WITH a 75% ratification vote announced late on 7 July, Canadian nickel mining and processing workers represented by United Steelworkers (USW) Locals 6500 and 6200 in Sudbury and Port Colborne, Ontario, ended a 360-day strike against Vale SA.
The Brazilian mining company and 3,500 USW members now begin a five-year collective agreement after a contentious strike that ended with both sides compromising on terms in mediated bargaining.
Those terms were pieced together in high-level mediation from 19-22 June in Toronto.
But final accord still eluded both sides due to differences in setting forth a just process through arbitration of Vale’s unilateral sacking of nine strikers.
Over 3-4 July, through the insistence of Ontario Provincial Labour Minister Peter Fonseca, a process was established, opening the way for the 6-7 July contract vote.
Still to be resolved, however, is another strike over a separate labour contract between Vale and USW Local 9508 involving 200 steelworkers in Voiseys Bay and Goose Bay, Labrador. Those strikers have been out since 1 August 2009.
The USW and Vale are expected to return to bargaining in mid-July in eastern Canada’s maritime province, and resolution appears imminent following the Ontario approval. There, 84% of total membership of the two branch unions turned out last week to ratify.
The contract acceptance in Ontario thus closes a chapter to one of Canada’s most acrimonious labour disputes, a dispute that saw mining and other unions from around the world galvanise behind the USW in efforts to preserve previously negotiated wage and work terms.
The ICEM and the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) helped coordinate the global campaign.
In a joint statement, ICEM and IMF General Secretaries Manfred Warda and Jyrki Raina said: ‘The perseverance and character of USW members in Ontario and Labrador is what trade unions everywhere will remember about this strike. Their fight became our fight and thus they laid the building blocks on how to wage a coordinated global campaign.’
The five-year agreement in Ontario includes yearly wage increases that, coupled with cost-of-living increases, will increase salaries between C$2.25 and C$2.50 per hour over the life of the agreement.
The existing defined benefit pension plan for current workers also increases in increments over the contract term, with cost-of-living indexing and life-time health care benefits preserved.
In compromises made by the two sides, a defined contribution pension plan for new hires was agreed to that provides company contributions equal to 8% of employees’ regular basic earnings, with workers able to contribute additionally between 2% to 6% of regular earnings.
This plan includes long-term disability coverage that is the same as that contained in the defined benefit pension plan.
The nickel production bonus was retained, although at levels less than the previously negotiated bonus.
Workers can still supplement regular earnings by up to C$15,000 per year, with compromise struck on the price of nickel in which the trigger kicks in. The prior trigger of US$2.25 per pound was increased to US$3.75, less than the US$5.00-per-pound originally sought by Vale.
The new contract includes a C$2,000 signing bonus for all returning and retiring employees, with two additional C$1,000 bonuses linked to production numbers in the last one-third of 2010.
It also includes a side agreement setting forth rigid contracting-out criteria, which will serve as a job security measure.
A retirement incentive bonus was negotiated that will give workers with 30 years service a one-time C$30,000 retirement stipend, with C$15,000 granted to those with 27-29 years. A reduction in force was also agreed to of 113 jobs, with those redundancies very likely to come by way of attrition.
The return-to-work agreement calls for Vale to recall USW members beginning in the next to the last week of July, and no later that 11 August. In the separate agreement involving the fate of the nine discharged USW Local 6500 members, the two sides agreed to have the Ontario Labour Relations Board make a determination on whether or not the unjust firings will go to independent arbitration. Those governmental hearings began on 9 July.
In the USW’s statement announcing the ratification, District Six Director Wayne Fraser said, ‘Our members have spoken and I believe everyone respects the decisions they have made in extremely difficult circumstances.’
Meanwhile, Labour, management, and the Liberian government celebrated the signing on 28 June of the second collective agreement between ICEM-affiliated Firestone Agricultural Workers’ Union (FAWUL) and Firestone Rubber Plantation.
Some 4,500 workers and their families will again benefit when the two-year contract takes effect in December 2010.
The ever-evolving labour-management relationship between FAWUL and Firestone is fast becoming a showcase in modern industrial relations for the administration of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Labour Minister Taiworn Gongloe stated at the celebration that the social relationship ‘has broken from the past,’ and thanks to enlightened leadership coming from the President, the rights of workers and the interests of the company both are now guaranteed.
Added Firestone Managing Director Charles Stuart, ‘What we’re celebrating here is the result of management and employees working in a peaceful and respectful manner. Without you we are nothing and together, anything can happen.’
It was only a short three years ago that FAWUL was fighting the last vestiges of an illegitimate yellow union that had been propped up by Firestone management for decades. Following free and open elections, and an ambitious years-long union-building project by the US-based United Steelworkers (USW), FAWUL won union certification in 2007.
A year later, on 27 July, FAWUL won its first collective agreement, giving workers a 24% pay increase backdated 19 months, reducing a quota system on tapping natural rubber from trees, and granting new schools and free tuition for the sons and daughters of workers.
This second contract goes further: a 3.5% wage increase, the construction of more schools and school transportation, and perhaps the most important gain, a mechanised transport system to haul the rubber latex to weigh stations. For decades, workers had to haul 150-pound buckets of rubber sometimes miles on their shoulders to the stations.
FAWUL Secretary-General Edwin Cisco said the months long bargaining was hard and arduous, but that a ‘new day of social dialogue between management and workers has begun and the days of confrontation and agitation are over.’
‘This is a major success story in so many ways,’ stated ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda, ‘and we should never lose sight of the fact that the Steelworkers Union of America did the hard and difficult work up front to make it happen. We commend the workers, FAWUL leadership, and Firestone Rubber management, and see a long, productive, and precedent-setting relationship unfolding inside Liberia.’
