18 February, 2011A new agreement reached with Tenaris in Brazil sees a reduction of working time with no loss of wages, however at the Calgary plant in the U.S. the company has been uncooperative and is imposing lay-offs and mandatory shutdowns.
BRAZIL/USA: In a massive CNM-CUT union meeting the workers of Confab/Tenaris in Brazil in February approved the reduction of weekly hours worked without a reduction on wages. When the ministry registers the agreement at the plant the weekly hours will be 42 instead of 44. In addition the negotiations resulted in an increase of 1.4 per cent in wages, the payment of seven holidays, plus December 24 and 31. The employer recovered the "half hour process" during the bargaining process.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Tenaris management has decided to lay-off 81 workers of USW local 7226 at the Calgary plant as of February 18, 2011. Tenaris will also lay off 95 per cent of workers on March 28, 2011 for one week for maintenance issues, as well as a major plant shutdown for three weeks in July 2011. Only workers from the maintenance department will be at the plant, with a small crew of workers to handle any other orders from the yard/shipping department.
Tenaris has been very uncooperative with USW in the past six months and many grievances have been filed on seniority rights violations, the rights of workers to move to their bid jobs, and many other violations of the collective agreement with Tenaris. The Executive of USW 7226 will be asking its membership to move many of these Grievances to Arbitration and have an impartial, legal judgment rendered on these issues.