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Ten days into a contentious strike at Vancouver International Airport (YVR)'s fuel Tank Farm 2, workers have got a boost from BC's largest labour centre who issued a 'hot' edict on the fuel stored at the farm. The eleven workers, employed by SGS Canada, deliver fuel from deepsea ships to the storage facility. The workers, organized by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), are striking for a first contract.
"Where we are in bargaining is basically one issue: dispatching." said ILWU National President Rob Ashton. "The way the dispatch hall is, for all longshoremen, is that the employers put their orders in for workers and then we send them a worker. The issue here is the hiring of full-time workers, where the longshore hall, and the eleven members here, want the new hires to come out of the dispatch hall, as its done in every other [ILWU] contract. And on that issue the employer has walked away. They say there's no way they're giving up any hiring. They believe it's their right."
"Longshore has protected the sanctity of the dispatch hall since we got it in the 1930s," Ashton continues. "That's where Bloody Thursday comes from, down in San Francisco, where the cops attacked us in the streets, that was to get the hiring hall. Because employers are bastards! And before that, if you wanted to get work, you used to have to do the boss a favour, either giving them a jug or a pack of smokes [...] stuff like that. And then if you didn't work as hard as the guy beside you, you were down the road never to be hired again."
While YVR management continues to claim that the struck Farm is only one of a number of sources of fuel, and that the strike will not impact operations at the airport, workers interviewed by The North Star on the picket line said that the fuel source is critical to YVR operations. They believe restricting access to the fuel tank is their main point of leverage in their negotiation with the employer.
Until Friday, December 20, the ILWU picket line was restricting access to the site, but a Federal Court injunction Friday morning ordering access to the site for PLH Dublin, the company that moves the fuel from the Tank Farm 2 site and to the aircraft, required the union to pursue other strategies, including seeking the 'hot' edict.
A press release from the ILWU explains the meaning of the 'hot' edict: "A “hot declaration” permits unionized workers to refuse to perform “struck work” such as not handling goods from a company in a lawful strike or lockout with its workers. A hot declaration allows unionized workers to refuse to deal with alternative goods or different means that the struck company is using during the strike or lockout to continue to operate. The BC Fed will only issue hot declarations where it will place pressure on the struck company to shorten the labour dispute and return to the bargaining table."
It is not common for the BC Fed, which represents over 500,000 workers in the province, to issue 'hot' edicts. The last one was in 2019 amidst a bitter strike against Western Forest Products. But with the right to strike being called into question in the wake of recent back to work orders for postal workers, dock workers in BC, Montreal and Quebec City, and railway workers across the country, the question of cross union solidarity is emerging as a critical question for the labour movement.
“The employer’s behaviour has been outrageous, including the use of replacement workers,” said BC Fed Secretary-Treasurer Hermender Singh Kailley. “They need to see that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with this union and their members.”
SGS Canada, the employer of the eleven workers on strike, is the Canadian Subsidiary of a Swiss Multinational with almost 100,000 employees worldwide and annual revenues of CAD$10 billion.