HE WESTERN CANADIAN LUMBER WORKER

MARCH, 1972-

LABOUR IN FOREFRONT

IN ANTI-POLLUTION

BATTLE

It’s not very often that the business-slanted press acknowledges the beneficial aspects of

Canadian trade unions. A recent exception is

the article below by John Schreiner in the Financial Post which told in glowing terms of the efforts of unionists in the anti-pollution battle.

By JOHN SCHREINER x

Paul Falkowski is a tough-minded crusader against pollution. In 1968, he personally — and suc- cessfully — charged a Northern Ontario pulp mill with polluting a river.

Since then, he has either laid charges, or threat- ened to do so, against the city of Sudbury, Interna- tional Nickel Co. of Canana, Canadian Industries Ltd., and the Ontario Water Resources Commis- sion.

This list is by no means exclusive.

There are plenty of pollution crusaders in Cana- da. What distinguishes Falkowski is that he comes from the labor movement. A German-born immi- grant, he has been a member for 18 years of the United Steelworkers of America and employed by the USWA’s big Sudbury Local 6500.

He spends almost all of his time battling pollution and is a leading figure in the local citizen’s group, the Sudbury District Committee on Pollution. The committee has developed from one set up in 1967 by the Sudbury Labor Council.

Falkowski is one example — perhaps one of the more visible examples — of man-power the labor movement is committing to antipollution action groups.

In British Columbia, the B.C. Federation of La- bor is encouraging its afiiliated locals to back branches of SPEC (Society for Pollution & Environ- mental Control), or form pollution committees.

The Ontario Federation of Labor this summer distributed 75;000 bumper stickers reading ‘‘Keep Canada Clean,”’ and has provided antipollution lit- erature to local groups.

A year ago, the OFL joined with Ontario com- munity colleges in sponsoring local seminars and other vehicles of public education against pollution.

The Canadian Labor Congress last year adopted an official policy paper on pollution, and this year spent about $14,000 in picking up half the cost of a 30-minute film made for the CTV network (not yet shown to the public).

There can be no question that most Canadian labor bodies, by now, are on the antipollution band- wagon.

Labor’s major activity so far has been what can be called public education. As long ago as 1965, for example, the United Auto Workers sponsored

provocative seminars dealing with Great Lakes pollution.

_ Latest example of these public-education efforts is the CLC film, which will be available for show- ing to labor councils and other public groups after CTV has presented it on television (perhaps later this year).

Entitled What If Nobody Came?, the film was shot in British Columbia. It sets up a labor-manage- ment confrontation on the classic issue. If pollution threatens fishing and pollution control threatens jobs, which will the average union member choose?

It’s a real choice some union members already are facing. In the pulp and paper industry, there is a real possibility that a handful of the oldest mills finally will be forced to close by the cost of cleaning up the effluent. In such a situation, should the union remain militantly in favor of cleaning up?

In some union locals, anti-pollution militants have found themselves cold-shouldered by col- leagues who fear for their jobs.

Unions are likely to soft-pedal the pollution issue when dealing with obviously marginal companies.

But labor’s general attitude is firm: pollution must be attacked. Unions maintain that Canadians can clean up without wiping out jobs: we can have both jobs and fish.

And some unionists such as Falkowski have made it their business to attack.

Falkowski, for example, four years ago became concerned that the nickel smelters were putting a dangerously high concentration of sulphur dioxide into Sudbury’s air.

As a first step, the union suggested Ontario study the effects of SO2 on Sudbury residents over a five-year period. The government undertook a dif- ferent and, in the union’s view, more limited study.

Meantime, Falkowski had begun making crude measurements of SO2 in the air. He and faculty members from Laurentian University asked for readings from Government monitors. They were refused, Falkowski says, because the government insisted the readings would not be understood.

So Falkowski’s union bought airmonitoring equipment of its own in 1970 (for $3,500), put it on top of the union hall and began making the readings public. The government eventually got the point and now makes its readings available.

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But the union now is ordering portable monitor- ing equipment to measure pollutants in different areas of the city

Among the more substantial triumphs of the Sudbury District Pollution: Committee is the $13 million sewage-treatment plant now under con- struction. Sudbury had been discharging raw sew- age — with the aid, Falkowski says, of a pumping station owned by the Ontario Water Resources Commission.

The pollution committee threatened to take both

the city and the OWRC to court unless corrective action was taken.

Falkowski and his committee also claim credit for several holding ponds that area industries have es for effluent once dumped into the rivers and akes.

One company, Falkowski says, was discharging toxic wastes at night — a detail he learned from a union member inside the plant.

A number of companies have found that pollu- tion-conscious employees are likely to blow the whistle on their bosses, if necessary.

British Columbia’s SPEC last year backed up a technical brief to a provincial inquiry on pulp-mill pollution with affidavits from mill employees.

“A lot of working people here are real big sportsmen,’’ says Phyllis Young, a research officer with the British Columbia Federation of Labor.

‘When they see their favorite fishing hole ruin- ed, they go to their local pollution group.”

And those local citizens’ groups often will en- courage the employees to help nail the culprits to the legal wall. ie

A Canadian Union of Public Employees member recently gathered material from a Toronto inciner- ator, where he works, for an effective antipollution display at a local school, showing students just

what people are dumping. He’d like to assemble an- other display from the sewage system.

It takes guts, of course, for the employee to ac- cuse his boss of polluting. Neil Reimer, Canadian director of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers, knows one chemical firm employee who revealed what his plant was dumping during the night. He’s not too secure in his job now, Reimer suggests.

What many unions really want to do is make pollution control an issue at the bargaining table.

‘Pollution clauses are beginning to show up, but they are pretty weak and wobbly,” says Jack Wil- liams, the Canadian Labor Congress’s veteran director of public relations.

The Steelworkers negotiated one in 1970 with Cominco Ltd., Trail, B.C. Basically a statement of the company’s good intentions the clause has per- mitted the setting up of a labor-management committee on pollution. -

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Shortly after that agreement was signed, Larry Sefton, the Steelworker executive who runs the union in Ontario and Western Canada, advised all his locals:

“Tam suggesting to you that a pollution clause be made one of the major priorities in your next negotiations.

“It is my view that it is an issue that should be pressed to a strike issue unless we get verifiable evidence from the companies that they have done something and are willing to put a clause on pollution in our collective agreements . . .”

Few unions anywhere have pushed that firmly for pollution clauses. Indeed, the pulp and paper unions in Eastern Canada last year allowed that contract demand to be dropped in the course of bargaining.

Yet new approaches on the pollution clause are being examined. In British Columbia, some union- ists are suggesting that locals negotiate an em- ployer checkoff earmarked to finance pollution control research or something similar.

Reimer, of the Oil Workers, aims to have a safety, health and environment committee set up in each plant the union has organized. There would be both labor and management members on each committee.

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He wants the collective agreement to refer to these committees, but he thinks committees would operate most effectively if the terms of reference were outside the contract. Questions touching on health, safety and pollution don’t lend themsleves to pressure bargaining, he believes.

Traditionally, management has resisted inviting the union onto plant safety committees.

‘“‘We are making some headway,” Reimer says. “Employer resistance is waning.”’

Reimer also believes it essential that the labor movement have a continuing and broad spectrum interest in combatting pollution. He does not want so important a question left to whathe calls “‘fly-by- night outfits’ that proclaim small achievements over pollution as final cures. :

And the CLC, in its policy statement lasf year, made much the same point, adding: _.'There is a real danger that fighting pollution will become mere talk, a fad which would lose popular appeal when another one came along.”’