The Falcon Strikes
What keeps Sudbury labour battle from ending?
by Mick Lowe
HighGrader Magazine January/February 2001
Like a metastasizing cancer, the drive to root unions out of Canada's hardrock mining industry has targeted a new and surprising site: Sudbury, Ontario, the mother of all Canadian mining towns.
The tumour first presented in Yellowknife in the early 90s, with the now notorious bid to smash the union at Golden Giant gold mine in the Northwest Territories.
Before that struggle was over, nine men had been killed in an underground explosion that resulted in the conviction of a striker on charges of second degree murder.
Peggy Witte's Royal Oak Mines extirpated the union, but the victory proved both Pyrrhic and short-lived; the company has since gone bankrupt.
In the mid-90's the cancer migrated eastward to another gold mining camp, at Balmertown in northwestern Ontario. Shortly after acquiring the mine, Goldcorp decided to bust a venerable local of the United Steelworkers of America right out of their operation.
A bitter four-year strike ensued, the longest in the history of the Canadian hardrock mining industry. In the end the union local was vanquished, and when the mine re-opened in the fall of 2000, it was strictly a non-union operation.
Just a few months earlier, at the beginning of August, the oldest of all Northern Ontario mining unions, Mine Mill/CAW Local 598, began a little-noticed strike at Falconbridge Ltd. in Sudbury.
After more than a century of continuous production, Sudbury's base metal mines, mills, smelters and refineries make the city Canada's oldest and largest integrated metals production centre, and a bona fide world capital of the hardrock mining industry.
The city's two principal producers, Falconbridge and Inco Ltd., have been unionized since the 1940s, and the unions representing the two company's employees, Mine Mill and the United Steelworkers of America, respectively, have long since come to occupy positions of importance and respect within the community. Trade unionism is as much a feature of the Sudbury mindscape as the Pre-Cambrian Shield.

As the strike deadline loomed over contract talks last summer, Falconbridge announced its intention to run the Sudbury smelter with nickel concentrate from its new Raglan operation in northern Quebec without its unionized workforce. It was an audacious, and unprecedented, threat. In the 56-year history of unions on the Nickel Range, neither of the two big nickel producers had ever attempted to scab a legal strike.
At the outset the union reluctantly allowed vehicles carrying strikebreakers through its picket lines. Office and technical staff and supervision were aboard the buses, too, so it was never clear exactly how many replacement workers the company had hired. But infrequently at first, and more often as the weeks dragged by, ominous plumes of gas were seen spewing from the smelter smokestack. True to its word, Falconbridge was producing nickel matte despite the strike.
Many Sudbury observers questioned the union's initial quiescence on the picket lines, but it was a policy that proved to be but the opening move in an increasingly intricate and hotly contested chess game. Vehicles were detained only briefly during the first five weeks of the strike. But when the union moved to tighten up the lines on September 6th the company quickly moved to apply for an injunction to limit picketing. The bid was denied by a Sudbury judge on September 15th, on the grounds that the company had failed to prove that it was suffering irreparable harm from the union's actions.

By mid-October restive rank-and-filers decided to close the lines up tight, forcing personnel to travel by helicopter and stopping most vehicular traffic. That state of affairs remained in effect for 12 days, until the company once again sought an injunction severely limiting picketing.
This time their court action was successful.
"We can still picket," one striker said bitterly outside the courthouse, "as long as we do it in Wahnipitae (miles from the company gates)."
The court ruling, which included a stern rebuke from the judge, was a low ebb for the strikers. In private, many local leaders declared they would be willing to settle by recommending some variation on the company's last contract offer, made shortly before the strike began.
Rank-and-file sentiments, which often tended to be more militant than the leadership, were also softening. "We'll eat some crow," one activist conceded. "We'll eat a wing, maybe, but there's no way we'll eat the whole goddamned bird."
The attitude was reinforced by a membership meeting in early November. Strike leaders emerged from the meeting evincing a strong desire to end the strike by meeting the company at least half way, a gesture that appeared perilously close to surrender.
Hemi Mitic, Assistant to CAW President Buzz Hargrove and the lead union negotiator, told CBC Radio News after the meeting, not once but twice, that the union hoped to have the strike over "before the Christmas holidays."

