BY JOHN STALEY
TORONTO - At a Militant Labor Forum here last month
involving an exchange between farmers and unionists, Gary
Gilliard told participants, "I went to the demonstration at
Queen's Park in December last year because we had been losing
$5,000 a week for months selling hogs." He was referring to a
protest of 700 hog farmers.
Gilliard, a hog farmer in Forest, Ontario, spoke on a panel with Jose Pereira, a butcher at the Quality Meats hog- slaughtering plant who had returned to work a week earlier after an eight-week strike. The third panelist was Guy Tremblay, a member of the United Steelworkers of America who had been building support through his union for both the struggle of the hog farmers and Quality Meat strikers.
As soon as the meeting opened for questions and comments from the audience, Gilliard turned to Pereira and asked if the freezers in the plant were full before the strike. "Processors told us that they couldn't pay us much because there was an oversupply of hogs and the freezers were full," said Gilliard.
"Not true" replied Pereira, explaining that the hogs are for export and that there was no problem like that.
In response to another question about the falling price of hogs, Gilliard said he thought that the banks and meatpacking companies encourage the hog farmers to produce more to drive the price down.
In March 1998 United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members ended a four-month strike against Maple Leaf Foods, Canada's largest meat processor. UFCW members ended up taking up to 40 percent wage cuts, a pattern which Quality Meats forced on its employees in the just-ended strike.
"Instead of making millions, Shwartz, the owner is going to make billions," Pereira said. "My wages have gone from $17.26 an hour to $11.26 (Can$1 = US$0.65)."
Gilliard expanded on the situation he and his brothers face as well as other farmers. "We built a new barn in 1979," he said. We got more per hog then than now and prices of everything else have gone up. We can't invest in new equipment now. We pay $100,000 in interest a year for bank loans, with a turnover of $1.5 million. We actually each earn $15,000 to live on."
Pereira's first language is Portuguese, as is true for many Quality Meat workers. He complained that "here in Canada people are just concerned about money. They just stay home by themselves. In Portugal they wouldn't take a wage cut."
"You can't measure what we have done at the end of a strike just by what's in the contract," explained Guy Tremblay. "It's always better to fight and if we make links with each other we come out stronger.
"There is more resistance today," Tremblay said. "Links are being made and this is new." He pointed to the support from workers on strike to farmers in the United States who are fighting to defend their land and protesting racist discrimination fostered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"I think the December protest (at Queen's Park) was good," said Gilliard. "If you don't protest nobody knows what is happening to you."
"The next step is to support other strikers," said another steelworker.