Our Security Lies in Our Fight for the Rights of All!
Defend the Resources, Livelihoods and Work of Canadians!
Stand with Windsor Salt Workers!
The Windsor Salt Strike is another case of a U.S. /global conglomerate taking over the production in Canada of an essential commodity and thinking it can do whatever it wants to be able to seize for itself ever more of the wealth produced by the workers it employs by trying to break their strikes and their unions, blackmailing them and their communities and refusing to negotiate. The profile and history of the U.S. law firm that is notorious for its expertise in breaking unions and of the lawyer the company has engaged to do their dirty work is very telling in this regard. The experience of Canadian and Quebec workers shows without the shadow of a doubt that they should not be permitted to operate in Canada. Like the Stelco workers' fight in Ontario and the fights of aluminum workers and others in Quebec, as well as the battles public sector workers are increasingly waging, the support of other workers and the affected communities, as well as public opinion generally, will be important for the Windsor Salt workers so that the experience the workers in Pugwash, Nova Scotia suffered with the same company as it broke onto the scene in Canada is not repeated.
The Facts
Windsor Salt workers are under attack from a California cartel that seeks to deprive them of their rights and liquidate their livelihoods. The global cartel seized control of all Windsor Salt production facilities in 2021 including those in Windsor, Ontario and Nova Scotia and seeks to destroy throughout Canada the wages, benefits and security that salt workers have acquired through union-organized struggles.
The
cartel informed the 250 workers of Unifor Locals 1959 and 240 in
Windsor that no renewal of their union contract would take place
without workers' agreement to relinquish their security of
employment.
The cartel wants the monopoly right to lay off, or fire workers
at any
time and replace them with others it may hire through
contractors. In
this way the cartel can force down the wages and benefits they
pay to
those who do the work and deprive them of any right to security
of
employment. This would increase the cartel's expropriation of
the value
salt workers produce, which the owners could spirit out of the
community and Canada and into the pockets of oligarchs in
California
and elsewhere around the world. This must not pass! The salt and
production facilities, which have been in operation since 1893
and
provide a vital resource for road safety, food production and
chemical
processing, belong to the peoples of Canada. The California
cartel has
no right to steal what belongs by right to Canadian workers and
their
communities and country and to trample on their dignity.
The global cartel already has a sordid reputation of depriving workers of their rights after it seized control of Windsor Salt operations in Canada. The cartel dictated a new contract full of concessions to miners at the Windsor Salt mine in Pugwash, Nova Scotia in 2021 and refused to discuss or negotiate anything else. It cruelly began to stockpile salt in Halifax and Prince Edward Island and bragged to workers, their families and community that it had the annual production capacity of over 29 million tons of salt in 24 production facilities, 15 processing plants and 130 storage locations across North America, South America and the Caribbean. It threatened that any reluctance to accept the dictated concessionary contract would be met with brutal use of its global power, which it demonstrated in full view of all forcing workers in the small community to agree.
In
Windsor, the state joined forces with the cartel on March 1,
giving it a provincial court injunction against the salt miners
to
weaken their picket line and allow scabs, trucks and trains to
enter
the facilities to pursue production and remove salt. This joint
cartel/state assault on the
rights of workers must be loudly denounced. Canadians should
respond to
these attacks with active support of Windsor Salt workers on
their
picket line and financially, and by raising their voices loudly
throughout the country and internationally. The cartel/state
attack on
workers and on what
belongs to Canadians by right must not pass!
If the cartel continues to refuse to negotiate in good faith with Canadians who do the work in order to increase its theft of the resources and value workers produce, as it has already done in Nova Scotia, then this global cartel must be brought in line by the working people of Windsor and the rest of Canada and Quebec. If it cannot operate these critical production facilities in a mutually beneficial manner with the workers, retirees, their community and Canada as a whole and the relations that have been built up for 129 years of production in Windsor, then they should not be in the salt business and governments worthy of the name should ask them to leave the country so that the workers can establish an arrangement that favours them in the modern spirit of respecting and upholding the rights and dignity of all.
|
Laura
Chesnik from EmpowerYourselfNow.ca interviews By
whose decision is it appropriate to permit a U.S. law firm which
is
notorious for its expertise in breaking unions to operate in
Canada
with impunity? Where are the laws which defend workers and the
claims
they are within their rights to make? What kind of governments
are
those in Ontario and Canada which talk big, very very big, about
human
rights in the rest of the world and of foreign interference and
even
sovereignty but do not care a fig about protecting the human
rights of
Canadian workers to live and work in dignity? What kind of a
definition
of human rights and rules-based international law do these
governments
defend when they claim that they cannot interfere in private
business
decisions because it will harm Canada/U.S. relations and be bad
for the
economy? What kind of laws and courts pass injunctions which
protect
narrow private interests?
Canadians have every intention of holding such governments to
account.
By affirming what belongs to them by right they are finding the
ways
and means of doing so. In this struggle, go all out to defend
the just
claims of the Windsor salt miners and workers! Oppose
union-busting by
unscrupulous law firms, especially when they come from the U.S.
where
the workers are also fighting against them, and
oppose governments and courts that in the name of high
ideals
help finance, support and protect the narrow private interests
which
hire such law firms.
Our Security Lies in Our Fight for the
Rights of All!
Defend
the Resources, Livelihoods and Work of Canadians!
Stand with the Windsor Salt Workers!
(Photos:Unifor)
This article was published in
Number 10
- March
6, 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/WF2023/Articles/WO10101.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca