The View from Ontario, 137 Days into a Mine Strike

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/2009/11/view-ontario-137-days-mine-strike

Yannick Rivard | November 26, 2009


Emotions are running high as the strike at Vale Inco’s nickel and copper mines in northern Ontario closes in on the six-month mark. Strikers are fighting the profitable company's attempt to use the economic crisis to shift power. Photo: USW.


Editor’s note: The strike at Vale Inco’s nickel and copper mines in northern Ontario is closing in on the six-month mark. Members of Steelworkers Local 6500, the strikers are fighting against the profitable company's attempt to use the economic crisis to shift power. Now more than 3,000 miners and mill workers are hunkering down for a winter on the picket lines in Sudbury, Ontario, a city of 150,000 residents about four hours north of Toronto that’s long relied on the minerals its miners have wrenched from the earth.

Emotions are running high throughout the community and people are starting to lose patience, whether they work for Vale or not. Engineers, managers, and non-striking union members in administrative jobs are being forced off desk jobs and into the mines. Contractors are being pressured to cross picket lines by their employers, who in turn are being pressured by Vale to keep crossing the lines or risk losing future contracts with the company. Hundreds of out-of-town scabs have come in, and the union is working with sympathetic politicians to try to reintroduce anti-scab legislation.

The union thinks the company is producing ore in violation of its agreements. The company claims it is their right to produce whether there’s a strike or not. Members have stopped trucks in Sudbury, and the union has taken the campaign global, protesting at ports where hot ore is being unloaded.

But in Sudbury belts are tightening. As they do, other businesses are finding themselves with no other options than to lay off workers. This is causing less money to be spent in the community, $20 million less every month according to a government-backed economic development taskforce.

Local blogs and newspapers predicted before the strike that the contract coming in 2009 would be full of major changes and concessions. The funny thing is these changes were all predicted at a time when the price of nickel was at a never-before-seen record high.

The truth is Vale doesn’t care what the price of nickel is right now. The company’s main objective is to become the largest and most powerful mining company in the world and it will take out anybody to achieve this goal. It won’t matter whether you’re an employee, a contractor, or a supplier. The company has already moved its equipment source from local suppliers to those abroad, ambushed its own staff and forced out former top managers, and cornered Local 6500 into striking.

We’re fighting to stop this “domino effect.”

FULL story at link.