Union Submits Counter-Offer to Alcoa/Rio Tinto Cartel
Energy March, Trois-Rivières, March 26, 2019.
The Alcoa/Rio Tinto cartel has now locked out around
1,000 workers represented by the United Steelworkers Local 9700 from
their Bécancour aluminum smelter for more than 14 months. On
March 21, Local 9700 submitted a full counter-offer for a collective
agreement to the Alcoa/Rio Tinto cartel to end the lockout. The
counter-offer in
the opinion of the union includes significant compromises while
preserving the union's essential demands.
 The two main compromises
relate to the pension plan and cuts to unionized positions through
attrition. In its counter-offer the union accepts the cartel's request
for the elimination of the existing defined-benefit pension plan and
its replacement by a member-funded pension plan with defined benefits.
The essential difference between the two
plans, according to the union, is that while the workers' pension
benefits remain defined in the new plan, the employer's contribution is
fixed and the risks related to the funding of the plan are borne by the
workers.
The other concession is the acceptance of the reduction
by attrition of 103 unionized positions. This represents about
one-tenth of the total unionized workforce of the company. The union
reported earlier that the demand for reduction in positions made by the
cartel in July 2018 was on the order of 20 per cent of the unionized
workforce. In its
press release announcing the counter-offer, the union says that it
maintains its demand for seniority in filling job postings and labour
mobility within the plant.
The union is presenting this counter-offer with the aim
of bringing the employer to the bargaining table to end the lockout by
negotiating a collective agreement that the workers will find
acceptable within the circumstances. The workers are in a very
difficult situation because the owners' cartel has refused to negotiate
since the start of the lockout and even long before that. There have
been no negotiations between the two parties since the beginning, just
a unilateral dictate by ABI management. The union reported that during
a conciliation session on April 3, ABI did not even see fit to respond
to the union's counter-offer and refused to hold negotiations with the
union. The necessity remains to pressure those in control to abandon
their anti-negotiation dictate, discuss and sign this counter-offer at
the bargaining table and end the lockout. Submission to enslaving
demands of the foreign oligarchs is not an option.
Interprofessional Health Care Federation of Quebec (FIQ) joins
locked-out ABI workers on their picketline to express their solidarity,
April 3, 2019.
This makes it all the more important for workers in
Quebec and elsewhere to step up their support for the locked-out ABI
workers. Workers throughout Quebec and Canada and their allies amongst
the youth and other strata must forcefully express the broad public
demand that ABI management give up its dictate and negotiate a
collective
agreement that is acceptable to the Bécancour workers. It
requires a concerted effort by all to send a clear message that the
cartel's anti-negotiation dictate to smash the organized defence of the
workers in the form of Local 9700 so as to destroy the existing terms
of employment will not pass!
This article was published in
Number 12 - April
4, 2019
Article Link:
Union
Submits Counter-Offer to Alcoa/Rio Tinto Cartel
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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