can knock it together, stuff it full and throw it in the back of a truck.

Most people would know better than this if they worked in the export packing industry, alongside the work- ers at Total Distribution Systems (TDS) in southwestern Ontario.

1.W.A. CANADA Local 500 repre- sents the 300 bargaining unit mem- bers at the London, Hagersville, and Tillsonburg operations of TDS.

These workers make over 600 dif- ferent types of wooden boxes for

packing just about anything for over-~

Seas shipment. “Any type of packaging that is done in wood, we've done it at some point in time,” says Hagersville operations manager Jack Brohman.

“We packaged a neonatal unit about a month ago. We’ve packed kidney dialysis machines, computers - even airfield lighting kits, right down to every last nut, bolt, screw, and the

iesel generator to make it run.” In

ecember they were packing a Gener- al Motors assembly line to go to Chi- na.

Packing valuable machinery or equipment in wood for safe shipment overseas is both an art and a science. It begins in the box development area at the Tillsonburg plant, where work- ers experiment with box designs, us- ing sample parts supplied by the customer.

Then, at the Hagersville plant, working from the blueprint provided by an autocad operator, the Hager- sville workers prepare the specialty boxes for Tillsonburg and London. They also pack custom shipments, like the ones listed above. In recent weeks, they have been packing vacu- um-sealed electronic parts and com- puters destined for Russia. The computers are packed so as to be sorted for years without damage.

AUTOMOTIVE EXPORT PACKING DRIVES THE BUSINESS

The Tillsonburg plant packages ex- clusively for GM - that means sepa- rately packing every single part of a car or truck that you can think of, to go by container shipment to the GM plant in Venezuela. Workers carefully remove engines, panels, and frames from the racks offloaded from the trucks arriving from the factory. Then they place them - to exact specifica-

tions - in the containers that they have developed for shipping them over- seas.

The London plant, which opened in 1974, packages the export parts for Chrysler Jeep Eagle destined for Chi- na.

The business originated in 1941 as Livingston Export Packing Limited. Founder Gerald Livingston started producing wooden crates in London, Ontario, for storing and transporting a variety of manufactured products. In 1943 he moved the firm to Tillson- burg.

Business with the automotive com- panies began in 1946 when Livingston got a contract to manufacture wooden parts for the Buick Estate Wagon. By 1950, he was providing packing ser- vices to Ford Motor Company. In 1955 he began export packing of Ford parts to overseas assembly plants. In 1964, General Motors also became an ex- port packing customer.

A year later the Hagersville facility

H was opened, in a row of hangars origi-

nally built in 1939 for training World

°° War II bomber pilots. After the war,

the site became a storage and repair

$ depot for over 8500 army vehicles. A

year after the Army moved out in 1964, Livingston bought it. In 1967, the company became a public corpora- tion. Then TDS bought the company from the Livingston family in 1986. MORE THAN A JOB, IT’S A WAY OF LIFE

Export packing has been a way of life for many Local 1-500 members. Earl Troyer, for example, who was at one time the Local president, has worked for 36 years at the Tillsonburg plant.

He lives just down the street from the plant and walks to work in seven minutes.

Troyer has lived in the area all his life. His dad was general foreman in the Hagersville plant for many years, starting in 1948.

“ve seen the good times and the bad times,” he reflects, “Our membership is 150, compared to 800 ten years ago.”

He started out at the plant making bases and crates for Westinghouse ap- pliances. For a while, he worked in sample identification, but now he dri- ves a lift truck.

Troyer notes that the Tillsonburg plant is fortunate in having a very ac- tive safety committee. “We have meet- ings once a month, discuss problems and work them out.”

Saul Marques, the union business agent, recalls, “We used to have propane lift trucks. Working indoors, the fumes were terrible. But now they are electric. It’s an example of a big step forward for this plant in dealing with safety.” Troyer agrees; of the new lift trucks in general he also says, “You can see a lot better; you can do a lot more with them.”

LW.A. Local 500 is in the middle of contract talks with TDS right now.

Home care

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The nature of the employees’ job presented some unusual challenges and issues for a union that’s accus- tomed to negotiating in the forestry industry. For example, some VALID clients require around-the-clock su- pervision, so some employees must spend nights in the homes, sleeping for part of their shift. The new collec- agreement gives employees a sig- ificant increase in wages for this so-called “sleep-shift.”

1.W.A. negotiators had to work closely with the employees to over- come their lack of familiarity with VALID. They met to prepare for nego- tiations and during bargaining ses- sions.

T wasn't totally familiar with all of the issues, how the organization oper-

ated,” Mr. Pisak says. “I needed some-

one who could share some insights into the day-to-day operations, some of the unique problems and some of

the issues that had to be addressed.

