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Mining Labour Issues and History – Sudbury and Global

NEWS RELEASE (United Steelworkers): Voisey’s Bay Workers Ratify Five-Year Agreement

31 January 2011-Goose Bay, NL: Unionized workers at the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine in Labrador have ratified a five-year collective agreement, ending a bitter, 18-month strike against Brazilian mining giant Vale.

Members of United Steelworkers Local 9508 voted 88% in favour of a tentative deal reached by their negotiating team and Vale representatives. Vote results were released today, following balloting in a number of communities over the last several days.

“Our members are returning to work with their heads held high,” said Steelworkers staff representative Boyd Bussey. “They stood up for their families and their communities and fought for what they believed in.”

“This labour dispute was unnecessarily provoked and prolonged by a giant multinational corporation,” said Wayne Fraser, Steelworkers District Director for Atlantic Canada and Ontario.

“Our members deserve to be proud for standing up to this foreign corporation and for finally achieving a fair deal,” Fraser said.

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NEWS RELEASE: Vale announces ratification of new collective agreement with mine and mill operations employees in Voisey’s Bay

January 31, 2011 – Vale is pleased to announce that a new five-year collective agreement has been ratified by the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 9508 representing mine and mill operations employees at Voisey’s Bay, Labrador. The settlement marks the end of the strike that began August 1, 2009.

Highlights of the new five-year agreement include improvements to employee wages and the Defined Contribution Pension Plan, a cost-of-living allowance roll-in and changes to the employee bonus program. The agreement also includes a special $2000 Return to Work payment and an additional $2000 Retention Bonus payable three months following ratification of the new Collective Agreement.

“We are very pleased that our mine and mill operations employees have ratified the new Collective Agreement and we look forward to their return to work and the resumption of normal operations,” said Tom Paddon, General Manager of Vale’s operations in Newfoundland and Labrador. “It has been a very long and challenging time for everyone involved and we are pleased that that the strike is finally behind us,” Paddon said.

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Canadian Mining Town [Sudbury] Hits Bottom – by Michael T. Kaufman (New York Times – August/1984)

This article was originally published in the New York Times on August 13, 1984.

SUDBURY, Ontario, August 13, 1984 – the Manoir Bar sits on the floor of a valley that was gouged out by a meteor millennia ago. Until two months ago the men drinking in the Manoir worked for two large companies and earned some of the highest industrial salaries in Canada digging and processing the ore churned up by the meteor.

Now, over beers, they tried to explain to themselves and to a visitor how this recently prosperous city had become the place with the highest unemployment in Canada, in the northern hemisphere and, some said, in the industrialized world.

Last month the two giant nickel and copper companies around which ;this city of 135,000 grew, shut down operations and furloughed their workers because their stockpiled supplies far exceeded the demands of industrial users in the United States and Europe.

The 1,250-foot stack at Inco, which in flush times propelled acetic smoke all the way to Nova Scotia, now stands dormant like a stele from a lapsed civilization. The 13,000 miners and mill workers who in recent years have earned salaries averaging from 20,000 to 40,000 Canadian dollars a year, or about $16,000 to $32,000, are either using up the last of their vacation pay or are living on $200 a week in unemployment benefits, so called poky checks.

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Vale Inco saved Sudbury from becoming Valley of Death: Clement – by Carol Mulligan (July 18, 2009)

Carol Mulligan is a reporter for the Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

“There was going to be no buyer, there were going to be no jobs, there weren’t going to be any capital investments, there was going to be no employer. That was the Valley of Death that Sudbury faced.”  Tony Clement (July 18, 2009)


Sudbury is better off now than it was two and a half years ago when Vale Inco Ltd. bought the former Inco Ltd., says Canada’s Industry minister.

If the Brazilian-owned Companhia Vale do Rio Doce hadn’t bought it, Inco would “not exist, it would have been closed down, it would have been liquidated if there wasn’t a buyer,” said Tony Clement in a telephone interview late Friday afternoon.

