September 3, 2009 - No. 159

Forestry Workers Fight for the Dignity of Labour
and a Pro-Social Self-Reliant Economy

Manitoba
• Lock Out of Powerview-Pine Falls Workers: Oppose the Tembec Dictate for Anti-Labour Concessions!

Northen Ontario
• "We Have to Find the Ways to Be Able to Control What Is Being Done with Our Natural Resources" - Interview with Al Simard, President, Saving the Region of Ontario North Group
• "We Want to Assume Our Own Future" - Interview with Rick Isaacson, Chair of Smooth Rock Falls Strategic Task Force Committee

• September 7: Labour Day 2009 Calendar of Events

Manitoba -- Lock Out of Powerview-Pine Falls Workers

Oppose the Tembec Dictate
for Anti-Labour Concessions!

At midnight on September 1, forestry monopoly Tembec locked out the workers at its Powerview-Pine Falls mill in Manitoba. Over 250 production workers, members of Local 3-1375 of the United Steelworkers (USW) and about 20 office workers organized in Local 216 of the Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union (COPE) were locked out when their collective agreement expired at midnight on September 1. Negotiations had just started on August 13, but the forestry monopoly had no intention of negotiating with the workers; it wanted only to impose on them its dictate for anti-labour concessions. According to Tembec, accepting these concessions would have meant that workers were "responsible" and willing to negotiate, but rejecting or even questioning them would be a sign that workers did not want to "negotiate" and the axe must fall on them and this small community of just over 1,000 people located 132 km northeast of Winnipeg. The mill, which produces newsprint by thermo-mechanical means, is one of the largest employers in the community and most of the workers live in the area.

The concessions that are being demanded amount to a 35 percent cut in wages and benefits. More job cuts are expected at the mill that has already lost over a hundred workers (from 350 to 250) in just a couple of years. This year, Pine Falls workers have been laid off four times for a total of 12 weeks and the lockout itself follows on the heels of a shutdown period. The longest shutdown was a six-week period in June and July. The other three shutdowns -- one over the Christmas-New Year period, another in February and one that began August 11 -- were two weeks each.

"The company is holding true to an ultimatum style of collective bargaining," said USW area supervisor Wayne Skrypnyk in a press release. "It threatened a shutdown on September 1 if it didn't get its way and now it is proceeding. [...] Our members and the people of Powerview-Pine Falls have already suffered enough through the current economic downturn. A lockout on September 1, after contract talks just started on August 13, does not send a positive signal to workers or the community. Tembec has to act responsibly."

Cam Sokolowski, President of USW Local 3-3175, told the Winnipeg Free Press, "We want to go back to work as soon as we can, but they are trying to gut our collective agreement."

Tembec spokespersons were very blunt in expressing their dictate. "The newsprint industry is in the most challenging period it has ever faced. While current pricing levels and the higher valued Canadian dollar have aggravated this situation, the principal and critical issue is the dramatic oversupply of newsprint relative to current and foreseen demand," said Chris Black, Executive Vice President and President of the Paper Group. "Simply put, there will be additional mill closures and sites must be cost competitive in order to survive. Tembec has an overall strategy for improving the competitive position of Pine Falls, a critical element of which is to achieve an immediate and significant reduction in labour cost per tonne produced. However, it appears that serious negotiation on the critical cost issues will not be allowed to occur."

While Tembec slanders the workers as a cost of production and is very clear in delivering its ultimatum that this "cost" must be reduced, they cannot explain how labour concessions are going to solve any problem of the forestry industry and of the newsprint sector in particular. They fail to explain how a transfer of wealth from the pockets of the producers to the coffers of the forestry monopoly will resolve problems that are caused by the inherent contradictions of the industry in which workers produce the wealth in the form of pulp, paper and wood products but this wealth is expropriated by the private owners who use it to build their private empires in competition with other private empires in a deadly race for profits and domination. The monopolies attempt to split forestry workers by lining them up behind each private empire to try and pit them against each other. Not only does this drive down their working and living conditions, but it prevents them from utilizing their collective experience and creativie energies to build an industry that contributes to nation-building and specifically to the well-being of the forestry communities.

The mill in Powerview-Pine Falls is by far the community's largest employer. The area enjoys bountiful forestry and hydro resources and a skilled workforce trained for more than three generations in producing pulp and paper. Tembec must treat the workers and the community with utmost respect and must also be reminded that it is using natural resources that belong to the nation. This should be more than enough for the forestry monopoly to back off from its arrogant dictate for concessions and killing of livelihoods but the opposite is happening. Tembec is openly advocating that wiping out competitors and its own facilities and workers is the only course and everybody should submit or else be crushed. It sees no way out than taking this deadly race for domination and profits to the end even if it means taking the workers and the community down with it. It is so dead set in its morbid outlook that it cannot even accept workers expressing their opinions and challenging and rejecting anti-labour concessions.

