Tho in ene) | Ge or ~ LABOR STELCO INTIMIDATES REP — a health’ and safety issue By MIKE PHILLIPS HAMILTON — Bonita Clark has set her sights On developing an avenue for workers to collective- ly and effectively counter widespread intimidation and harassment at Stelco. : Any active steward, health and safety rep or union activist will tell you that Stelco management knows how to put the screws to workers they determine aren’t conforming to the corporation’s game plan. Clark, a stationary engineer and pump tender, has taken just about everything Stelco could throw at her in a bid to break her spirit and force her out of her job. She’s just about the only woman left in produc- tion at Stelco, after the company was dragged kick- ing and screaming into the 20th century by agreeing to hire women. Clark had to fight to get into Stelco. Stelco. - She and three other women took the corporation to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1979 and won. “‘Stelco had said that no qualified women “out of the 28,000 job applications it held on file, had applied for work’’, she told the Tribune recently. ‘*T was sitting on file with my engineers paper from six months to a year before they hired me. In the end the pressure on the company was too great and I was hired.”’ 13,000 to One Ratio She was the first woman to be brought into the sprawling Hilton\complex since the second world war. ‘I was the only woman working beside 13,000 Men until Nov. 1980 when they hired another woman. She quit after one day.” e Clark fought an uphill battle from day one. ‘“The Supervisors saw me as some kind of threat to their authority —a challenge. I got the feeling that it was as if they expected that a fat, stupid, ugly cow was 80ing to walk through the gate. ae Harassment was petty, tyranical, and within her first year on the job she was molested by a super- Visor. Her natural inclination ae indignity, but she quickly discovered that the con- tract Betean Stelco aid Steelworkers Local 1005 Contained no language against discrimination. A Hate Campaign “The real problem was that I was molested, and When I protested I was faced with a hate campaign y the other foremen.”’ Itranged from pressuring Clark’s workmates not ‘0 speak to her: to the indignity of refusing to Provide her with a washroom. In fact they made her clean the men’s change-houses and- wash- Tooms. “After the 1981 layoffs, the company stepped up the Pressure on the women remaining in Stelco. Viously they calculated that if they could make -€ Work time so miserable and ugly that we'd quit, 3 would make their task of getting rid of us much €asier,”’ h Despite the grueling pressure and the toll the enessment campaign took on her physical and motional welfare, Clark fought back. In Decem- a heaped She became a steward and, in June, 1985, she wth and safety rep. To management's horror the Successfully confronted unsafe conditions in Plant with work refusals. com K blew the whistle on Stelco’s refusal to ply With designated substance regulations brief t With silica dust, lead and asbestos. In his © the Laskin-McKenzie administration, Stan Gray, director of the Hamilton-based Ontario Workers Health Centre, documented Clark’s ex- posure of Stelco’s disregard both for the law and the health of its work force. Stelco was to have complied with the silica regu- lation in 1983 but never got around to putting a program in place until the spring of 1985. The com- pany was never prosecuted by Ontario’s labor ministry for consistently violating the lead, silica and asbestos designated substance regulations. Clark’s complaint that silica was still being used in some areas even after the June, 1985 banning and that workers in her department had been exposed to significant levels of the substance during the two years Stelco ignored the control order, fell on deaf ears at the ministry, Gray charged. ‘They Want Her Out’ Gray adds that the fact that Laskin and McKen- zie completely ignored this evidence of flagrant disregard for the law, ‘‘says something about the economic weight of Stelco. The corporation is a heavy hitter in the Ontario economy. Bonita has become a very active safety rep and that’s an extra reason they want her out.”’ Heavy hitter or not, Clark believes she’s on to something that will help the union and its members resist harassment. In 1985, a year after Stelco refused to respond to complaints she brought before the human rights commission, Clark filed more than 60 charges of harassment and discrimination before the Ontario Labor Relations Board. In essence, she is arguing that the sexual and other forms of harassment creates an unsafe work place and a poisoned work environment. ‘*We’ve been up and down all the possibilities of how to solve this problem. My point of view is that we need the right to refuse. We have to take har- assment out of the closet and recognize it for what it is — a health and safety problem.” Stelco, of course, is fighting back tooth and nail. The labor board convened the first day of hearings as a plant health and safety inspection. With typical arrogance the company at first refused to allow the government and union officials to enter the plant. It took the threat by government officials to have Stelco executives actually subpeoned in their homes, and an invasion of TV cameras and report- ers outside the plant gates to make the corporation go through