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7 November, 2005
Negotiations resume today in the bitter 10-day strike at Stora Enso’s Langerbrugge paper mill in Gent, Belgium.
ICEM affiliate ABVV-FGTB and other unions are striking over local mill management’s callous style of labour relations. Managers have pitched ultimatums and reactive measures at the workforce of 330 in the newsprint and publications papers operation since workers requested standard wage talks last spring. Then, management agreed to negotiations but only if 24 job cuts went along.
Workers rejected a miniscule €.12-an-hour pay hike with a 98% vote and Langerbrugge managers slammed the door on further dialogue. Even after the brewing dispute came to national level, management took an antagonistic bargaining posture and the matter went to a national conciliation.
Unions issued a formal strike notice to Stora Enso if the conciliator’s wage offer was voted down in a vote of workers by 66.67%. The conciliator’s offer of €.17-an-hour failed by a 78.7% vote, and workers struck on 28 October.
Last week, paper mill management escalated the dispute by petitioning courts to impose a €1,000-a-day fine on the unions for every worker turned away at plant gate pickets. To date, only 20 or so of the 330 workers have crossed picket lines, and those are employees in ancillary positions who fear their services will be contracted out.
Since the strike began, workers responded to a survey with 61.5% saying management’s ultimatums were unacceptable, and they would continue a course demanding mutual respect in social dialogue. Langerbrugge bosses, however, have continued, in the words of one union leader, “ill style of management” by threatening to call off the start of talks today if workers were to receive picket-line support and solidarity from other workers.
Managers have portrayed the dispute as “all about pay” in the trade press, but, in fact, the dispute in Gent is about an abusive and dictatorial approach to collective negotiations by Stora-Enso managers.