| Could there be any plainer picture of bully Alberta than those scenes from the picket line at the giant slaughterhouse known as Lakeside Packers in Brooks?
Refugee workers from well-known hellholes such as Sudan and Zimbabwe walk the line in hopes of obtaining a first contract with Lakeside, a subsidiary of Tyson Foods, a U.S.-based multinational and the world’s largest meat packer with 114,000 employees and annual sales of $26 billion. Is this David and Goliath? You bet it is. But in Alberta, Goliath has the government on his side, so don’t expect wily David to win anytime soon.
Tyson has a reputation for union-busting activities. In 2003 in Jefferson, Wisconsin, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW, same union as Lakeside) finally caved after an 11-month strike and accepted the company’s rollback of wages, health care, vacation time and pension benefits. Less than half the workers who went on strike were rehired because replacement workers had already taken their jobs.
But if any industry needs an honest, strong union, it has to be the meat-packing industry, particularly a plant as large as Lakeside, which slaughters a million cattle a year. Many of the 2,400 workers are recent arrivals to Canada who have yet to master English. The work they do verges on dangerous to numbingly routine. How on earth would workers have any voice at all without a union?
Dr. Jean Worms practiced medicine in Brooks for 30 years and has seen first-hand what happens to workers at Lakeside. He recently retired to Canmore, but finds he cannot stay silent as he watches strikers battling for that first contract and the right to be represented by a union.
"Ever since the Americans took over that plant in the 1980s, things have gone down the tube for workers," he told me over lunch at the Tandoori Hut.
He then recalled how patients who worked at Lakeside would come to him with serious tendon problems in hands, elbows or shoulders. "Some of them could barely open a hand because of the constant gripping of their instruments on the line," he says.
According to some workers, when Worms sent them back to the plant with a written recommendation that they be given time off work, or modified duties, the forms were torn up by supervisors. Sometimes the complainant was fired.
"This happened several times," says Worms.
Worms also says workers were often told that they shouldn’t go to the doctor; they should see the plant nurse instead. Then they were back at work a short time later.
"One has to question the ethics of the nurses. They seemed more responsive to the voice from on high (at the plant) than their patients. Some nurses who worked there part-time told me they felt very uncomfortable and pressured."
They aren’t the only ones. According to Worms, many people in Brooks, including other physicians, are reluctant to speak publicly about what goes on inside the plant. "They feel threatened," he says. "I certainly wouldn’t speak out if I was still practicing there. In Brooks they still settle things the cowboy way."
No doubt frontier justice is alive and well in other parts of the country as well, but in Alberta it is aided and abetted by a government that sees itself as the supporter and defender of the rich and powerful. That’s why workers seeking a first contract are usually at a disadvantage. Unlike most provinces, Alberta does not require first contracts to go to binding arbitration. That makes it much easier for a company to get rid of a newly certified union altogether and discourage future workers from ever entertaining the idea again. Even Brooks MLA (and cabinet minister) Lyle Oberg thinks this has to change. He’s also a doctor, so perhaps he, too, knows what goes on inside the plant.
In Alberta, replacement workers (or scabs, as the unions call them) are par for the course when workers go out on strike. Who wouldn’t get angry when they see workers bused in by the company to take their jobs after they have taken the risk of giving up their income to fight for better working conditions?
Television footage of strikers and replacement workers screaming at each other (and much worse) is always gut-wrenching. How could this happen in a civilized country like Canada? But let’s not forget that it is the government that set the stage for such violence. It’s as though they want it to happen. As though they want workers to look selfish and out of control, so they will lose public sympathy.
In Alberta, workers are left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, their employers get government handouts. In the case of Lakeside/Tyson, the government doled out $33 million in 2004 as part of its bailout package during the BSE crisis – money that would have been better spent on beleaguered farmers and ranchers.
It’s difficult to imagine that the striking workers at Lakeside will win this battle. As far as most Albertans are concerned, Brooks is off the map, not a place they venture to on a regular basis. And yet those workers need public support if they are going to get that first collective agreement. It’s not an impossible dream. After all, many Calgarians were sympathetic when hospital laundry workers went on strike a few years back. Ditto for Safeway workers.
Yellow school buses full of city folk who support the workers may be the only way to get justice for them, and erase that ugly image of bully Alberta. |
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