RUPERT LOCKOUT
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pute except to express concern that ASCU contract demands would mean a form of "worker control" of the co-op.
In an interview June 25, he insisted that "all Guild members tied up" as soon as the lockout began, despite steady reports of vessels leaving the co-op floats.
The question became academic July 1, however, when the remaining co-op vessels streamed out of Prince Rupert to the grounds. It was this exodus that sparked the hot edict.
ASCU business agent Linda Long said she believes the co-op fishermen met June 30 in the firm's net loft, behind picket lines, and voted to fish. Greene refused comment on whether the guild had voted on the question of the lockout or the decision to fish.
Long reported that contract talks began in April against a backdrop of mounting unresolved grievances and management harassment. "We had to watch every little thing."
ASCU's main objective was to obtain tougher contract language protecting seniority rights, said
SALMON
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pinks, $1.15 a pound for coho and chums, $1.50 a pound for all large springs, $1.15 a pound for small springs and $1 apiece for jack springs.
Despite the companies' failure to challenge economic arguments demonstrating that the union's original demands were realistic, union committee members in mid-June indicated they were prepared to break a deadlock created by the association's unwillingness to bargain seriously and recommend a one-year contract providing minimums of $1.25 a pound for sockeye, $1.05 for coho and chums, 75 cents for pinks, $1.35 for all large springs, $1.05 for small springs and $1 apiece for jack springs.
In face of further company stalling, the union committee on June 22 again revised its demands to provide minimums of $1.05 a pound for sockeye, 45 cents a pound for pinks, 85 cents a pound for coho, 60 cents a pound for chums, $1.13 a pound for large springs, 85 cents a pound for small springs and $1 apiece for jacks.
It also trimmed to 1.25 cents a pound its demands on company contributions to the United Fishermen's Welfare Fund.
The association has offered eight-tenths of a cent per pound, an increase of one-tenth of a cent from 1977. It refused pointblank to make any offer at all on union demands for a medical plan in the industry.
"At our last meeting," union business agent Bill Procopation pointed out, "the companies, which currently are rejoicing in record profits and booming markets, responded to major attempts by fishermen to reach settlement by moving just one more cent a pound on chum prices and a nickel on jack spring prices.
"Faced with that sort of response, the union committee decided to place the association's unrealistic offer to a vote of the membership.
"It is urging a strong rejection vote which will serve notice that fishermen want a contract reflecting to some extent their own spiralling costs and the companies' glowingly healthy profit and sales position."
Throughout negotiations this year, company spokesmen conjured up visions of a large pink salmon carryover in the U.S. and of rockbottom prices being paid to American fishermen for their pinks.
Both claims were refuted by union committee members, who cited statistics showing that American canned pinks are moving steadily and information received from U.S. net fishermen's organizations showing that interim prices of 40 cents a pound or more already have been settled for Alaska pinks.
president Bill White, but "we never even got a wage offer until the lockout."
The offer, as finally submitted in letter form, suggested no term for a contract, Long said, and was produced "without prejudice" to allow the co-op to change any part of it during later talks.
The wage proposal — 10 cents an hour more than the industry settled for at other Prince-Rupert plants — "was not offered in a way that you could consider legal," she explained, and was worded too loosely to take to the membership without much clarification.
The co-op's refusal to discuss other clauses indicated its desire for "complete destruction of seniority," Long said.
"They want to replace department seniority with seniority by job function with the idea of introducing a quota system or piecework."
Wages are not the main issue, she emphasized, because protection against speedup, contract-ing-out and loss of seniority are key membership concerns.
But the co-op effectively refused to clarify its offer in negotiations by following the letter only 48 hours later with lockout notice. The union had voted May 17 in favor of strike action if necessary to secure a contract.
Management has refused to comment on the lockout except to issue a press statement claiming the union demands include some "which are unprecedented in the field of labour-management relations in North America."