“There was going to be no buyer, there were going to be no jobs, there weren’t going to be any capital investments, there was going to be no employer,” said Clement. “That was the Valley of Death that Sudbury faced.”

Clement was responding to charges by United Steelworkers international president Leo Gerard that the federal government should have forced Vale Inco to live up to commitments made when it purchased Inco.

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Clement’s Takeover Hangover [Vale, Inco, Sudbury]-by Andy Hoffman and Jacquie McNish (July 22, 2009)

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media. Originally published July 22, 2009

“There was going to be no buyer, [for Inco] there were going to be no jobs, [Sudbury] there weren’t going to be any capital investments, there was going to be no employer.” — Industry Minister Tony Clement

“He’s either sadly misinformed or he’s ignoring the facts because back in 2006 we were a very successful company. There were lots of companies trying to buy us, not just [Vale].”— Scott Hand, Inco’s former CEO

The wave of foreign takeovers that cut a swath through Canada’s resource sector in 2006 and 2007 has become a critical problem for Industry Minister Tony Clement as the new owners break their acquisition promises not to slash jobs and production.

Mr. Clement is under fire for ill-informed comments regarding the sale of nickel producer Inco to a Brazilian mining giant, and for taking an inconsistent approach to enforcing the commitments the foreign companies made in order to win Ottawa’s consent for the controversial deals.

Last week, the government took the extraordinary step of going to court to demand United States Steel Corp. meet job and production pledges that were part of its acquisition of Stelco Inc. in 2007. The move, a first in Canada, has shocked industry and legal observers who say that Industry Canada has been much more flexible with other foreign buyers.

But Mr. Clement then portrayed Inco’s acquirer, Brazil’s Vale SA, as a local saviour – even though Vale, too, is cutting jobs earlier than promised, closing operations and grappling with a strike. Mr. Clement said Sudbury, the site of Inco’s flagship nickel operations, would have become a “Valley of Death” if the Brazilians hadn’t bought the company for $19-billion.

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Ontario Mining Association Helps Create a Safer Mining Workplace Through Better Training

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.
 
 This posting came from the Ontario Mining Association’s 90th Anniversary Publication (October/2010): http://www.oma.on.ca/en/resources/OMAat90three.pdf

 

The Safety and Training Advisory Committee was formed in 2001 to provide the industry with a single voice concerning safety and training recommendations to the Ontario Mining Association’s board of directors and various safety associations, and to provide a sounding board for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities’ (MTCU) Mining Tripartite Committee. The tripartite committee consists of labour, management and government, and meets at least four times a year to discuss changes to the common core training program.
 
The mandate of the committee is to provide advice and recommendations to the OMA board of directors and industry employers on issues related to health and safety and employee training. When new legislation is proposed or there are changes to Canadian Standards Association (CSA) standards that affect the mining industry the committee discusses these changes.

Fred St. Jean is chair of the OMA’s Safety and Training Advisory Committee. He is currently superintendent of safety for Vale, Ontario Operations. His technical background is in mines engineering and he has worked underground in various capacities including supervisor, safety supervisor and general foreman operations.

St. Jean is proud of the fact that many of the committee members are active on other provincial health and safety fronts including the Mining Legislative Review Committee and its subcommit¬tees, the Mining Tripartite Committee and the Safety Association Advisory Committee. He acknowledges that he has “a very talented committee with a very experienced, enthusiastic, and very well-connected group of people on health and safety matters in the province.”

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Elliot Lake Uranium Mining History – Our Wild Atomic City – by Alan Phillips (Originally Published in Maclean’s Magazine – May 25, 1957)

Denison Mine was the largest uranium deposit in Elliot Lake, Ontario.

Here’s a Graphic Picture of Ontario’s Elliot Lake

A billion-dollar order for uranium
A $300-million spending spree to fill it
A lawless horde of transients
A Communist struggle to control mine workers
A serious outbreak of disease

Just off the Trans-Canada Highway skirting Lake Huron’s north shore, a buried vein of ore snakes north through the Algoma Basin in the shape of an upside-down S. It curves for ninety miles beneath the pineclad granite knolls, a mother lode that is spawning eleven giant uranium mines in the greatest eruption of growth since gold gave birth to Dawson City.

