After a high level meeting between company management and union leadership on Thursday October 29, the parties have agreed to resume bargaining and work towards finalizing a new collective agreement.

“After having a face to face meeting, the union has agreed to resume bargaining and we hope to have a deal in place to vote on November 5 instead of taking a strike vote,” said CAW National Representative Todd Romanow.

“Both parties are in full agreement that needlessly worrying the public is not our intention but rather to come to a fair agreement for the employees and the company,” said Romanow.

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It’s been 104 days since Vale Inco workers took to the picket line.

With no bargaining or compromise in sight, they’re gearing up for a chilly winter.

“Nobody expected it to last this long,” said Wayne Rae, president of United Steelworkers Local 6200.

“Our push now is to show governments and communities around the world how (Vale Inco) acts. They have no respect for workers.”

Some striking workers from Port Colborne, Sudbury and Voisey’s Bay, N. L., and Steelworkers representatives, made their way to Bay St. in Toronto Wednesday to protest in front of Vale’s office. Another dozen or so representatives were scheduled to make their way to New York to protest at the New York Stock Exchange, where Vale staff unexpectedly pulled out of providing breakfast for investors and ringing the opening bell at the stock exchange.

A protest was also held in Sudbury.

“There is no headway with our company. They don’t want to bargain, they want concessions, huge concessions,” Rae said.

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The 2400 members of the Toronto Public Library Workers Union, Local 4948, (CUPE) will be in a legal strike position at 12:01am Monday, November 9th.

With an overwhelming strike vote mandate of 86 per cent, the union is asking the Toronto Public Library to maintain and strengthen an already highly-skilled workforce, with more full-time jobs and fairer treatment of part-time workers, to ensure that Toronto Public Library remains one of the finest public library systems in the world.

“Our vision is one of well-trained staff with good jobs and strong connections to the neighbourhoods they serve and libraries with strong collections, programs and services that are professionally delivered and attuned to the community. Good jobs with decent benefits are an investment in our city,” said Maureen O’Reilly, spokesperson for the local.

“The Toronto Public Library has a wonderful reputation for offering a wide variety of specialized collections and innovative community-based services and programs to library users,” said O’Reilly. “But recent trends at the Toronto Public Library indicate a shift to a more American-style library system – with an emphasis on cutting costs by relying upon more and more part-time work and self-service check-out machines.”

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Mediator calls meeting with town, union in effort to restart talks

CUPE Local 719 and Town of Woodstock officials met Wednesday morning at the request of mediator Paula Ultican.

The two sides remained at the negotiating table all day and were heading back into negotiations Thursday morning.

Whether these meetings help close the gap between the two sides, or proves to be a face-to-face encounter emphasizing the sharp divide between the town and its unionized workers, remains to be seen.

With talks at a standstill since Sept. 30 – one day before the town locked out unionized workers – the mediator requested that officials from both sides of the dispute meet in an effort to find a path back to the bargaining table.

Following Tuesday’s regular council session – attended by CUPE officials and most of the town’s locked-out workers – Mayor Art Slipp told the Bugle-Observer town officials planned to attend Wednesday’s meeting. The mayor expressed hope the meeting will lead to a resumption in the stalled talks.

Standing outside town hall following the 15-minute council session which dealt with only three minor issues, CUPE lead negotiator Tom Steep also confirmed the mediator’s request. While union officials were to attend the meeting, which was held at an undisclosed location, Steep wasn’t expecting a lot from the meetings. Unless the town lifts its demands for union concessions, he said, there will be nothing to talk about.

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Seventeen weeks after first walking off the job, the striking workers of the municipally owned ERTH Corp. decided to take their message directly to the shareholders.

Starting with Thursday’s picket in front of Ingersoll Town Hall, the roughly 50 striking workers hope to convince the mayors and councillors of the company’s seven municipal shareholders — Ingersoll, Zorra, East Zorra-Tavistock, South-West Oxford, Norwich, Central Elgin and Aylmer — to take a more direct role in the ongoing negotiations.

“They’re the custodians of the utility and should be putting pressure on the company to resolve this,” said Don MacKinnon, the president of the Power Workers’ Union, which represents the unionized workers of the ERTH Corp. subsidiaries.

The roughly 50 picketers in front of the town hall were a mix of local ERTH workers from Erie Thames Power Lines, Ecaliber, CRU Solutions and Coulter Water Meters and supportive union members from other southwestern Ontario utility companies. Holding flags and signs, the workers were calling for Mayor Paul Holbrough, one of the company directors, to come out and speak to them.

“Where’s our mayor?” asked a megaphone-touting worker. “We want answers.”

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CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

Unionized employees of the Toronto Public Library voted 86 per cent in favour of a strike this week, but negotiations on a new contract will continue over the next few days with the help of a provincial conciliator.

“Our preference is to arrive at a negotiated settlement,” said Maureen O’Reilly, bargaining committee chairwoman for local 4948 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents 2,400 library employees. “The library is unwilling to take those steps to get there,” she said yesterday.

Library spokeswoman Ana-Marie Critchley said in a statement: “we are committed to negotiating a settlement that is fair and reasonable to TPL employees and responsible to the residents of Toronto.” She declined further details about the talks.

Ms. O’Reilly, whose union was formed earlier this year after breaking away from the city’s powerful outside workers’ union, said the possibility of a labour disruption will become clearer “in the next couple of weeks.”

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About 80 per cent of workers at Presteve Foods Ltd. voted Sunday to strike for pay increases.

The Wheatley fish-processing plant was rocked last year by allegations of more than a dozen sexual assault charges against owner Joe Pratas, allegedly involving female workers from Thailand.

Despite the past upheaval in the plant, CAW Local 444 president Rick Laporte remains optimistic a new contract can be reached before the Oct. 30 strike deadline.

Laporte said negotiations are continuing with Ulysses Pratas, son of the owner, and Windsor lawyer Claudio Martini. “There’s a lot of dialogue going on.”

Morale has improved over the last year under new management, Laporte said. “I give him (Ulysses Pratas) credit.”

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Union Going Global to Track Product and Reach Vale Customers

TORONTO, Oct. 12 /CNW/ – The United Steelworkers (USW) protested the arrival of a shipment of Vale’s copper in the German port of Brunsbüttel yesterday. USW was joined by leaders of mining unions from around the world.

In a show of global organizing, USW Canadian National Director, Ken Neumann, along with two striking Steelworkers from Canada confronted the ship arriving in Germany with Vale content coming from Canada.

3,500 members of the United Steelworkers have been on strike for nearly three months in a growingly bitter confrontation at Vale operations in Sudbury, Ontario, Port Colborne, Ontario and Voisey’s Bay, Labrador.

USW along with mining union leaders from Germany, Brazil, South Africa, Japan and elsewhere along with other supporters held a demonstration at the German port of Brunsbüttel as a ship transporting 35,000 tons of Vale copper concentrate from Voisey’s Bay was arriving today. A group of the leaders then met with the ship’s captain and a ship owners’ representative.

“We informed them about the strike and why we were demonstrating. The captain and agent were both supportive and said they would raise the issue directly with Vale and would inform the buyers of the copper about the dispute,” said Neumann.

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When Mark Magee lost his welding job last January, he thought he’d picked a sure-fire second career.

“I’d get up every morning and there are trucks going by my house. I thought that should be a good job,” said Magee, 37, who lives in Norwich.

Now ready to graduate from the Ontario Truck Driving School and his unemployment insurance about to run out, Magee is stuck in jobless limbo — he can’t do his road test because of a strike by Ontario’s driving examiners.

Without the road test, Magee can’t get his trucking licence. Without the licence, he can’t get a job.

“There are people here who have jobs lined up and ready to go but they can’t work because of this. A couple of people I know are close to losing their homes because they can’t pay their mortgages,” Magee said.

In fact, some instructors have been giving students — for most trucking is a second career — money for groceries and gas to help tide them over, said Ron Baker, an instructor at the school on Exeter Rd.

“They’re playing with people’s lives here. There are people here who just don’t know what to do.”

The Ontario Truck Driving School has a backlog of 200 student drivers ready to take the road test and get into a rig.

DriveTest estimates that 4,000 people per day haven’t been able to get their driver’s licence. Almost 600 workers have been out on strike since Aug. 23.

Don Rose, 57, lost his job with Therm- O-Disc in St. Thomas and thought trucking was the safest bet, especially in the hard-hit manufacturing city.

“I’d like to do short haul, but I’ll take whatever’s available,” Rose said.

“I could take the test in early November but even if the strike ends tomorrow, it’s going to be after Christmas before I’ll be able to get in there, with the amount of people they have backed up.”

The strike has also put a strain on driving schools such as the Ontario Driving School, who do road tests for all age groups.

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