Militant

UFCW Local 175 members on picket line November 5 outside Quality Meat Packers slaughterhouse in Toronto. They fought for higher wages, won small pay raise.

The vote by members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 175 was 271-112 in favor of the proposed contract. The union bargaining committee had made a unanimous recommendation for approval of the offer. Approximately 190 workers did not participate in the vote, which was held from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in a hotel in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto.

The approved contract was almost identical to the company’s “final offer,” which strikers had rejected November 13 in a vote of 200-180. It includes small wage increases over three years.

The strike began November 1, following an October 28 meeting attended by about 400 of the 570 QMP workers. At that meeting, the company’s first offer, also recommended for approval by the bargaining committee, was rejected by 75 percent of the workers.

The first offer contained a signing bonus of $500 per worker. The company withdrew the bonus in its second and “final offer.” The proposal that was finally accepted contained a signing bonus of $300 paid in two installments—the first within two weeks of the ratification vote, and the second in “the first week of January 2006 for employees actively employed on both the date of ratification and January 1st, 2006.”

The new three-year contract includes wage increases of Can$1.15 to Can$1.75 (US$1 = Can$1.19) over the length of the deal, depending on classification, and minor improvements in the dental plan and pensions. The return to work agreement states that “the Company shall not discriminate against, threaten, harass, insult or treat in any adverse way any person for lawfully exercising his/her right to picket or to strike and in particular the Company shall not discipline or treat in any adverse way, any employee for any related activity during the labor dispute.”

“The strike was worth it, even though we didn’t get what we need, because the company now knows we want to be treated like human beings,” said a cutting room worker who asked not to be identified.

The QMP bosses made some headway during the walkout in wearing down the strikers through a campaign of intimidation. The owners claimed they had no more money to offer, and that the strikers were risking their jobs because the company would lose its contracts and its portion of the hog processing market to competitors such as the larger Maple Leaf Foods.

Last spring Maple Leaf signed a contract with its UFCW-organized workers similar to the QMP contract without a strike.

Company letters to workers implied that the bosses might shut the plant. This stance was contradicted by QMP spokesperson Karen Sample. In the November 27 issue of the national daily Globe and Mail, Sample said that regardless of the outcome of the vote the QMP owners have no intention of leaving the area despite demands by new condominium owners in walking distance of the plant that the company close down or move.

The day before the November 28 ratification vote, company officials made calls to many strikers urging them to get out and vote. “My supervisor left a message on my answering machine Saturday morning urging me to go the meeting and giving me directions on how to get there,” reported Troy Roberts, a sanitation worker with five year’s seniority.

One feature of the strike was the participation of workers from as many as 20 countries. They had been hired over the past six years, since a concession contract was imposed. “The company thought that Chinese workers would accept anything,” said one striker from the boning room, who did not want his name to be used. “They were wrong.”

The new contract did not reverse most of the 40 percent cuts in wages and benefits that took place when a two-month strike in 1998-99 failed to stop the concessions drive of the QMP bosses. This drive followed a pattern of concessions imposed on workers in the meatpacking industry across Canada and in the United states that began in the mid-1980s. Along with the monetary concessions came six years of speed-up on the line accompanied by a rising injury rate, longer hours, and verbal abuse of workers by foremen and management as the bosses increased productivity. Because of the conditions in the plant, the initial vote to reject the company offer and strike was in part a demand for dignity.

There are no new concessions in the contract that was approved. Early on in the negotiations between the company and the union bargaining committee, the bosses demanded contract language limiting the use of washroom time outside paid breaks to 30 minutes a week per worker. This was withdrawn after the majority of workers boycotted a company-sponsored “employee appreciation” lunch-time barbeque in protest.

The four-week strike affected the hog industry throughout Ontario. According to the Ontario Pork Marketing Board, a large portion of the approximately 28,000 hogs slaughtered by QMP each week had to be sent out of province, including to the United States, at considerable expense to the both the large industrial hog producers and working hog farmers. QMP, the number two hog slaughterhouse in Ontario, processes nearly one-quarter of the 115,000 hogs slaughtered per week in the province.

John Steele is a member of UFCW Local 175 at QMP and was one of the strikers.  
 
 
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