This co-operation got us an agreement that is in the best interest of the em- ployees and the clients.”

IWA BECOMING MORE DIVERSIFIED

It isn’t the first time local 1-207 has been asked to represent employee groups outside the forestry industry. The union will represent non-tradi- tional employee groups that wish rep- resentation, and more of these groups are coming to the I.W.A.

“We're becoming more diversified,” Mr. Pisak says. “The vast numbers of our members in the I.W.A. are in the forest industry, but we're getting into other areas.”

There are many examples of Cana- dian I.W.A. locals that represent em- ployees in non-traditional sectors. The Alberta I.W.A. local’s 1,300 members include employees of a mobile-home plant in Lethbridge, a pre-fabricated- home manufacturer in Lloydminster and a Travelaire recreational-vehicle plant in Red Deer. Municipal employ- ees in Grimshaw are also unionized under the 1-207 banner.

VALID employees organized their own petition to ask for a supervised vote. That vote overwhelmingly sup-

ported the call for the local to repre- sent them.

The resulting agreement is in force for just over two years, expiring March 31, 1997. It includes a clause that allows for the renegotiation of wages in the final year if the funding situation has changed significantly.

Employees unanimously ratified the collective agreement. “We don’t have everything in the agreement that we wanted, but it is the first one and it’s something to work on,” Mr. Pisak comments. “There’s no question we got them a better agreement than what they had. They didn’t have a col- lective agreement before.

“We're looking forward to a long re- lationship with these employees.”

Whether the next negotiations in 1997 are easier and more lucrative for employees of the Vegreville Associa- tion for Living In Dignity depends largely on the level of funding in two years. One thing is certain: VALID em- ployees believe they're better off with LW.A. Canada Local 1-207 than they would be on their own.

Wayne Rothe is a freelance writer JSrom Alberta.

“Hopefully in the new year, we'll have another contract,” says Troyer.

HOW I.W.A. BENEFITS TDS WORKERS

The union has done a lot to improve working conditions at the TDS plants. Marques, who has been the business agent for seven years, says that the biggest improvement has been the es- tablishment of seniority in layoffs.

“When it comes time to lay off, they have to lay off in order of seniority. This is probably the largest contribu- tion the union has made. Before they were organized, the plants laid off whoever they wanted to lay off.”

ECONOMIC DOWNTURN COSTS JOBS

Unfortunately, there have been a lot of layoffs. Back in the late Seventies, Tillsonburg had 800 workers and Hagersville had 300, working two shifts. But because of downturns in the economy, Tillsonburg dwindled to 70 and Hagersville to 85.

Those job losses were caused by a number of things: Massey and White Farm went out of business. So TDS was not packing much agricultural equipment any more. The volume of material from Ford and GM went down, as overseas factories began do- ing some of their own manufacturing.

The workers make over 600 types of boxes for packaging just about anything overseas

Also, the nature of the materials and methods of packing are continual- ly changing. There are more container shipments, more shipment in corru- gated boxes, and more shipping in reusable containers than there used to be.

“This isn’t one of the richest compa- nies in the world.” Marques admits, “And the reason is that General Mo- tors, Ford and Chrysler have asked for severe price reductions. And the one-way boxes are being replaced by clip lock boxes, which are returnable. It'll cut down quite a bit on the num- ber of boxes manufactured in Hagersville.”

Clip lock boxes are becoming more popular for environmental reasons. “Where at one time in this province and elsewhere, you could take wood to your landfill, today they’re not ac- cepting it, or if they are it’s at a high cost, priced by the ton,” Marques ex- plains.

“Corrugated boxes is another thing - they’re getting into recycling corru- gated products. And we have a real task to deal with that because it takes jobs away from some of our I.W.A. members.

On the other hand, TDS is trying to develop a larger market for the clip lock boxes in North America, now that GM wants to use them to ship its products to Venezuela. This could lead to more jobs in the future. INCREASED NON-UNION COMPETITION

Another big problem is increased non-union competition with I.W.A.-or- ganized plants. When Livingston start- ed in the industry, there were very few competitors. Now there are liter- ally dozens of them, bidding for the same business that TDS is bidding for.

“We suffer because this is an estab- lished business, and they pay decent wages,”Marques explains, “but people in the States open up plants and pay just above minimum wage.”

Since the parts come from the Unit- ed States anyway, it’s tough to hang onto the American customers when U.S. suppliers pay minimum wage and then underbid Canadians.

Continued on page fourteen

LUMBERWORKERAJUNE, 1995/13