The hub of these mines is a chaotic city-to-be called Elliot Lake. Twenty-two months ago it was just a stand of timber dividing two lakes, so wild that a bulldozer leveling brush ran over a large black bear. Today it’s a prime example of a boom town, familiar symbol of dynamic growth – and trouble.

For a couple of months this spring Elliot Lake made headlines that had nothing to do with uranium. An outbreak of jaundice packed ninety victims into nearby Blind River’s 59-bed hospital. About three hundred cases were reported before the disease began to wane early last month. Provincial health officials insisted that the outbreak did not rate as an epidemic while union officials were demanding the mines shut down until the sewage system was improved.

Infectious disease is an age-old bugbear of the boom town, which has its other ageless features. It is the nation in miniature with its time span speeded up as in a silent movie.

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Vale Voisey’s Bay Workers Still On Strike – by Darren Cove, President, USW, Local 9508

Originally published August 2, 2010

Last week, Newfoundland and Labrador – and scores of our working families – were saddled with a dubious Canadian distinction, the result of a foreign corporation’s aggressive and unprecedented anti-labour agenda.

The mining strike at Voisey’s Bay, provoked last summer by Brazil-based corporate giant Vale, entered its second year on Sunday, Aug. 1. The strike has become the longest-ever labour dispute in the century-long history of former Inco Ltd. mining operations in Canada.

Perhaps most disturbing is the fact this dispute is being prolonged by Vale’s second-class treatment of Newfoundland and Labrador workers compared to Vale employees elsewhere in Canada.

Our union, United Steelworkers Local 9508, has offered to settle the Voisey’s Bay strike by accepting the same deal Vale reached last month with its employees in Ontario. But Vale is attempting to dictate that workers in our province — including many aboriginal employees — accept a lesser contract, with inferior bonuses and benefits, compared to the Ontario settlement.

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Vale Still Bitter Over Year-Long Sudbury Mining Strike – by John Fera

John Fera is the president of United Steelworkers Local 6500. He is retiring on August 1, 2010.

While United Steelworkers in Sudbury and Port Colborne are returning to work, it will take considerable time for many in our communities to overcome the pain and hardship of the year-long strike against Vale.

Indeed, over the last couple of weeks there has been consensus from all corners that it is essential for Vale to build respectful and productive relationships with its Canadian workers and their communities.

In this light, it is profoundly disappointing to see Vale’s top executives going out of their way to make public statements that show no interest in fostering trust, goodwill and respect with workers.

Vale’s CEO Roger Agnelli claims the strike was so prolonged because “the United Steelworkers has a long record of conflicts and strikes.” Well, I’m sorry Mr. Agnelli but the USW has been representing the miners in these communities for generations and in Vale’s first negotiations it has managed to extend their strike to more that 100 days longer than the longest ever strike at Inco.

Contracts for good wages, pensions and benefits typically have resulted from hard-nosed negotiations, short strikes and goodwill, until this unprecedented aggressive Vale approach.

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Canada and Sudbury are Very Important to Vale – by Vale CEO Roger Agnelli

Roger Agnelli - CEO ValeThe end of the strike that lasted nearly a year at Vale’s operations in Ontario, Canada, is very significant for our company, as we have overcome yet another challenge. Besides making our Canadian employees’ pension and variable pay regime more similar to the successful system already in place in other countries, the deal removes restrictions and interference in managing the company, thereby aligning our operational efficiency in Canada with our practices elsewhere.

“We are talking about returning management power to supervisors, for example, enabling them to do their work at the operational level in a more appropriate manner in order to achieve their objectives and ensure the safety of their team members, assuming responsibility for management and pursuing innovation,” said Vale’s CEO, Roger Agnelli, in an exclusive interview with Vale News (July 16, 2010). Read the full interview below.

“Canada is important for Vale and Vale is important for Canada. Our partnership is for the long term.” – Roger Agnelli

1) What are the main changes resulting from the approved collective agreement in Ontario?

The most important points that we agreed to are a defined contribution pension plan for new employees, variable pay based on performance and the removal of restrictions and interference in managing the company. In these three areas, we have simply aligned Sudbury and Port Colborne with the successful system that exists in other countries where we operate.

This issue about interference in management is very important, not only for me, as CEO, or for the executive director. We are talking about returning management power to supervisors, for example, enabling them to do their work at the operational level in a more appropriate manner in order to achieve their objectives and ensure the safety and efficiency of their team members. And we are also talking about further developing a meritocratic system. With this new variable pay plan, employees will be rewarded for the results they produce rather than just changes in the nickel price.

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Ensuring Sudbury Mining History Doesn’t Repeat Itself – by Claude Gravelle

Claude Gravelle is the Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt and the NDP’s Mining Critic. This column was published in the July 20, 2010 edition of Northern Life 

Earlier this month, we all breathed a sigh of relief as USW members ratified a new five-year agreement with Vale.

These workers deserve to be commended for their efforts. Their families, friends and neighbours also deserve to be commended for supporting them throughout this very difficult time. Having visited the Steel Hall regularly, I can attest to the generosity of community members and business owners who made significant contributions to the workers’ food bank for almost a year.

However, many workers lost their vehicles, homes and savings. Some families even fell apart. We cannot understate the impact this strike has had on so many people. We all know small and independent businesses throughout Greater Sudbury that also paid a price for this strike.

As an Inco employee, I lived through the previous record-holding strike of 1978-1979. It’s hard not to feel that history repeats itself sometimes. But this shouldn’t stop us from trying to move forward in way that prevents such devastating events from happening again.

And while much has been said and written about this strike, more analysis and reflection is both welcome and necessary. We need to look at the conditions that led to the strike, and the conditions that contributed to its longevity.

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The Vale Inco Stike of 2009-2010 Leaves a Bitter Legacy in Sudbury (16 Tons and What Do You Get?)- by Michael Atkins

Michael Atkins is the president of Laurentian Media Group matkins@laurentianmedia.com This column was published in the July 20, 2010 edition of Northern Life

The column was originally titled “16 Tons and What Do You Get” but was changed for web searches.

“Sixteen Tons” is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hills the following year. A 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one in the Billboard charts, while another version by Frankie Laine was released only in the United Kingdom, where it gave Ford’s version some stiff competition. Travis claimed authorship of the song, but a competing claim was made by George S. Davis.  (wiki)

Long strikes get forgotten everywhere except where they happen. Sometimes they get forgotten before they are over. The United Steelworker/Vale Inco fight to the finish this year had many twists and turns, some of them quite surprising. It will not soon be forgotten.

It became clear by mid-winter it was hopeless to try to introduce common sense. It was a strike over principal and neither party was prepared to give up their principal until they had won or had no choice.

It was an epic battle. To think that, after a year off work, and with tens of millions of dollars lost by the company, and the union suffering indignity after indignity (particularly the settlement of a sister union whose workers, in part, were doing the work of strikers), it took an eleventh-hour nudge (or was it an ultimatum) by the provincial Minister of Labour to get an agreement from both parties to refer their last issue (nine fired workers) to the Ontario Labour Relations Board for a decision.

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Excerpt from Until the End – by Adelle Larmour (The Story of John Gagnon-Health and Safety Union Activist)

Adelle Larmour is a journalist at Northern Ontario Business and Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal. Contact her at  untiltheend.larmour@gmail.com  to order a copy of Until the End.

Chapter 48 – The History of the Northeastern Regional Cancer Treatment Centre in Sudbury, Ontario

The idea of building a Northeastern Regional Cancer Treatment Centre gained strength in the early ’80s, when Sudbury citizens began lobbying for this centre of excellence despite the difficult economic conditions. Maureen Lacroix, a proactive personality who has either chaired or sat as an executive member on more than 20 organizations involving housing, job creation, and healthcare, played a lead role in the effort to establish this full-service Centre in the city.

