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23 August, 2010
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the US, the United Steelworkers’ (USW) Paper Sector Bargaining Conference was held from 17-19 August, with some 500 local union leaders further refining a common negotiations agenda aimed at synchronizing working terms and conditions for 100,000 unionised paperworkers in North American.
The conference also served as another springboard for Workers Uniting, the joint cooperative organization formed by the USW and Unite the Unite of the UK that is a registered trade union in four countries. Ten shop-floor trade union leaders from paper and printing plants in the UK attended, as did pulp and paper union leaders from Australia, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and South Africa.
The conference took a hard look at management operated behavioral-based safety programmes compared to the preferable process safety alternatives, and the USW thoroughly analysed a comprehensive safety and health survey it did a year ago from among local unions of some 30 pulp and paper companies.
Linda Pollock, a shop-floor leader at HarperCollins book publishing in the UK and Unite member, addresses the USW paper conference
But the main focus at the bi-annual conference was to shape common bargaining agenda, a process the union’s pulp and paper leadership has honed in recent years in order to regain bargaining clout after decades of mill-by-mill bargaining in the US pulp and paper sector. Delegates did that last week through some 30 break-out sessions that brought local branches of the same company together.
In one, the MeadWestvaco council of trade unions, USW trade unionists elected Iain Eid, a Unite activist from a MeadWestvaco packaging plant in the UK, as spokesperson, further cementing the trans-Atlantic Workers Uniting bond.
USW Executive Vice President and ICEM Executive Committee Member Jon Geenen, who heads this sector for the union, opened the conference by reporting that since 2007, due to dire economic circumstances that have caused mill shutdowns, bankruptcies, and coupled with production offshoring in search of cheaper labour, the USW’s largest industrial sector has lost 100,000 members, and dropped from holding 846 collective agreements to 750.
The global panel included Simon Mofokeng (right) of South Africa, who told of the victimization of union activists in his country by Sappi, and Fred Wilson (center) of CEP in Canada, who told how his union retained pattern bargaining in eastern Canada last spring
Despite this, the USW paper sector has achieved 17 master agreements in which partial framework terms are common within a company, and successfully negotiated successorship language for 50,000 workers. In the absence of adequate US labour law, this means that in the event of an asset sale of a mill or takeover of a company, the new employer must honour the collective agreement and retain the unionized workforce.
Expanding successorship language in all collective agreements of the sector was one of 13 bargaining priorities formulated at the conference. Others include strengthening health and safety language based on recommendations made from the health and safety survey, called “Papered Over: Safety and Health in US Paper Mills,” contract term lengths of three years unless other circumstances prevail, and holding the line on 80/20 health insurance coverage, meaning employers pay 80% of health care premiums under the privatized US health care system.
Early this year, members of USW Local 1050 in Michigan at a Pratt/Visy paper plant wrote to workers at the Tumut mill of Visy in New South Wales, Australia, encouraging them to join the CFMEU. Alex Millar (left) presented the USW paper converting unit a flag signed by Australian paperworkers at Tumut who favour unionization. At center, USW District Two Assistant Director Art Kroll and Pratt/Visy unit chairman Mike Prins. At right, USW District Two Director Mike Bolton
Other priorities relate to maintenance of defined benefit retirement plans, maintaining current vacation schemes, and addressing adequate staffing levels, a huge threat to safety in industrial settings where employers have been reluctant to re-hire workers when recovery and increased production begins.
The conference heard from USW President Leo Gerard who told trade union leaders that America was at a crossroads in upcoming national mid-term elections. He said the US either continues on a path of people-friendly government initiatives now underway by President Barack Obama and Democrats, or a return to the regressive social policies of the Bush era.
One panel during the conference featured union leaders from several paper-producing countries and their perspectives on future growth or decline, and trade union matters in their respective countries. That panel consisted of Jouko Ahonen, President of Paperiliitto of Finland; Christer Larsson, an economist for Pappers Union of Sweden; Fred Wilson, Executive Assistant to the President, Communications, Energy, Paperworkers (CEP) Union of Canada; Alex Millar, Federal Secretary of the Paperworkers Branch of Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU); Simon Mofokeng, General Secretary of South Africa’s Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union (CEPPWAWU) of South Africa; and Peter Ellis, National Officer of the GMB.