April 2, 2004
On Saturday March 27th, about eighty IWA millworkers from around the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley, members of the Hospital Employees Union and the Anti-Poverty Committee protested outside the executive meeting of the IWA Local 1-3567 in Langley, BC. The leadership of 1-3567 is under increasing pressure from CUPE and HEU as well as dissident members in the local, for acting more in the interests of the BC Liberal government, then its own or other union members.
In December the leadership of IWA Local 1-3567 were implicated in a raid on a Vancouver sawmill where sixteen members of Local 2171 say they were assaulted. They are also complicit with signing a sweetheart deal with G&H Noble, a Surrey Sawmill owned by the brother of union local's president, Sonny Ghag. The workers at G&H Noble saw their wages cut by 35% and they lost language in their collective agreement protecting them from contracting out.
As well, the leadership of IWA Local 1-3567 has been signing “partnership agreements” with Compass Inc., Sodexho, and Aramark, the multinational corporations who the BC Liberals have contracted to do the work previously performed by HEU members. The IWA agreements have lowered wages almost 50%, down to $9 an hour.
In 2002, both the BC Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) adopted policies to dissuade other unions from entering into such agreements because they would undermine the existing the Hospital Employees Union established relationship to the work, even if it was contracted out. The IWA claimed that they were just unionizing non-union workers. The HEU, CUPE and other unions filed official complaints against the IWA to the CLC, but the CLC president, Ken Georgetti, said there was nothing he could do. Only last week after 1-3567 signed another partnership agreement, did the CLC finally invoke sanctions against them. But now IWA has announced that they are planning on merging with the United Steelworkers of America, a large American union with over 600,000 members, so the CLC sanctions will not have much effect.
But HEU and the dissent members of 1-3567 have not given up the fight. Every protest against the 1-3567 executive gets larger and there are over 800 members on a petition calling for the resignation of the Sonny Ghag. On March 26th, over one-third of the HEU membership voted 86% in favour of a strike. Despite the hardship HEU members have faced over the last two years they are still on the frontlines, struggling for the rights of workers in BC.
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