The co-op also promised to conclude an agreement on the basis of its letter "anytime the union wishes to return to the bargaining table."
At Fisherman press time, ASCU was moving on two fronts to win a contract. While Long met with officials of the B.C. Federation of Labor to secure its support for the hot edict, the ASCU executive publicly appealed to the coop to return to the bargaining table on July 6.
The edict, which received immediate UFAWU support, followed a last-ditch appeal to Greene from White on June 28.
In his letter, to which Greene failed to reply, White asked for a list of co-op vessels, a statement of support from the Guild, a tieup of Guild vessels and creation of an unfair list to spotlight vessels violating the tieup.
"What we're really asking for," White concluded, "is support that one affiliate gives to another, especially when both are direct charters from the CLC."
Meanwhile, co-op fishermen on the grounds were reported selling their catch to cash buyers when possible. A rotting catch of groundfish was seized in Vancouver from the co-op boat Freeport, which had sailed all the way from Prince Rupert in a futile search for shoreworkers willing to scab.
UFAWU members at B.C. Packers' Seal Cove Plant earlier turned away the co-op vessel Old Chum, which Long reported was subsequently unloaded and iced-up at the co-op plant by management workers and others.
Mike James photo
* Here Vancouver Shoreworkers Local president Ray Neita is shown casting his ballot at Canfisco's Home plant June 30 as shoreworkers throughout the coast voted 3-1 to back up their demands with strike action.
SHOREWORKERS VOTE
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After union members finally succeeded in convincing them that this ploy wouldn't work, the companies grudgingly released a trickle of minor offers on wages and conditions.
"This same offer could have been tabled weeks ago if the companies hadn't been so determined to play games with proposals which they knew all along would not be accepted by workers in the industry," one committee member commented.
Here's what the companies offered:
—A one-year agreement with an across the board increase of 37 cents an hour, filleters receiving an additional five cents an hour and the northern differential increasing by three cents an hour.
—A two-stage increase totalling two cents an hour in company contributions to the shore-workers' welfare fund.
—Improvements in vacation pay provisions for long service employees.
—Minor improvements in one or two other areas.
The companies have continued promoting demands which, if accepted, would set back by years contract provisions governing the classification and earning power of cold storage workers.
They still insist that the cold storage differential be paid only for hours worked in low temperature rooms, thereby erasing the hard-won principle that the premium rate is applicable when cold storage employees are assigned to other work area, such as vertical plate freezers, birds-eye freezers and packing lines.
The companies' monetary offer is particularly unrealistic, shoreworkers contend, when viewed in the light of the industry's record profit margins, restrictions imposed on workers in
Canada insists U.S. modify treaty stand
Canada's fishery treaty negotiators have made it clear they will not allow resumption of reciprocal fishing with the United States until the U.S. makes significant compromises in its demands, says UFAWU secretary George Hewison.
Hewison, who attended top-level meetings in Ottawa June 19 and 20 as an industry advisor, said he left the negotiations feeling "rather gratified that it was the first meeting we've walked away from when I haven't felt we've sold the farm."
The Americans had quite a different attitude, Hewison reported, and appeared "much more conciliatory" than they had before Canada suspended the 1978 interim fishery agreement.
But major questions remain, he added, and final agreement must
await the outcome of salmon interception talks scheduled for Seattle in September.
Statistics tabled in the House of Commons indicate that Canadians have benefitted from the treaty suspension, he said, while American fishermen are losing money.
Ian Todd, head of fisheries' offshore commercial branch, said late last week that senior «negoatiors met throughout June and were able to make "encouraging progress" on some Atlantic coast issues.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada's top negotiator, is scheduled to meet Lloyd Cutler, his U.S. counterpart, this week in Brussels. Both men said after their last meeting that they had reached agreement on a number of West Coast questions.
recent years under Ottawa's spurious 'anti-inflation' program, and demands currently being fought for by workers in other industries.
