Portside

Alfred Mungra and Bob Lapchuk work at a beer and beverage can plant in Toronto.

So what brought them 3,500 miles across an ocean last week to protest outside Carnival Cruise Lines’s AGM in London?

The answer is a 19-month strike involving the plant’s entire 120-strong workforce, provoked by a union-busting employer that wants to slash wages, cut pensions, abolish their cost-of-living allowance — and won’t even promise to give them their jobs back if they agree.

Thanks to Workers Uniting, the global union formed by North America’s United Steelworkers (USW) and Britain’s Unite trade unions, resisting the bully-boy tactics of transnational firms can now take an international form.

Alfred and Bob’s plant is run by Crown Metal Packaging Canada, itself part of Crown Holdings, a US firm with its headquarters in Philadelphia. At full tilt it can produce five million cans every 24 hours.

Alfred, a maintenance machinist, has worked there for 28 years. Bob, a maintenance mechanic, for 42. Each earned $27 (£18.30) an hour before the strike.

So how did the dispute begin?

“Well, that goes back to the summer of 2013,” Bob says.

“Our contracts expired on June 27 of that year. We worked all summer without contracts.”

The workforce hoped meetings with management to negotiate new contracts would prove fruitful, but it soon became obvious the company wasn’t taking them seriously.

“We had three meetings that summer. They walked out of two early.

“When we did meet all they wanted to talk about was minor issues, not our main concerns at all. For example, if you’re a military reservist you’re entitled to one paid week off in summer.

“Actually that applied to no-one at the factory. It was a non-concern. But they harped on about it all day. Just stalling.”

There was no reason for management to be unhappy with the plant’s performance. In fact in spring 2013 the company had given it the “presidential award” naming it the number one plant in North America, based on its records for safety, quality and production.

But the meetings dragged on and no new contracts showed up.

“Intentions to strike were issued on September 6 at midnight due to the failure to talk seriously,” says Bob.

“That was midnight Friday. On Thursday, about 3.40pm, they told us to shut the lines down, clear out, shut off the equipment — as if the plant was closing,” Alfred chips in.

Bob nods. “It would have been a lockout if it wasn’t a strike.”

The plant was closed for two weeks and two days. Management did not contact the union to talk.

“Then the food side started up again — the line producing small, Campbell-soup tin size cans. You only need six people to run it. They brought in non-union labour from our sister plant in Calgary,” Bob says.

“That lasted eight weeks,” says Alfred, “with them being paid double-time, put up in the Marriott hotel, meals paid for.

“They brought in the US firm AFI security — specialist union-breakers. In the US they carry guns.”
But not in Canada, I presume.

“No, we’re slightly more civilised,” Bob laughs. “Anyway after that they shut down again for maybe a month, then after Christmas 2014 the whole plant started up, the food line and the two beverage can lines.”

“Busing in new, non-union staff they gathered via employment agencies,” says Alfred.

“Not trained workers. We have reason to believe people from the United States are coming in to do our jobs, which is illegal.”

Since the strike started, the workers — USW members — have mounted round-the-clock picket lines at the two entrances, dividing staff between three eight-hour shifts each 24 hours.

They’ve not let up once, even with temperatures over the winter getting as low as minus 41ºC with wind chill. And some picket-line experiences have been truly harrowing.

On February 19, Bob was in the pickets’ warm-up shed when he heard on the radio that police were searching for three-year-old Elijah Marsh, who had been filmed pushing open a door at his grandmother’s flat and walking, wearing only a T-shirt, a nappy and snow-boots, into the frozen night.

“It was minus 25ºC,” Bob remembers. The pickets phoned the police and offered to help conduct the search. It was a colleague of Bob’s, David Elines, who found the child’s body.

But 19 months is a long time for a strike to go on — especially when Crown is spending around $60-70,000 a week on security, plus extra for all the perks given to the scab workforce.

The cost to the company has been calculated at $33 million for the entire strike period, or around $175,000 (£120,000) per striking worker per year.

In all that time, has management not agreed to talk?

“We’ve voted on one offer,” says Bob. Under Ontario law, the employer has the right to force a vote on an offer, though only once. Crown Metal Packaging exercised that right in March 2014.

“They wanted us to accept a 42 per cent cut for new starters,” says Bob. “That was a big deal for us. There are generations who’ve worked at the plant.

“Take [his co-worker] Sheryl — her dad and granddad worked there. Actually so did her son over one summer — I’ve worked with her son, her, her dad and her grandfather actually...”

We laugh and Joe Drexler, USW’s head of strategic campaigns in Canada, chides Bob on his failure to retire.

