Two weeks earlier, the unionists had voted to reject the company’s “final offer” after the bosses attempted to split the union by offering a much improved pension plan for the 380 workers who will be eligible to retire in the next four years. Labatt employs some 950 workers at its plant here in Lasalle, a Montreal suburb.

At the onset of the strike, the most contentious question centered on the company’s efforts to do away with a clause in the old contract that virtually prevented it from contracting out production, warehouse, and delivery jobs to nonunion outside agencies. Under the new agreement, the company can hire from outside agencies, but only after all negotiated recall rights have expired.

“We protected most of our union members, but not the jobs themselves,” said Pierre Rousse, a forklift operator who has worked at Labatt for 16 years. “The door is now open for contracting out and I’m worried about what the company is going to do over the life of the contract.”

One of the main demands of the strike was for access to full-time jobs for nearly 150 temporary workers. In a press release issued on the first day of the strike, Robert Daneau, the union president, explained: “These temporary workers have been here for 10 to 15 years, with no seniority and no benefits. Yet they do the same jobs for half the paycheck.” The new contract will allow 104 of these temporary workers to get permanent jobs within the next three years. Workers hired after 1998 will have recall rights only for one year in case of layoffs.

Union members also won wage increases totaling 14 percent over the life of the seven-year contract.

From the outset of the strike, Labatt hired Best, a private security firm, to insure the free circulation of delivery trucks to help break the strike. Best agents often harassed strikers, sometimes cutting them off when they attempted to follow these trucks to identify drivers and their destinations. A court injunction limited the number of pickets permitted at the gate.

The union, for its part, registered a formal complaint against Labatt for multiple violations of Quebec’s “antiscab” law. The complaint points to the use of managers to do an array of beer production and delivery jobs. And although the law allows for the company to liquidate stocks, weeks after the strike began government inspectors pointed to the fact that levels of beer stocked in tanks were higher, not lower than at the beginning of the strike, an indication that beer was being trucked in from other plants to meet high-season demands.

Labatt is owned by the Belgium-based company Interbrew, the world’s third largest in the industry. Workers at the Lasalle brewery, the biggest in Canada, had been without a union contract since December 31. Workers had decided to leave the Teamsters and the new union obtained its accreditation with the CSN on February 28.

“In some ways, we went back with less than what we had when we went out,” said Rousse. “But on the up side, we’ve seen our boss’s real face. Like all bosses, Labatt wants to get rid of relatively well-paid union jobs. We held them back a little on that.”

A few days before the contract vote at Labatt, the recently elected Liberal government of Quebec premier Jean Charest announced its intention to broaden the use of contracting-out in both the public and private sectors. In an opening shot against the unions, Charest is taking aim at Article 45 of the Quebec Labor Code, which stipulates that when a company is bought out or moves to another location, the union maintains its standing at the company for a year.

Normand Faubert, vice-president of the Labatt Brewery Workers Union, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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