with the hearing. The following day as the hearing recon- vened in Toronto, Stelco challenged the media’s right to be present, their aim from the beginning was to hold in camera hearings and muzzle the Tess. At the end of March, Clark’s case before the board resumes. It has the potential, if her claim is upheld, of setting an important precedent in ex- panding workers’ control over the working en- i ent. ‘operons? for Clark, it could mean ending the humiliation of having to ask permission to use inadequate washroom facilities and other indigni- ties. What may be taken for granted by most work- ers remains the symbol of what she’s been fighting for all this time: ‘*First I'd like a washroom, she says, ‘after all, I've only been waiting eight years.”” Labor in action GEORGE HEWISON Construction workers are down, but not out The Construction Labor Association of Alberta has all but delivered the funeral oration for unionized construction workers in Alberta. Or have they? Why would Millar MacKinnon, president of CLA Alberta, waste so much breath to tell his delighted membership that only six per cent of the construction work and slightly under five thousand construction workers (out of a total of 61,500) in his province are union. In his speech, MacKinnon gives ample credit to the Tory Government (but is inspired by his construction employer com- patriots) for introducing the 25 hour lock-out legislation in which Alberta bosses may bolt the doors on their employees, then re-hire them 25 hours laters sans union contract. It’s obvious that MacKinnon’s concern is not so much that Alberta construction unions may die but rather that they may live, so for good measure he prescribes the formula to finish them off. He suggests to his ‘“‘union partners”’ that they continue in the concessions race. Continue the downward pursuit of the Merit Shop employers. Continue the plans laid out in the trap ‘‘En- suring Our Future’? upon which the Canadian Federation of Labour was built. In the next door province of VanderZania, unionized con- struction workers are facing similar problems. Kerkhoff Con- struction, once the off-the-wall vanguard of the right-to-work folks is now in big league construction compliments of a joint venture with the South Korea transnational Hyundai and the umbrella provided by the world’s only government which publicly seeks trade with South Africa. Elsewhere in Canada construction is caught in the malaise of the economic crisis, while technological change alters work pro- cesses and adds a further threat to the construction workers and their unions. But construction workers, while down, are not out. Their unions, if they pool their strength, can beat off the attack, and move ahead. Central to this process is to acknowledge that the CFL was, and is, a mistake. Unity among the trades, and with the Canadian Labor Congress is crucial. For example, both Canada’s building trades unions, and the Steelworkers, Canada’s largest industrial union are caught in the same economic net. Both have employers demanding con- cessions; both have members who are jittery over job losses, including to the non-union sector; both welcome a massive dose of capital expenditures to change the economic climate within which they operate. Union jobs for all Combined, they have the resources to vigorously campaign for a new industrial strategy for Canada including the building of secondary industry and the hundreds of thousands of jobs (in- cluding those for construction and steel workers) that go with it. In the past, jurisdictional disputes have made cooperation difficult, if not impossible. In other words, unionized jobs have been stolen from one organization to another, while the total pool of unionized jobs has been shrinking. The strategy that is required is one which increases the pool of unionized jobs for everyone. That is just the industrial strategy adopted at the last CLC con- vention in Toronto in 1986. —- A useful start in such a co-operation process would be to jettison the CFL which was originally set up to frustrate unity and co-operation in the Canadian trade union movement. The CFL has never had a secure base in Caneda. It has always promised a haven to any disgruntled affiliate of the CLC which could stomach the politics of Tory politicians and big employers speaking from the podium of CFL conventions. Few unionists have availed themselves of this uniqué opport- . unity. Sovereign and independent Many militant building trades unionists have continued to struggle for unity within the trade union movement sometimes under difficult conditions; sometimes with little appreciation from their brothers and sisters in the CLC; sometimes at the risk of trusteeship and suspension in their own unions. Their persis- tence is beginning to pay off. In the beginning, only a handful of building trades union locals across Canada remained in the CLC. Their ranks have swelled, and today as the CFL stands totally discredited, and the need for unity is more apparent than ever before, more building trades locals are re-joining the house of labor. It’s perhaps too soon to call the movement a flood. But the day is not far off for a complete re-uniting of all of the trade union forces of Canada in a sovereign and independent (independent of the boss) trade union movement. PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 18, 1987 e 7 is ail cake