Old Dutch workers get crumbs for severance

Other workers at old-style industries hurting across Quebec

MONTREAL — When the termination letter came from the company in early June, Montreal factory worker Shelton Bernard was surprised, then stunned, then insulted, then angry.

He and the other 130 unionized employees at Old Dutch Foods in Lachine will be paid full salary until the 50-year- old plant shuts permanently in late September.

But as severance, all they will get is a small lump sum. One week’s pay, no matter how long they’ve worked at the factory — that’s it.

For the lowest on the pay scale, it amounts to barely $740 before deductions. For the best-paid, $1,000.

“Imagine — they want to pay us nothing,” said Bernard, a machine operator who has worked at the Norman St. snack food plant, formerly the Humpty Dumpty potato chips factory, for 10 years.

“It’s insulting,” added Rohan Williams, a sanitation worker at the factory, who, like many of the others being laid off there, clears about $520 a week after tax.

“People who’ve been here 30 years or more will get exactly the same thing, 40 hours’ pay, right across the board,” said Williams, an 11-year veteran on the overnight shift.

“Some of them have been here since they were teenagers. They practically built the company. They’ve dedicated their lives to it — complete families, in some cases.”

The injustice makes his blood boil.

“Maybe from a legal standpoint the company can pull it off. But come on! From a moral and a human standpoint, they shouldn’t be able to get away with it.”

But they just might. And so will many others.

The rude fall off the Humpty Dumpty pay wall is not unique to Old Dutch. Across Montreal and in other parts of Quebec, workers at old-style industries are hurting.

In mid-July, the first 200 of 1,300 workers at the Swedish-owned Electrolux cooking appliances plant slated for closing in L’Assomption will be thrown out of work.

Next spring, the Mexican-owned Mabe Canada dryer factory in east-end Montreal will close, leaving several hundred more without jobs.

And in another example, in Châteauguay and Quebec City, 150 workers at Original Foods will be unemployed when the company moves to Ontario.

The 130 unionized workers still employed at Old Dutch (70 others have already been let go) are holding out some hope they will get a better deal than just a week’s pay in severance — but not much. As the Sept. 27 closing looms, the signs are not good that they will get more than they have been offered now.

Their collective agreement, signed in 2009 and expiring at the end of this month, says nothing about severance pay.

But the last time the factory closed — in 1969, when it made chips under the Maple Leaf brand — workers got one week’s pay for every year worked, and that’s what the union wants now.