Employees at IG Machine & Fibers near Ashcroft are still looking for a new contract with their employer, more than seven months after being locked out.
After 18 months of negotiations, the workers were served with a lockout notice in early July, 2021. On July 12 the company gave notice that they were locking workers out as of 7 p.m. that day. Since then, six of the 40 employees have found work elsewhere and officially resigned, while many other employees are contracting out and working on a temporary basis in Northern B.C. and Alberta.
“There are lots of opportunities there,” an employee told the Journal. “We could take a whole crew up to Northern B.C. and work. It’s crazy up there.”
The employee added that the plant — where rock is crushed and coloured, then shipped to other divisions to create roofing shingles — is running at 10 per cent capacity, operated by a handful of non-union staff. “The silos were full before we left, which bought them some time,” says the employee, adding that there is a tentative agreement on the main contract.
“We’re stuck on a couple of points of the return to work policy. That’s been a huge sticking point. It came up three weeks ago, but we’re at a standstill.”
The bargaining committee has agreed to recommend acceptance of disciplinary language regarding the lockout, which would protect employees who, while off-site, express their thoughts about the lockout and those who continued to work during it.
“We don’t want threats, but people are emotional after seven months of not working, and we don’t want people disciplined because of that,” says the employee. However, the bargaining committee has hit a roadblock around the matter of accrued vacation time during the lockout.
“We want it, and the employer doesn’t want to give it. We feel that they chose to lock us out, and we have repeatedly asked for them to lift the lockout so that we could continue to work while we negotiated. If they lifted the lockout today we would have to go back, but they still have conditions.”
The employee notes that the workers at nearby Teck Highland Valley recently reached a settlement with their employer that included a signing bonus of $20,000 per person.
“Our signing bonus is zero. We see the Teck employees settle for that, and our employer doesn’t want to give us vacation time.”
editorial@accjournal.ca
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter