Vol.63/No.41 November 22, 1999
British Columbia port workers fight lockout
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BY BERNICE BRANDON VANCOUVER, British Columbia—At 4:30 p.m. November 7, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) set up picket lines at nine British Columbia ports in response to a lockout imposed on the 2,000 dock workers by the B.C. Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA), the representative of 71 port companies. The bosses gave a 72-hour notice of a lockout on November 4 after the union refused to vote on their final offer. Longshoremen have been without a contract since June 1998.
The shutdown of Vancouver's port—normally one of North America's busiest—will reportedly cost the Canadian economy $89 million a day. Even before the lockout began Gordon Campbell, the Liberal opposition leader in the provincial legislature, had called on the federal government to urge the employers to lift their lockout and also to consider back-to-work legislation.
Longshoremen on the picket line at Roberts Bank, 25 miles south of Vancouver, said contracting out is the biggest issue in their dispute with the port companies. Sultran, a Calgary-based company that owns the Pacific Coast Terminal Dock in Port Moody, awarded a three-year contract to a nonunion firm to test the quality of sulphur shipments. The employers have said that they cannot address this issue in the contract because Sultran is not a member of the BCMEA.
Pointing to employer attacks on longshore workers in England and Australia, Rob Visser, who has worked on the docks for 13 years, told the Militant, "You can't give them an inch; you can't even let a fingernail in the crack or they'll take a mile."
Since the BCMEA was formed in 1966, there have been 14 labor disruptions at the port. During five job actions the federal government passed back-to-work legislation.
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