Attempts to kick-start negotiations were curiously unavailing, however. On November 10th Mitic put the union's willingness to compromise in writing to company head negotiator John Keenan. In a letter which was also faxed to the news media, Mitic maintained that on one of the critical strike issues "given the changes that the company demanded and the concerns of the union, I feel confident that we can now put this issue behind us."
In the event of a failure to a successfully reach a settlement through negotiation, Mitic also offered to settle the dispute through binding arbitration, an option that is usually anathema to all but the most desperate of union leaders.
But the company still refused to accept the union's surrender, posing anew a question that had vexed observers from the beginning: what was the dispute all about, anyway?
Almost no one saw the strike coming. In contrast to its cross-town rival Inco, Falco has always enjoyed a reasonably good relationship with its unionized employees. Although a much smaller company it had in recent years out-produced and out-earned Inco pound for pound and was, by any measure, the more productive and successful of Canada's two nickel giants.
When Inco's Sudbury employees settled in late June for a new three-year contract that featured, at best, modest gains in wages, pensions and benefits, it was widely assumed that Falco would follow past practice and routinely offer its employees the Inco pattern. Sure enough, by late July Falconbridge had matched the Inco pattern on the monetary side; but its best pre-strike offer was studded with concessions on contract language.
(For a full list of the takeaways and the actual proposed wording, visit the union's website at www. minemill598.com under the heading "Why Are We On Strike?")

Considering that Falco had earned a record $235 million in the first half of 2000 and appeared headed for its first-ever half billion dollar profit year, members of Local 598 were in no mood to grant concessions. They voted 97% against accepting the company's final offer.
But in hindsight, it now appears that far more portentous events were taking place; not at the bargaining table in Sudbury, but around the boardroom tables of Bay Street in Toronto. Just days before the strike started on August 1st, the senior management of Noranda Inc. made an announcement: the company had upped its ownership of Falconbridge to 50.1% of the latter corporation's common shares.
The news prompted little reaction in Sudbury, not least because Falconbridge had been, for all intents and purposes, a subsidiary of Noranda for some time, even though the latter did not own an outright majority of shares. Noranda, in turn, was controlled by Edper Brascan, whose board of directors included Conrad Black, Trevor Eyton, Jack Cockwell and David Kerr.
Kerr, the President and CEO of Noranda, as well as a director of both Falconbridge and EdperBrascan, raised eyebrows on Bay Street and suspicions in Sudbury in late September when he told the National Post that Noranda intended to buy up more Falconbridge shares ". . .when the price goes down. . .We'd like to see it go to the middle teens."
Could it be that the strike was really nothing more than a cynical corporate ploy to depress the shares of Falconbridge to facilitate a cheaper buy-out by Noranda? And what of the responsibility, not to mention ethics, of a majority shareholder in a corporation saying publicly that he hoped the share price in that corporation would actually fall?
Whether the strike had anything to do with it or not, Noranda's creeping takeover of Falconbridge continued, with the larger firm coming to control 55% of Falco by the end of November.

Meanwhile behind the scenes the CAW's Mitic talked frequently with his corporate counterpart Keenan. Every time one old issue appeared to be removed as a barrier to resuming formal negotiations, another replaced it, according to a frustrated Mitic. Clearly his hopes for a settlement by Christmas were slipping away. Finally, in mid-December, the union filed formal charges against the company with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, accusing Falco of bargaining in bad faith.
As the strike dragged on, it became ever clearer that the company had no intention of accepting the union's surrender, of returning to the bargaining table, or of proffering a new collective bargaining agreement.
Instead there was more and more scuttlebutt around the picketline barrel fires about the "180 day rule," after which time the company was no longer legally obligated to take its striking workers back. That deadline, of February lst, 2001, is apt to prove a red letter day in the strike. If it comes and goes with little or no interest by individual Mine Millers in returning to work to scab their own strike, the union may yet regain the momentum and emerge from the dispute with pride and collective agreement intact.
With Falconbridge maintaining minimal production the strike is nevertheless crippling its ability to earn the healthy profits that could be expected in the current robust phase of the nickel price cycle.
In the third quarter, Falco reported that the strike had cost it $24 million (this, despite the fact that numbers include the pre-strike month of July Falco where the company was working at record production levels). The company's fourth quarter statement, due in late January, was expected to reveal far greater losses.
And so as the Christmas season began in Sudbury, the question remained: how far would Falconbridge and its corporate parents Noranada and EdperBrascan be willing to go to rid themselves of their historic and still scrappy union?
"The company may well have overplayed its hand," suggests one veteran Sudbury businessman.
Certainly morale on the picket lines has improved since the ban on slowing vehicles was imposed. Running skirmishes with Sudbury police and scab vehicles away from company property have, often as not, impaired the company's ability to move equipment and personnel through the gates. It's a tactic, which, so far at least, has produced few arrests. Nonetheless, Falco's attempts to break its union remain a serious challenge to the labour movement as a whole and the outcome is far from certain.

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