B.C. Packers, for example, chalked up gross profits of almost $19 million and a net profit of $8.2 million last year, while shore-workers' living standards were eroded by unabated increases in living costs and the impact of federal wage controls.
Committee members point to several groups of unionists currently on strike after rejecting contract proposals that look almost attractive alongside the Fisheries Association's offer.
They include members of the Canadian Food and Allied Workers Union, engaged in a strike-lockout with major meat packing firms after turning down an increase of 50 to 55 cents an hour, and members of the United Brewery and Distillery Workers, who have spurned an employers' offer of $1.05 an hour in a two-year agreement.
"Across the country," the shoreworkers' committee noted last week, "workers are demanding wage increases to counter price-gouging by employers — who subject consumers to scandalous price increases, reap enormous profits and then piously preach wage restraint to workers at the bargaining table."
The B.C. fishing industry, it emphasized, exploits the world's "most profitable fisheries resource" and union shoreworkers are not prepared to take several steps backward, as proposed by the employers, at a time when industry earnings and markets are "extremely healthy."
Minimal wage increases and proposals to undermine established conditions similarly were the substance of the association's offer to UFAWU tendermen.
Like their fellow union members in the shoreworkers' section, tendermen concluded that the hardnosed attitudes displayed by the companies this year reflected an unwillingness to bargain in good faith and left no alternative but to take a strike vote.
Unanimously recommending an affirmative vote for strike action, the tendermen's negotiating committee pointed out in a bulletin issued June 29 that during the period of wage controls:
—Tendermen's wages increased by 14 percent.
—Living costs rose by almost 20 percent.
—Company profits soared by 111 percent.
"That's the issue in a nutshell," a committee spokesman commented.
"Employers refused to respond to our economic agruments justifying substantial improvements in wages and conditions because they couldn't deny the industry is extremely healthy and profits embarrassingly high."
In fact, the association's offer to tendermen represents a wage-cutting demand, the committee says.
"The offer of $50 a month in-
crease — approximately 3.5 per-ent — means a cut in real wages in light of an annual eight to nine percent inflation rate and projected double digit inflation in the coming year."
In addition, the employers have demanded that tendermen give up the option of negotiating separately for the herring roe operation — a proposal, the committee says, that would "force tendermen in the herring fishery, who operate in a different and frequently more intense working environment, to accept inferior conditions in future."
Association spokesmen have rejected out of hand a number of key union proposals affecting crew complements, towing rates, medical and dental plan provisions, severance pay and statutory holidays.
And, while the companies pay lip service to upgrading safety standards, they have refused to move on specific union demands that would make long overdue changes a reality, including proposals for the safe manning of barges and the provision of survival suits.
Faced with a set of employer proposals that could only erode further the working conditions in a section of the industry already crying out for drastic improvement, the tendermen's committee "believes it will take a powerful strike vote and the threat of a strike to move the companies and win a settlement in line with tendermen's needs and the companies' ability to pay."
VLC slams McDermott
Vancouver Labor Council has called on Canadian Labor Congress president Dennis McDermott to stop issuing personal statements that are odds with congress policy and to retract his recently expressed opposition to a nationwide campaign for a shorter work week.
Council delegates endorsed an executive recommendation supporting a letter sent to McDermott last month by Carpenters Local 452 expressing "anger, frustration and amazement" at the McDermott's statement that there "isn't any point" in pursuing the campaign for a 32-hour work week endorsed by CLC convention delegates in April.
Carpenters' delegate Colin Snell noted that the convention stand, spelled out in a composite resolution reflecting proposals submitted by unions across the country, had been "a clear exposition of organized labor's views on the question of the 32-hour work week."
Snell said his union had urged McDermott to "retract your comments and, as chief executive officer of the CLC, to identify yourself foursquare with the campaign for the 32-hour week."
McDermott's statement, he said, had been "irresponsible".
12/THE FISHERMAN — JULY 4, 1978