“Aside from that 42 per cent cut, which would create a two-tier workforce, they were not offering any pension increase. And then there was the Back to Work protocol,” Joe explains.

“It didn’t assure anyone that they could return to their jobs,” says Bob. “They were hinting they’d maybe let about 25 of the 120 of us come back and for the rest keep on the scab labour. They didn’t want an agreement.”

Management also wanted to close the plant’s trade union office. At Crown plants in the United States this has happened before.

Bob mentions one where the permanent union office was replaced by a desk in the men’s toilets.

Workers voted 117-1 to reject the offer. “No wonder,” says Joe. “They were asking them to take a suicide pill.”

Clearly they weren’t getting anywhere with Crown.

“So we created a working group,” says Alfred, “about 20 of us, leafleting and picketing suppliers.” Secondary picketing is legal in Canada, though it has been banned in Britain and the US.

Firms using products from the plant were leafleted, warning them that containers might prove inferior now they were being pumped out by an untrained workforce. And reports from bottlers started to come back that there had been problems with the cans.

Then there was wider campaigning. Alex Eshelman, a staff rep with USW strategic campaigns, brings up the Bottles Not Cans campaign, which sought to hit the company commercially by getting people to buy bottled drinks instead.

“We had banners in front of beer stores, radio ads, newspaper interviews,” she says. “It was an impressive effort.”

Solidarity action with other unions — for example, teachers fighting for proper conditions for teaching assistants — brought them on board, and now the Toronto Crown workers’ battle is backed by the 630,000-strong Canadian Union of Public Employees, 70,000-odd teachers and many more.

Organised hotel workers have campaigned to get canned beer out of hotel bars, while student unions are doing the same in college-run boozers.

Internationally, Workers Uniting were “with us from the start,” Joe says, praising Unite and global union IndustriALL. Meetings with unions from Britain, France, Italy and Turkey with members working for Crown have taken place in Geneva. Complaints about the company’s breaches of multinational enterprise guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have been lodged with the US State Department and the Norwegian government — whose state-owned pension plan is a major Crown shareholder.

And the campaign was taken up with the Ontario legislature. The cause was taken up in the provincial parliament by the New Democracy Party and — after high-profile campaigning in Liberal-held “ridings,” or constituencies — by some in the Liberal Party.

“Liberals are kind of the mushy middle,” says Joe. “They aren’t pro-labour, but they’re not exactly against us either.”

But eventually the campaigning paid off, and the provincial labour minister appointed an arbitrator to conduct an industrial inquiry, the first since 2007.

The inquiry is ongoing. So why the protests in London last week outside the Carnival cruise company AGM?

Carnival’s CEO Arnold Donald pockets a couple of hundred thousand dollars extra a year by sitting on the Crown board. Alex remembers collaring him at a shareholders’ meeting in New York.

“He said he wasn’t aware of the issues in the Toronto dispute,” she says. “But that he was very concerned and to send him a letter.

“We did. He never even acknowledged it.”

So part of this week’s London protest was to remind Donald that the campaign isn’t going away. The USW campaign has already seen workers with dispute-branded T-shirts and leaflets book cheap cruise holidays from Carnival and press their case. Travel agents have been emailed with embarrassing revelations about the conditions on some ships operated by the firm, which owns other cruise line operators including P&O.

“Donald needs to see that his failure to act will tarnish Carnival’s reputation in Canada,” says Alfred. “We hope he’ll wake up and talk to John Conway” (the $12 million-a-year Crown CEO and chairman).

“Because something’s got to give. We’ve hardly mentioned the financial hardship. Some of us have had to find other work. Others have had to withdraw children from college, or take out loans we can’t afford.

“The dispute has had a heavy toll on the workforce.”

“People need to remember — it’s 124 families, not just 124 people,” Bob agrees.

“The campaign will continue on all fronts,” Joe insists. “We call it a campaign of a thousand cuts — hit them everywhere we can hurt them. We have to be inventive, it’s just one of their 147 plants so they have the power.

“But the labour movement is really rallying behind us now. They realise that if Crown wins the precedent — that you can use a legal strike to sack and replace an entire workforce — will have negative consequences for decades to come.”

Are they optimistic? “Well, it’s in the hands of the Ontario government,” says Bob.

The industrial inquiry will end with a recommendation to the labour minister. Ontario has the power to demand a binding arbitration, though it would need to pass a specific mandate for this dispute to force Crown to accept one.

“The parliament has the power, if it can be persuaded to use it,” Bob finishes. “Otherwise I think we can kiss this company goodbye.”