Vol. 71/No. 22 June 4, 2007
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(On the Picket Line column) Rail maintenance workers strike in Canada |
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Militant/John Steele
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TORONTO, May 18—About 3,200 track maintenance workers, members of the Teamsters union, struck Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) across Canada May 16. Pickets, like the one pictured above outside the CPR Intermodal services yard here, slowed the movement of containers filled with imported consumer goods. “They’re trying to break us,” Bill Poirier, a Teamsters Canada health and safety official, told the Militant yesterday. Poirier said the bosses were trying to hold down wages and conditions for the track maintenance workers in preparation for upcoming negotiations with locomotive engineers and other CPR workers. He reported that 82 percent of the workers who voted supported strike action. The union is demanding a wage increase of 13.5 percent over three years, improvements to car mileage allowances, and better clothing, boot, and tool subsidies. CPR has assigned 1,300 managers to replace the striking workers and has reportedly applied for a court injunction to stop all picketing.
—JOHN STEELE Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home |