For 18 months, they stood their ground on a picket line outside the plant that many had worked in for most of their lives. Through two of the coldest winters, they braved freezing weather as sentinels, guarding a principle that unites them. The 120 workers at Crown Holdings in Toronto were on strike because they refused to betray the next generation of workers.
The demand by Crown was that all new hires would be paid 42 per cent less for the same work. Somehow that seemed wrong to those who had toiled to make their plant the most productive Crown facility in all of North America.
They had received that award only two years earlier, and viewed it with pride. The plant churned out six million cans every day — supplying beer, soft drink and soup producers in central Canada. The employees were the usual mix you find in Toronto’s industrial workforce — Anglo, Caribbean, Asian, European, mostly men but with a few “union sisters” as well. And they did see themselves as a family, with some there for two or three generations.
Perhaps it is the inter-generational presence that makes the owner’s idea of paying less to future employees so offensive. Or maybe it’s a general sense of decency that views that kind of corporate arrogance as nothing short of obscene. The company finally realized that it had struck a raw nerve on this issue, and changed its bargaining approach. After months of strike, it brought in enough replacement workers to run the operation, and informed the union that the two-tier demand would be replaced with an across-the-board cut of all wages by one third.
It’s not hard to figure out that the strikers would reject that idea as well. When they did, the company indicated that if they wanted to end the dispute, only 26 of the original workers would be re-hired, according to an internal e-mail. Two-thirds of the workers might never get their jobs back, as the company intended to keep the replacement workers who had scabbed the strike. It was obvious that the strike was no longer about wages and benefits, but really about crushing the union.
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