No worker in Canada can accept the definition of "negotiation" that Tembec and the other monopolies are presenting, according to which anti-labour concessions are what has to be discussed and agreed upon at the bargaining table or else all hell is unleashed against the workers. All workers must demand that Tembec immediately stop its lock out and enter into discussions with the Powerview-Pine Falls workers on the basis of their own demands.

Northen Ontario

"We Have to Find the Ways to Be Able to Control What Is Being Done with Our Natural Resources"

- Interview with Al Simard, President,
Saving the Region of Ontario North Group (STRONG) -

TML: What are your main concerns and demands at this time?

Al Simard: We have many issues on the table at the moment. One is the need to revisit the Softwood Lumber Agreement (SLA) between the United States and Canada. It is causing major problems. For example, it openly promotes the shipment of raw logs to the United States by exempting them from the export tax. Shipping raw logs to the U.S. has become very common in BC. This means the exporting of not only our raw materials, but of our jobs. Our natural resources should be processed here in Canada and this would greatly assist our forestry communities to grow and prosper. The SLA also imposes heavy penalties on governments that assist the forestry industry and the forestry workers in Canada. It gives decision-making power on the fate of our industry and our communities to the U.S. We think that this issue of affirming our sovereignty on our natural resources is very important. We are not saying that we should not export any resources but we have to address this problem that there is very little manufacturing infrastructure to process our natural resources in Ontario or across Canada and that the SLA is one of the factors at play in this matter. We should not be merely in the business of extracting natural resources in order to ship them to the U.S. but process these resources in a way that serves the people and, first and foremost, the people who live in the resource regions such as Northern Ontario, whether it is the workers and their families, the First Nations, the small businesses, etc.

We are very concerned also about the problem of wood allocations. STRONG was born out of the struggle against mill closures in Northern Ontario and we have always been active on this matter. According to us, if a mill shuts down, we have to make sure that the resources remain in the area in which the mill was operating and are put in the service of restarting the mill with the aim of sustaining the community. We have seen cases where big multinationals buy mills with the intent of shutting them down in order to obtain the wood licenses. When a mill shuts down, wood supply is redirected to other mills that belong to the same multinational, or it is traded and very often shipped out of the region. People see with anger loads and loads of wood that was harvested and processed in the area being redirected to other locations and they are left without resources. We also see huge multinationals finding it more profitable to become hydro producers and sell it to the grid instead of using the hydro facilities to maintain the forestry operations. One of the things they do is to sell their dams to other private companies. Not only are the forestry communities deprived of their forestry resources but of their hydro resources as well. And the most troubling part in all this is that the governments, including the Ontario government, are facilitating handing over all this power to these multinationals instead of defending the interests of the Northern communities. Without the wood and without hydro resources where is the incentive to invest in restarting production? There is no investing to maintain the operations. The machines are run down, our resources are getting shipped for a quick buck. The situation is so absurd that sometimes a big corporation will shut down a mill and then make sure that there cannot be another buyer so that a competitor cannot take over. You cannot call that economic development for the North. We did a lot of work against all this, and we were part of large mobilizations of the people and in some cases the people were successful for example, in preventing AbitibiBowater from selling its hydro dams in Iroquois Falls.

We say that the communities, the town councils, must have first bid when a mill is closed or when hydro facilities are sold so that we keep in our hands the instruments we need to develop and prosper and to keep our people living and working in the area. We have to find the ways to be able to control what is being done with our natural resources and not merely hand them over to these huge multinationals, which is what the governments are doing. The governments are supposed to work in the peoples' best interest not in the multinationals' best interest. If one of these multinationals buys a mill, OK, it can do it, but it must be obligated by the government to process the resource where it is being harvested so that our people can work. Not only are the governments allowing these companies to redirect the wood, but they do not put in place any support program for the affected communities. Our people are supposed to fend for themselves.

I want to say in conclusion that STRONG is known for its mass actions, its actions to bring people together and make the people work together to solve these problems. We have organized rallies, demonstrations and roadblocks, as well as meetings with discussion panels to make everybody aware of what is going on and see what can be done to change the situation. We are open to anybody who wants to see a real future and not the downfall of Northern Ontario.

In conclusion, I want to wish good success to the work of TML in the new season.

"We Want to Assume Our Own Future"

- Interview with Rick Isaacson, Chair of Smooth Rock Falls
Strategic Task Force Committee -

TML: What is the work that your committee is doing?

Rick Isaacson: Our task force committee was established about 8 months ago when Tembec made public that it was planning to dismantle the pulp mill that it closed in 2006. This pulp mill had been for a very long time the largest employer in our community which has just over 2,000 people. Smooth Rock Falls is a small forestry community in Northeastern Ontario which is one of the many single industry towns of Northern Ontario. In 2006, Tembec closed the mill, first for a so-called indefinite period of time and then it declared that the closure was permanent. Over 220 workers lost their jobs when the mill closed. I myself worked there for 34 years.

There was an original task force that was established at the time of the closure, made up of representatives of labour, Tembec and the town. This task force did a lot of work, including feasibility studies to see how the mill could be restarted, and we even found new investors a number of times who were interested to restart the mill but each time Tembec found so-called criteria to stall the procedures and the mill could not be sold.

In the summer of 2008 there was a town meeting in which Tembec participated and it became clear that they were refusing to sell the mill. They were badmouthing it, that it was old, that nobody would ever be interested in restarting it but the fact is that they simply wanted to kill it.

It was at that point that we decided to establish the new task force in which Tembec of course does not participate because it has made it clear that they want to dismantle it. Our task force is a sub-committee of the Economic Development Committee (EDC) of the town. It makes recommendations to the EDC and an important part of its work is to challenge the powers-that-be for example the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Environment, to step up to the plate and take up their responsibilities towards the community.

As far as Tembec is concerned, it is telling us that they may give us the building, but they want to strip it of its infrastructure, like the turbines and the boilers. It has taken measures to either sell this infrastructure or to move it to other locations. We do not need a vacant building. We need a facility that has that infrastructure that is needed to resume production and show that we have a real viable project.

TML: One of the big issues has always been the power dam that Tembec has and used to feed the mill with hydro power.

RI: Yes and it is still big issue. We told Tembec that we are very interested in the dam but Tembec told us that they have no intention of parting with it. They are making good money with it by producing hydro and selling it to the Ontario grid. They rather would not sell it but Tembec's creditors are pushing hard for it to be sold so that the money is used to pay part of the huge debt that Tembec has contracted over the years.

Our position is very clear. It has never been the intent or the letter of the water lease agreement of the government with the company running the mill, which dates back close to 100 years, that the power facility would be used for anything other than feeding the mill so that the people of our community can work. The role of the dam was to provide power to an operating mill and we disagree with the way it is being used right now. Tembec is making good money with it but there is absolutely no return for the community. We are saying that if Tembec wants to sell the dam, the community must have the first power of refusal for at about 18-20 months so that we can make sure that the sale is in the interest of a project that keeps the community working. For sure Tembec does not like us to be in the picture and would like to proceed with the dam the way it likes but this is unacceptable for us.

Then there is the issue of the fibre. We are facing a huge problem in Northern Ontario which is that while the government has jurisdiction over the public woodland, it is in fact Tembec in our region that has the operating licenses over the land; it has the actual control over what is harvested or not. People who need wood have to go to Tembec and ask. The Ministry of Natural Resources has the discretion and power to do something to secure fibre for the people but the experience is that it washes it hands and lets Tembec have total control over the fibre in our area.

So we are facing all these issues and this is why we are saying that we are ready to make a move forward and assume our own future but we have been raped of our resources. We feel like Tembec and the Ontario government are like somebody who is selling you a car but they have control of the gas and you can't get any.

TML: What do you want to see happening?

RI: We are ready to take the route of green energy for the future of the mill. Everywhere we hear about green energy and diversification, but we need leverage for that, we need money, equipment, hydro, fibre and so on. In Northern Ontario, we do not have a lot of people but we have the resources and we are fighting for them.

We want the possibility of getting these buildings with some content into them, not vacant buildings. We want from the government a guarantee of fibre supply for a period of time, at least 3-4 years so that we can start a new project. There should be some revenue going back to the community from the money made with the hydro power and we want to make sure that if the dam is sold the community has an effective say on who is going to buy it and that the vocation of the dam will be to provide power to the mill. There are investors that are interested and we want a project over which the community has some control.

We feel that we may have been gullible for a while sitting on this original task force and observing these stalling tactics which made sure that no project could go ahead. Every time we raised something concrete, we heard Tembec say that if the community keeps the resources in its hands, whether the fibre or the hydro power then Tembec would be forced to close other facilities in the North. People have been pitted against one another for too long. Each community has to be looked after and has to have a future. We are all in the same boat.

September 7 -- Labour Day 2009

Calendar of Events

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