Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Job Success But Not Job Security
(May 13) - Sometimes we learn our lessons too late to profit from them. Such was the case last week when Skyjack let another group of workers go. In any unionized workplace, the company would have been forced to let them go in order of seniority. Skyjack workers don’t have a union, so the rules of negotiated labour relations don’t apply. The laws of the accounting jungle do.
Skyjack isn’t hurting for money. It is one of the more profitable components of the very profitable Linamar empire. A couple of weeks ago, it finalized a deal to buy two American plants from Volvo Motorized Equipment. They make rough terrain fork lift trucks. Last August, Skyjack bought a company called Carelift. It operated in Breslau, also making rough terrain lifting machines called Zoom Booms.
The Volvo work is being brought up to the old ABB plant on Woodlawn Road.
It’s good to see this work flowing north. In recent months, most movable manufacturing jobs have been going in the opposite direction. This corporate success is not translating into increased job security for long service Skyjack workers. Some with as much as ten years’ seniority were tossed out of work last week. It’s not that the company was short of work. It wasn’t. Nor was it because these workers weren’t very good at what they did. They were. They had helped put together a lot of high quality scissor lifts over the years.
Their problem was that after being there for so many years, they were entitled to higher wages, more vacation time, and other little bits and pieces that are normal rewards for long service and loyalty.
Even upper management folk take these sorts of things for granted. The lesson the workers learned last week was that new hires coming in off the street get lower wages, fewer benefits and less vacation. The bean counters were taught this in the first year of their MBA studies.
Last December, about 35 Skyjack workers were similarly laid off without regard to seniority and without enforceable recall rights. The ones who stayed breathed a sigh of relief and thought they kept their jobs because they were better workers. Last week a few of them found out there is more to it than this. Some have grandparents who organized unions in the first half of the last century. They did this because their own experience taught them a fundamental fact of life: workers and their families need to join together to protect themselves against the predatory practices of bean counters. If they do nothing else, effective union stewards force managers to see the world that exists on the other side of the ledger sheet.
A falsehood is repeated so often these days that some people think it is true. It is that unions have become irrelevant. They were needed back in the dirty thirties but not today. Even if everyone else in Guelph believes this to be true, the workers at Skyjack and other Linamar plants should know better. They should know that only a union will negotiate seniority rights for them, enforce health and safety regulations, and bring them a grievance procedure to resolve disputes in an orderly way.
Linamar certainly knows how to look outside for help. It just got almost two million dollars from the provincial government to fund new research into solar power. They recently started making rechargeable cordless lawn mowers. When they got into this game, they joined companies as diverse as MTD Products, Black and Decker and others. All are now rushing to develop a practical solar powered charging system for their batteries.
Linamar is getting help from the provincial government’s environmental and alternative energy development fund. I don’t think anyone would object to this. It’s the sort of assistance the government should provide through their Ministry of Research and Innovation. The company would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
By the same token, the workers have access to the Labour Relations Act. It provides assistance through the Ministry of Labour. They would be foolish not to take advantage of it. Management shouldn’t object, since we all know that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
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