9 August, 2010
Trade unionists of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) ratified a three-year labour agreement with a subsidiary of Votorantim Cimentos of Brazil on 29 July, ending a 20-week strike at a cement plant in Bowmanville, Ontario. The ratification vote, by 58%, reflected dissatisfaction by the plant’s 87 workers for getting stuck with an inferior pension plan in two years time.
And the outcome of the strike itself depicts the uneven playing field in collective negotiations when an employer can dictate terms with no law in place to prevent the use of scab labour during a dispute.
The chief issue was the Brazilian company’s subsidiary, St. Mary’s Cement, demand that a change was necessary from a defined benefit pension plan to a defined contribution plan. Nowhere in negotiations could the company prove that the current pension plan needed the financial relief that a weaker defined contribution plan would deliver. St. Mary’s was also seeking wage and work-rules cuts.
Negotiations, which resumed only in mid-July, did see the company move on some points, but the new agreement will see the defined contribution plan take effect in September 2012. Cement workers will get a C$1,000 lump sum pay-out both in 2010 and 2011, and will get a 2% wage increase in 2012.
CAW President Ken Lewenza
CAW Local 222 members in southern Ontario did prevent the company from outsourcing quarry operations and control room positions. Under the back-to-work protocol, staff began reporting to jobs on 4 August, with the last of the workers to be back on 16 August.
“The situation we experienced at St. Mary’s Cement over the last number of months is just one example of how foreign-owned corporations, in this case Votorantim Cimentos, have been allowed to buy Canadian resource companies and wreak havoc on the workforce with few, if any, obligations to the country,” stated CAW President Ken Lewenza.
“Congratulations to these workers for having the courage to stand up for their hard earned gains, including their pension, where our government has failed to do so.”
Votorantim is a privately-held São Paulo-based industrial conglomerate that controls one-third of the Brazilian cement market. It purchased Lafarge’s Blue Circle cement operations in the US and Canada in 2001 and revived the original name of the company, St. Mary’s Cement.