BY SUSAN BERMAN
BURLINGTON, Ontario - "There were promises made by the company that no trucks would be moved out, that there would be nobody going in. Yet they took the boxes out, they took spices out, they took machinery from the slicing room out. The latest we've heard is that they're taking the ham line out." Christian Sanc, a striker with 12 years at Maple Leaf Foods in Burlington, described the latest moves by the company against the strike. "The ham line is already cut into pieces and on the shipping dock ready to go," he said.

The 900 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers here struck November 15, and have been joined by another 900 who struck the company's plant in Edmonton, Alberta, November 17.

Many strikers say they're determined not to let the machinery leave the plant. "Monday and Tuesday they [the strikers] stopped the supervisors from going in," so they couldn't ship out the machinery explained Debbie Bernaski.

Pickets said they had heard the company would be going to court January 23 to get an injunction to limit picketing. That way the company can wait until the picket lines are small and then move the machinery out. According to the Hamilton Spectator, Maple Leaf has made arrangements with other companies or in its other plants to temporarily supply some of its customers.

"My impression of Maple Leaf is that they intend to be a player on the world stage in the pork business and they don't think they can get there without what they consider to be competitive wage agreements," said industry analyst Michael Palmer. "They'll do whatever it takes to get those agreements."

To Maple Leaf owners Wallace and Michael McCain, being competitive means cutting wages of the Burlington workers by up to Can$9 per hour (Can$1=US$0.70); cutting benefits coverage; eliminating seniority of the current workforce; and making workers pay for each minute over 20 minutes spent going to the bathroom each week.

At their Hamilton processing facility, where wages are already only Can$10.90 per hour, the McCains want a "flexible" workweek to eliminate weekend overtime pay, to reduce benefits to 50 percent, and to force workers to give up a day's seniority for each day absent. They have already shut their Edmonton facility in face of a strike, throwing more than 900 workers out of a job.

Maple Leaf Foods, one of Canada's largest food companies, has rapidly become a big player in pork production. Pork processing is a Can$5.8 billion business in Canada. In addition to competing for North American markets, the McCain's have their eyes on the expanding Asian market, one of the areas where pork consumption has been increasing. In three years, Canadian exports of fresh and chilled pork to Japan, for example, increased over six times to Can$38.7 million.

Over the last few years, the McCain family has been buying up competitors. In 1995 they bought Maple Leaf meats. Last fall they bought Burns Foods. For the past few months, Maple Leaf has been fighting to get control of Schneider, a pork processor based in Ontario.

The Schneider family, however, countered by promising Smithfield Foods Inc., the largest pork processor in the United States, controlling shares at a bid of $25 per share. Maple Leaf upped its bid to $29 per share to try to secure a deal.

"He says he's got to take over Schneider," Sanc told the Militant. "They have enough to pay three times the value of stocks for Schneider's, but maintain they can't give us money because they have to be competitive."

With the economic crisis in Asian markets, Canadian pork processors face increased pressure to undercut their competitors - not just for Asian sales, but for North American sales as well. In particular, they face off against U.S. producers who have succeeded in driving down wages, increasing line-speed, and worsening working conditions.

Attempting to play on nationalist sentiment, the Maple Leaf bosses argue that deep wage cuts are necessary because 13 U.S. pork plants have more than double the capacity of its largest plants.

For Maple Leaf, driving down the living standard of workers, getting rid of outdated facilities like the Edmonton plant, and restructuring production are key to becoming top dog in the long run. "I would imagine their earnings will be slightly lower this year than they might otherwise have been [without the strike] but this isn't the question for Maple Leaf. It's a question of what will happen three to five years down the road," analyst Palmer stated.

"The picket line is solid, but people are upset," explained Sanc. "A lot of people have been working here 20-30 years. We're talking about jobs that are labor intensive, where people are dropping dead with heart attacks on the line because of the speed. It's not just the money issues. People feel like we're treated like animals - it's the seniority, the 20-minute washroom breaks."

"I was a knife person at one time, but I started getting carpal tunnel. I took the meat off the neck bones. Then I got off the knife and went to a laborer's job," said striker Debbie Bernaski.

The company restarted negotiations at the two smaller processing plants in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and Hamilton, Ontario. According to strikers in Burlington, the union told the company they could forget about talks with the processing plants if they didn't talk to the union at the Burlington facility. The company has now agreed to negotiations for January 28 in Burlington.

Sanc summed up the importance of the strike. "We are the first piece of the dominoes. If we fall it's going to be a chain reaction," he explained. Bernaski recounted a discussion with a worker she knows at the Chrysler plant in Brampton. "I told him if they [the employers] go through with this then they're going to go for all the factories, all the unions, all the plants. So we have to stick to our guns."

Susan Berman is a member of United Steelworkers of America Local 5338 in Toronto.  
 
 
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