National Post (National Edition)
22-month strike a cautionary tale for unionized factory workers.
Firm’s offers to settle get progressively less generous
The soft “thwick!” of darts as they spear the dart board, and the low growl of a generator fill a plywood shack workers built in the parking lot of Crown Metal Packaging LP, near the intersection of two highways in the north end of Toronto. The generator powers three ceiling lights, pointed at the dart board, which hangs above a pot-bellied wood stove. Three employees of Crown dressed in shorts and sandals, all in their 50s, compete in a friendly — there is no money at stake — game of darts.
“We don’t have money,” said one worker, who asks his name not be used. “We only have the strike fund.”
On Sept. 3, 2013 about 130 employees of this metal can factory, members of the United Steelworkers, walked out on strike.
On Sunday at a hotel near Pearson airport the workers will vote on a new contract offer, and all here hope the 22-month strike — during which strikers have worn out four previous dart boards — will end. The labour dispute emerges as a cautionary tale for unionized factory workers in Canada who stand up to hardnosed global manufacturers in today’s economy.
This sprawling factor y, which opened in 1983, stands among the top producers in North America for Crown Holdings of Philadelphia, which owns 140 can factories in 40 countries. In 2012 Crown named this its “Plant of the Year” for outstanding “safety, productivity and budget management.” The plant that year produced 5.5 million cans a day, which Molson Coors in Toronto and Labatt’s in London, Ont., among other companies, fill with beer.
In 2013, Crown offered a contract that curtailed workers’ power to file grievances, scrapped a cost-of-living allowance and introduced a two-tier wage scale — new hires would earn less than existing workers.
“This is not a particularly startling list of demands, given the kind of ‘concession’ bargaining that is occurring generally in the current economic climate,” Morton Mitchnick, a mediator-arbitrator, wrote last month in the report of his oneman Industrial Inquiry Commission, appointed by Ontario’s labour minister, Kevin Flynn, in an attempt to settle the dispute.
The workers rejected that offer, and walked out. They have now walked the picket line through two winters. After Toronto’s ice storm of December, 2013, friends of the union brought broken tree limbs to burn for heat. A black cat gave birth to several litters of kittens on the roof of a workers’ shack. Another shack caught fire in February; the blaze burned one side of a pine tree.
As the workers sit under a faded patio umbrella this week, Tony Di Felice, a writer for the New York-based socialist newspaper The Militant, drops off a flat of Tim Hortons doughnuts.
“It’s a very, very good job,” said Colin Leung, a machinery maintainer here. His job pays about $26 per hour. “It’s a middle-class job. Everybody likes to work.”
Crown has been good to investors. From 2012 to 2014 its net income rose 19 per cent; since 2010 its share price has almost doubled, to US$54 from US$28. In the past 14 years, Crown has closed 10 of its 14 plants in Canada. Crown did not return telephone calls.
“The strike as a tool of industrial relations is a much-diminished one,” says Rafael Gomez of the Centre for Industrial Relations at the University of Toronto. “Where else can these guys go? A retail job at a third of the wage.”
The United Steelworkers, the union for 225,000 workers in Canada and 600,000 in the United States, has contrasted company profits with workers’ plight. It urged a boycott of beer cans and picketed the neighbourhoods of Crown’s officers and directors.
The strategy backfired. In February 2014 workers rejected a contract offer that “scheduled a return to work.” In retrospect, noted Mitchnick, workers made a “monumental miscalculation.”
Since then company offers have become progressively less generous. The company at one point said it would take back only 40 or 45 workers. A subsequent offer eliminated the two pay tiers; instead, Crown said, returning workers would see their wages drop. Workers Sunday will see the latest offer.
On the picket line, the workers just seem tired. Some sold their houses, cashed in their savings, took other jobs.
The timer sounds on the Samsung phone of Scott Jackson, 51, a quality control worker. He waves a transport truck out of the plant. A month after the strike began, Crown resumed production here, using management, employees transferred from Calgary and temporary personnel. This is a busy place. Trucks roll in and out; under a protocol, the strikers may delay trucks 15 minutes when they enter and leave.
“Their offer is some kind of buyout,” said Jackson. “But is it worth it considering the two years that we lost? A lot of the guys are so fed up now they will take anything.”