Paying the price for walking the line
There’s little need right now for the old wood-burning stove in the shed’s corner. Or the split logs and kindling boards stacked up outside. But who knows? The time may come again. Another bitterly cold winter on the picket line, in a strike that has gone largely unnoticed by the public for 21 months — except when a couple of men, dressed for the brutal elements in their layer-upon-layer of tramping clothes, joined the search for missing toddler Elijah Marsh in February and discovered the frozen boy behind an unsuspecting family’s house.
Seven seasons have turned since 118 workers at the Crown Holdings can factory in North York walked out, on Sept. 6, 2013. Since that date, only two employees have crossed the line and returned to their jobs, though a dozen others have taken retirement.
They have remained resolute in the cause, if, from the perspective of United Steel Workers (USW) Local 9176, exceedingly compromising in negotiations, with the company demanding steep wage cuts.
“We conceded wages,” says Wayne Harrison, grievance committee chair, who’s worked at the plant since 1985. “We agreed to their wage scale.” (In fact there’s no agreement, though the union has made wage counterproposals.) “But they want to freeze the current pension and we don’t agree with that. They want to go to a contributory pension in the future, eliminate the defined benefit plan.”
It has been an ordeal, sticking to their guns, even when largely holstering them, living on $335 a week strike pay. Some have required financial assistance from the USW for mortgage payments to keep their homes. Offspring have put off university and taken interim jobs to help their families cope. Others are working one or two jobs while continuing to put in their picket duty.
“People’s teeth are rotting out of their heads,” says Mike Cruttenden, because dental treatment means paying upfront and submitting claims afterwards. “People are going without prescriptions because they don’t have a drug card. (The company) stopped benefits 15 days after we struck.”
And for what? Amid boycotts — the public urged to buy bottles, not cans — the multinational Philadelphia-based company reached a labour agreement with workers at one of their plants, in Wyoming, in April, granting a decent contract that includes at least some of the demands that are being denied in Toronto.
Now, most worrisomely, strike leaders here have learned that their names are on a “hit-list” — mostly outside crew — that the company will not allow back, when and if this dispute is resolved.
“They have a list of 34 workers they don’t want to come back,” says Harrison, who is one of them. “And they have a prior proposal that only 24 jobs in the plant are available, even if the workers agree to all of the things they’ve got on the table.”
That means taking back only 24 of the strikers, the rest of the jobs claimed permanently by the temporary workers.
“This has made it impossible for the union to negotiate,” says Harrison. “Basically, if they vote for it, three-quarters of them will be taking a suicide pill. They won’t get their jobs back. It’s like putting a contract in front of us that’s never going to be agreed to. It’s meant to fail.”
Cruttenden: “We’ve been named, tarred and feathered.”
It’s intended, these workers have no doubt, to break the union.
This is the same metals factory which, early in 2013, had been awarded one of the company’s highest honours, named Crown’s safest and most productive plant in North America. This is the same factory where management came to the union after the turn of the millennium, with stock value plummeting, pleading for understanding about economic pressures.
“They came to the union on bended knee and asked for relief,” says Cruttenden, a back-end maintenance worker and past-president of the local. “I gave them relief. They came back three years later, when the stock was up to $15, and said, well, we can just make (the cans) over in Buffalo. Again and again and again, we’ve given them what they wanted. Now the stock’s at $53.
And this is where the union took a stand. ‘Look, give us a piece of the pie.’
“They started in June 2013, with 83 pages of language changes. So we struck. They’ve never been serious. Any time they put something on the table, it’s unpassable by voting because it disenfranchises half the goddamn membership, either by wages or by exclusion.’
The plant, on Signet Dr. — near Finch Ave. and Highway 400 — had been churning out 6.5 million cans per day, for upwards of 120 brands of beer and tinned foods. Those on the line are certain Crown has only been able to meet a portion of that demand (estimates based on the numbers of trucks that come and go) using untrained scab labour. It’s possible to determine by numbers stamped on cans — at the LCBO, for instance — whether they’ve been made in Canada or shipped up from the States.
There was a glimmer of hope when the province appointed experienced mediator-arbitrator Morton Mitchnick in March to find a solution for the impasse. It was supposed to be a 14-day assignment.
Though negotiations are secret, the union says the company is no longer pushing for a two-tier wage system — unacceptably low salaries for young, new employees, which had provoked such a pushback. Instead, they want to cut wages across the board by an average of 33 per cent. And they’ve allegedly been intractable about “the 34” and “the 24.”
One more meeting between the union and the mediator has been scheduled for May 29. But it will be too late for a resolution, argues Cruttenden, because the Legislature is scheduled to recess in early June. “They won’t even see the report until they come back in September.”
Without anti-scab legislation — which existed in Ontario but was clawed back by the Mike Harris government in the mid-’90s — the company can stagger on with re- placement workers until the union is utterly quashed.
The union has been holding vigils outside the Labour Ministry, and the Canadian Labour Congress has recently sanctioned a nationwide boycott of beer sold in cans manufactured by Crown. What the union is demanding — begging for, actually — is direct intervention by Premier Kathleen Wynn’s Liberals and binding arbitration, which of course could convince the company to pack up and move instead, taking more manufacturing jobs out of Ontario. Not because of economics but as punishment.
“We really need the Liberal government, right now or next week, to put binding arbitration in place and get our people back to work,” says Cruttenden.
“We have a protected right under the Charter to strike. Now that we’ve exercised that right, this is what the company’s doing — taking away our jobs. If they’re successful against the Steelworkers, every place else will go down one by one. They’ll follow this as an example.” It’s a gamble. The mediator could side heavily with the company in binding arbitration and then the union would be stuck because they appealed for it. “It’s a chance we’ve got to take,” says Harrison.
Cruttenden adds: “Let’s not bulls--- each other. We’re not in a strong position. If we can get back inside, to fight for the future, we will do that. But we’ve got to get back inside the building.
“We deserve that. We made a lot of money for this company. They’re financing this strike by the profitability we made for those bastards. And what do we get? Twenty months on the picket line.” Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.