As charge nurse in the emergency unit, and later, assistant director of nursing services at St. Joseph’s Hospital between 1958 and 1965, Lacroix immediately recognized a gap in the system during monthly cancer clinics hosted by the hospital and later by Laurentian Hospital (1974).   

It all took place in two little examining rooms in the emergency department at St. Joe’s. As many as 200 people could have been seen in the course of a day and a half. These were people who waited a long time to see a physician for life-and-death type of news.1

Although Sudbury could provide surgeries and some chemotherapy for cancer patients, advanced chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiotherapy2 were only available at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. Lacroix also realized that when the patients returned home, hospital personnel lacked the expertise to administer cancer-specific medicines.

Also, there were those people who would return from Toronto after having their surgeries and chemo- or radiotherapy that had residual chemotherapy drugs to be given. There really weren’t people who knew the protocol about these drugs or how they should be administered.

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[Vale Strike] In Sudbury it’s Restive, Not Festive – by Tony Van Alphen (Toronto Star-December 19, 2009)

Tony Van Alphen is a Business Reporter for the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. This article was originally published on Saturday, December 19, 2009.

Workers’ mettle gets test as Vale Inco strike drags into bitter northern winter , It’s a war zone here. Their tactics are designed to provoke us like never before. They’re not interested in getting back to bargaining.

SUDBURY–Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” is blasting from a satellite radio in the tent’s makeshift living room.

A couple of plush La-Z-Boy rockers and a couch surround a blazing wood stove. The fresh Christmas tree in the corner gives the place a cozy holiday feeling.

Three hearty men in heavy overcoats and toques hover around the stove, slap their gloves and exchange brotherly greetings. The song ends and they step outside into another world.

There’s not a lot of love or warmth there. They’re on the picket line just after sunrise a few days before Christmas at Vale Inco’s Clarabelle Mill.

It’s a flashpoint in the five-month standoff between some 3,100 workers and one of the world’s biggest mining companies.

The workers face a bitter wind, -20C temperatures and a company spending millions of dollars to keep them in line. Strikers walk the line and delay trucks and cars for 12 to 15 minutes before allowing them through to the sprawling mill up the road. Then, they walk some more.

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[Sudbury/Vale strike]Nickelled and Damned -by John Gray (Globe and Mail- March 26, 2010)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

This article was the cover story of the March 26, 2010 edition of the Globe and Mail’s monthly Report on Business magazine.

Down the road from the Copper Cliff smelter, where the Inco Superstack reaches 380 metres into a clear winter sky, striking Steelworkers stamp their heavy boots and feed a smoking fire pit with scrap wood. Massive ore trucks, engines growling, wait for permission to drive through the picket line. It is a familiar ritual; after 10 or 15 minutes, the picket captain signals the drivers to proceed and go about their business at the smelter—their business being strikebreaking.

When Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers walked off the job at the Vale Inco nickel mines, it was mid-July. The progression from agreeable summer weather to minus 20 C has been brutal. The best to be said about minus 20 is that it’s better than minus 30, just like strike pay of $200 a week is better than no pay at all. It’s hardly surprising that there’s little of the bravado that usually sustains picket lines.

The downbeat atmosphere may also reflect a sense among the strikers that the world has changed and that their strike has not been noticed by Canadians. There have been many strikes in Inco’s history—but every other one was decided in Canada. Now Inco is a subsidiary of a company based far away.

If the long stalemate in Sudbury had a sound, it might be that of the other shoe falling. When the takeover binge of the mid-2000s saw many of Canada’s pre-eminent companies disappear into foreign hands, the debate over the “hollowing out” of the domestic economy was muted. After all, Vale, like other acquisitors, made undertakings to preserve jobs and, in fact, to carry on much like before.

Now, it appears, things look very different to Vale.

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