BY JACQUIE HENDERSON AND PAUL KOURI
CAMPBELL RIVER, British Columbia - Pulp and paperworkers at three Fletcher Challenge mills in this province ended their nine-month strike by narrowly approving a contract April 18. About 59 percent of the 81 percent who voted, cast their ballots in favor of the agreement. At the MacKenzie mill in northern BC, 68 percent of the 200 workers there voted against.

Two-thirds of the 2,400 strikers belong to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP). The other third are members of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada (PPWC). Fletcher Challenge forced the workers out on strike July 14, 1997, demanding the unions agree to 365- day continuous production, a six-year contract, and "flexibility."

The strike centered on the last demand, which the strikers pointed out would eliminate jobs, undermine safety, and weaken the unions by allowing the company to compel workers to do whatever task it saw fit, regardless of seniority, job classification or experience.

The contract proposal, based on a modified version of a mediator's report rejected last February by a 93.5 percent vote of the membership, concedes these three demands to the employer, including on the key issue of "flexibility." It also includes small increases in wages, 0 percent in the first year and 2 percent yearly over the rest of the contract, some improvements in pensions, and a signing bonus of $2,750.

Union officials argued in their contract summary that they had "been successful in securing many protections for members in the implementation of flex."

Gerritt Lettinga, accepted this statement. Lettinga has worked for the past five years as a papermaker at the Crofton mill, 150 miles south of Campbell River. He said, "Fletcher Challenge wanted one-way flexibility from top to bottom instead of cooperation, but in my opinion they didn't get it."

Robert Welsh and Tim Dorsay, both in their early thirties, spent an evening together carefully examining and discussing the proposed agreement. "When you take the time to read it critically you realize its a lot of hype," Welsh said after voting in Campbell River. "They have some words there that suggest that there will be no job losses due to flexibility, but it's all very vague. Other places in it they admit workers jobs can be `displaced' due to `efficiencies.' "

Dorsay added, "You'll never be able to pin down whether job losses were from flexibility or not."

Charlie Varco, a longshoreman at the Elk Falls mill, helped organize the strike support rally of 1,500 last April 4 in Campbell River. He elaborated further on the negative consequences of what the company calls flexibility. "The contract is a threat to safety because its going to force people to do jobs they're not familiar with.... It's also a vehicle for management to impose retribution on anyone they want - for example, someone who's been going after them on safety issues."

Kim Belling, 33, works on the Elk Falls spare board. He voted for the agreement, arguing that the company is "following a global trend of trying to reduce the labor force and their costs. Their competitors down east are already doing it." But he wasn't enthusiastic about the contract. "There's no real humanity in it anywhere," he declared.

The outcome of the strike at Fletcher Challenge, the longest in the history of British Columbia pulp and paper industry, will serve as a pattern for the rest of the pulp and paper industry in the province. In the next couple weeks CEP members on strike at Timber West in Elk Falls, sold off by Fletcher Challenge during the strike, will vote on the pattern contract. The other contracts in the industry also expired in 1997 and have been on hold waiting for the Fletcher Challenge settlement. All 11,000 members of the pulp and paper unions in BC contributed $50 per week to provide the strikers with $400 per week strike pay.

Pattern bargaining is relatively recent in British Columbia's pulp and paper industry. In 1992, workers shut down the entire industry for several weeks. Forest companies demanded, and got, the provincial labor board to make illegal industry-wide bargaining and job actions. The union officialdom then accepted this framework and targeted Fletcher Challenge in 1994-95. With the price of paper strong at that time, FCC settled after a strike of a few weeks without getting the major concessions on 365-day continuous production and flexibility that it and the rest of the industry wanted.

This time, Fletcher Challenge, with huge amounts of cash reserves from the sale of one of its mills in the United States and paper prices down, was in a better position to weather a long strike. "With the soft market and the down time in the industry, it probably did not cost us much," bragged a company spokesman.

During the strike, Fletcher Challenge claimed the unions were being unreasonable in their unwillingness to accept the same conditions that they said the CEP had already accepted in eastern Canada. Fletcher Challenge frequently threatened to pull out of BC. In March the company announced it was buying a newsprint mill in the Philippines.

The workers held their picket lines strong 24 hours a day during the strike, halting production at the mills. They organized several rallies during the course of the walkout, the last of which drew 1,500 workers. In response to the company and media campaign, officials of the two unions offered nationalist rhetoric about problems with "foreign" companies. At the April 4 rally one of the local presidents, Fraser McQuarrie of CEP local 630, carried this chauvinism even further, stating in his address, "We don't want Malaysians, Indonesians, and others coming here to run our country."

The experience of this fight has deepened the discussion among unionists here on what it takes today to defend workers interests against the bosses' attacks. Mike Snelling, a veteran of many strikes during his 23 years as a shipper at the Crofton mill and years as a Longshoreman before that, commented, "We're fighting the biggest. Fletcher is worldwide. Maybe we should have picked a different company, or maybe we should have gone out all together."

Welsh, from Elk Falls, noted, "They're going after the underlying principles of unionism. We fought this long, now is not the time to give up."

Paul Kouri is member of the United Steelworkers of America local 2952 in Vancouver. Jacquie Henderson is a member of the International Association of Machinists Local 764 in Richmond, BC. Chuck Demers of the Young Socialists in Vancouver and Steve Penner, member of the Canadian Auto Workers in Langley, B.C. contributed to this article.  
 
 
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