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15 May, 2012
The current propensity by multinationals to lock-out Canadian workers when they refuse cutbacks to their work standards continues. On 5 May, Evraz North America, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Luxembourg-based Evraz Group, locked out 105 union members of Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 551 in Camrose, Alberta.
The lockout comes three months after expiration of a prior labour agreement and more tellingly, comes during a boom cycle of steel pipe manufacturing, with the Camrose mill residing squarely and profitably inside the booming bitumen oil production fields of western Canada.
Evraz is seeking elimination of the defined benefit pension scheme for new employees, cuts in retiree benefits for future pensioners, and has offered pay rates in a new three-year contract that are less than what it agreed to at union-represented tubular pipe factories in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Calgary, Alberta, late last year. The company also seeks to slash vacation benefits in Camrose.
Meanwhile, due to an acute shortage of skilled workers in the Canadian tar sands, the Camrose factories have been unable to hire enough metalworkers to operate around-the-clock operations and even before the lockout, the company has been stretched thin in meeting existing orders from oil- and gas-producing firms.
“It is completely unfathomable that workers in the oil and gas industry working in the hottest economy in North America are being attacked and threated to give back long fought gains,” said CAW National Representative Todd Romanow.
Todd Romanow
Last year, the United Steelworkers (USW) set up a global Unity Council for workers and their unions of the Evraz Group. In a message to USW Local 6673 in Calgary and USW Local 5890 in Regina, Romanow wrote:
“At the heart of this attack is the removal of our defined benefits plan and retiree benefits for future employees but make no mistake, the fight is bigger than that as it is an attack from a multinational conglomerate on working people and the middle class.” He added it is “all in the name of corporate greed and insatiable profits.”
The Evraz Group is controlled by holding companies connected to the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, owner of UK’s Chelsea football club of the English Premier League. It is Russia’s largest steelmaker, operates iron ore and coal mines throughout the world, and is North America’s largest producer of tubular pipe and second largest maker of steel plate.
In Camrose, a facility Evraz got in 2007 with the US$2.3 billion acquisition of US-based Oregon Steel Mills, the company operates two pipe mills, one making 16-inch piping and casing for drilling and transport of oil and natural gas, the other producing large-diameter pipe used in transmission lines.