CHILE VS. PINOCHET

— page 8

APARTHEID VOTE SHAM

— page 10

Wednesday, October 3, 1984

Newsstand Price 40° Vol. 47, No. 38
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\mca: the jobs that never were to be

Paying tribute to an eight-month national peace effort, Vancouver Ald. Libby Davies congratulates departing
members of the P2C2 — The Peace Petition Caravan Campaign — from the north steps outside city hall Sunday.
The caravan had left Victoria the previous day, while another group left St. John’s, Nfld., at the same time.
Collectively they'll cover more than 7,000 km and stop in 70 towns and cities on their way to Ottawa and a
48-hour vigil on Parliament Hill beginning Oct. 20. Activities by local residents in each urban centre are planned and
the caravan hopes to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures en route, said campaign organizer Lynn Connell.
The trekkers will also meet with several mayors and city councillors, urging support for peace initiatives at the
municipal level, and backing the caravan’s peace program. The caravan participants will present the signatures to
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and opposition party leaders John Turner and Ed Broadbent. “‘It is no longer good
enough for politicians to make motherhood statements in support of peace,’’ Davies told the assembly at city hall.
She reminded the group of the city’s referendum on cruise testing during the election Nov. 17.

NANAIMO — The Chamber of
Commerce is still clinging to the tattered
remains hoping to piece them together
again, but for virtually everybody else in
this mid-Island city, the proposal advanced
by Amca International to build an assem-
bly plant at Duke Point has come com-
pletely unravelled. And it has revealed the
company’s real objective — to obtain a
cheap, skilled work force and government
subsidies to go with them.

The chamber was continuing last week
to gather names of hundreds of unem-
ployed on job applications which it hoped
to use to form an “association” — which
could then sign the contract with Amca
that Ironworkers members have twice
rejected.

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The chamber’s plan will probably never
go anywhere — for one thing, it has
divided the business community and local
government officials have repudiated it
— but it indicates the extent to which the
Amca assembly plant proposal has been
used to manipulate public opinion and
impugn the trade union movement.

The original plan devised by the
Dominion Bridge division of Amca Inter-
national involved establishing a plant at
Nanaimo’s Duke Point industrial park
which would assemble oil rig modules for
shipment to the Alaskan north slope oil
field.

Dominion Bridge worked out a deal
with Frank Nolan, secretary of Local 712,
the shop workers local of the Ironworkers,

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DAVID McMICHAEL

— page 11 —

Support
for COPE

multiplies

| page? —

in ’84 race —

4

to certify the local at the plant in return for
a contract with wage rates 25 per cent
below Local 712’s regular rates.

But the B.C. Federation of Labor and
the Building Trades Council challenged
the contract before the Labor Relations
Board, arguing that the work involved was
the jurisdiction of the construction unions
and challenging Local 712’s right to
represent workers who had not even yet
been hired.

The LRB accepted the voluntary recog-
nition of the union but ordered that a vote
be taken among the Local 712 membership.

In fact, the local rejected the sweetheart
pact twice — by a vote of 86-79 Aug. 29
and by a more convincing 320-149 when a

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slightly amended agreement was put to
them Sept. 8.

Before both votes, spokesmen for
Amca had emphasized that the project
would not go through if the union
members did not accept the low-wage
package.

Peter Gwyn, head of Amca’s marine
division insisted that the wage rates laid
down in the agreement were necessary to
allow the company to bid competitively
with U.S. suppliers.

Not surprisingly, that same argument
was being used in Washington state where
the company tried to get the Building
Trades to accept a wage cut “in order to
see AMCA page 3

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