23 January, 2012
Some 80 buses and numerous car caravans converged on London, Ontario, Saturday, 21 January, in boisterous disagreement to Caterpillar Inc.’s hardened lockout of 650 members of the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) union. Fair estimates placed the number of people attending the CAW and Ontario Federation of Labour’s (OFL) Day of Action at 15,000.
Caterpillar’s Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), part of its Progress Rail Services Corp., makers of train locomotives, locked out members of CAW Local 27 on New Year’s Day in an egregious exhibition of corporate might and spite to wrest C$30 million from a single workforce in collective negotiations.
The Day of Action at Victoria Park across from the town of the south-western Ontario saw the OFL distribute red scarves to the throng as a symbol of resistance. A rock group warmed up the protestors with Buffalo Springfield’s Something’s Happening Here and following a dozen or so speeches, a good portion of those assembled marched to factory gates in east London to join picketers.
CAW President Ken Lewenza concluded the speeches with an impassioned oratory on the current state of collective negotiations in Canada, where multinationals hide behind a Conservative government and gouge working families of their livelihoods to booster profit sheets.
Ken Lewenza
“This struggle started three weeks ago,” said Lewenza. “But in the last five years, 450,000 manufacturing workers in Canada were asked to go home and say to their young children they lost their jobs through no fault of their own.”
He demanded that EMD quit the lockout and return to the bargaining table, something the company has refused to do so far in the cold of this Canadian winter. CAW Local 27 President Tim Carrie reminded those protesting that “Caterpillar has a history of beating down workers and getting away with it.
“Not this time!”
Another speaker was President Bruce Klipple of the ICEM-affiliated United Electrical, Radio, Machine Workers’ of America (UE), whose union also represents workers in family-supporting jobs at an EMD competitor in the US – General Electric. He said the obvious; that a downward swing in wages and benefits in electric diesel manufacturing in London cannot and will not be tolerated.
Bruce Klipple
Other speakers included Sid Ryan, OFL President, Ken Georgetti, Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President, and CAW Local 27 Chairman of the EMD bargaining unit, Bob Scott. London Mayor Joe Fontana had sharp words for Canadian Premier Stephen Harper, who used the diesel locomotive factory as a backdrop to tout jobs and investment when Caterpillar/EMD bought it in 2010 but has been silent and absent since the lockout began.
In bargaining that began in May 2011 and carried through a seven-month contract extension, the vile American company did not move once from its stand of reducing average wages of C$35-an-hour to C$16.50, and cutting all benefits by 50%.