For $15 a month community members will be able to purchase a box of fresh vegetables and fruit.
The Sudbury Good Food Box is a non-profit organization that brings neighbours together to purchase a variety fresh vegetables and fruit. Once a month volunteers pack the Good Food Boxes, and they are delivered to various sites across the city. Savings are passed on to those who purchase a box because you are receiving an assortment of vegetables and friut at a wholesale rate.

To Order a Good Food Box, or learn more about the program, contact:
Social Planning Council of Sudbury Canadian Diabetes Association
30 Ste Anne Rd, 1st Floor 2141 Lasalle Blvd, Unit F
Sudbury Sudbury
(705) 675-3894 or email goodfoodbox@spcsudbury.ca

Press Release
For Immediate Release
June 8, 2010

Information from the Bargaining Committee

On June 4, 5, 6 and 7, 2010, both Bargaining Committees along with Mediator Kevin Burkett held several meetings in Toronto in an attempt to conclude bargaining and achieve a settlement.

Unfortunately, time was not on our side and Mr. Burkett’s schedule could not accommodate us staying in Toronto and continuing talks. Mr. Burkett called for an adjournment of talks to begin again on June 18, 19, 20, and 21 with both Bargaining Committees and Mr. Burkett.

In the meantime, Mr. Burkett has asked Sub-Committees of both Union and Company to meet in the interim to discuss specific outstanding items.

While we are frustrated that talks weren’t successful this time, we understand the need to carry on and get a fair deal.






Source: John Fera
Phone: 675-3381 ext. 232

Cope *ap

COPPER CLIFF, ONT.—My grandmother, Lillian Rose, was the sweetest person
I’ve ever known. She gave up more than youth and beauty to leave England
and come with her husband to the nickel mines of Canada’s Precambrian
Shield. The Sudbury region, some 400 kilometres north of Toronto, is an
unforgiving place for a fragile English rose.

During the last 40 years of her life, she had a disease that turned her
once-pale skin red and left it blistered and scabbed. The constant flaking
embarrassed her and, on bad days, the pain sent her to bed. My earliest
memory — and I was no more than 18 months — was of being on her bed on
Jones Lane in Copper Cliff, understanding even then I had to be gentle.

Doctors couldn’t help because they believed her allergic to the air she
breathed, a soup of industrial pollutants. Sometimes the sulphur was so
thick it seared the throat.

Move away, they said, and your skin will clear up. But they didn’t talk
about that publicly. My grandfather Reg was an electrician at the Copper
Cliff smelter and his job, and the livelihoods of the physicians
themselves, depended on what was then King Inco, the world’s biggest
producer of nickel.


[ Read the rest ... ]

Please be respectful with the working employees at CTV. They are unionized employees like we are, we have no quarrel with these people, they are doing their work. They are workers just like we are and members of Local 667, IATSE and their job is just to interview us to try to get our side of the story.

If we have any problems with CTV management, our Executive will deal with them directly so again, please be respectful with the people who are interviewing us.

Executive Board
USW Local 6500

Contract talks between Vale Inco and striking Steelworkers in Sudbury have broken off.

Contract talks between Vale Inco and striking Steelworkers in Sudbury have broken off.

In an e-mail message Thursday afternoon to The Sudbury Star, mediator Kevin Burkett said the two sides could not reach a deal to end the strike, which is now almost 10 months old.

"At my invitation, representatives of the parties have been meeting in an attempt to find a pathway towards settlement," Burkett wrote. "Unfortunately, I have concluded that at this time no such pathway exists.

"Accordingly, I have adjourned these discussions."

The two sides were meeting at a Toronto hotel.

More than 3,000 Steelworkers in Greater Sudbury and Port Colborne have been on strike since July 13 in a dispute over pensions, the nickel price bonus and transfer rights.

More than 200 Steelworkers in Voisey's Bay, N.L., have been on strike since Aug. 1 over similar issues.

This is the second time negotiators for the Steelworkers and Vale Inco have met to bargain since the strike began. Ten days of negotiations in early March failed to end the impasse and led to a vote by Local 6500 members on Vale Inco's offer of settlement. It was rejected by almost 89%.

Striking members of United Steelworkers Local 6200 in Port Colborne — which bargains jointly with Local 6500 — also rejected the offer by a 98.1% margain.

Vale Inco had little to say about the break down of talks.

"We respect the decision from Mr Burkett acknowledging that the latest round of mediated talks have ended without an agreement," Steve Ball, the company's Sudbury spokesman, said in an e-mail statement.

"If we have anything additional to say, we will issue a press release tomorrow."

sudburystar

Listed below is the decision of Justice R. Gordon rendered March 24th, 2010.

- Picketers shall be limited to eight (8) at each established picket line location.

- Picketers are prohibited from hiding or concealing their identity at or near the Vale premises by wearing a balaclava, bandana, scarf or other clothing covering their face and the picket captain is ordered to demand that any such picketer leave the picket line and the Sudbury premises immediately.

- Justice Gordon refused to make an order with respect to secondary picketing.

- Justice Gordon includes in his order the following provision: “The Sheriff of the judicial district of Sudbury shall do all things reasonably able to be done, with such force and assistance as is required in the circumstances to prevent or stop breaches of this Order and in the even the Sheriff believes that the execution of the order may give rise to a breach of the peace, he or she may require a police officer to accompany him in the execution of the order”.




Cope 343 *ap Issued by Local 6500, USW – March 26, 2010

We Call on Vale to Respect Its Employees and Our Community

NOTE: This is the full text by the United Steelworkers posted on FairDealNow.ca in reply to Vale’s letter of March 17th.

In the latest “open letter” published by Vale Inco, this foreign corporation again demonstrates its contempt for our community and for Canada’s democratic traditions and labour relations culture. But most of all, Vale demonstrates a shocking disrespect for its employees.

Indeed, the most disturbing aspect of Vale’s latest public attacks may well be its blatant disregard for the independence, intellect, and judgment of thousands of its workers.

As you know, striking Vale employees in Sudbury and Port Colborne recently voted 90 per cent against the company’s last contract offer. After eight months on the picket lines, the vote was even more emphatic than an earlier contract rejection at the strike’s onset in July 2009.

To a reasonable, objective observer, such an unequivocal result would suggest serious shortcomings with Vale’s contract offer. It would suggest that a company that purports to care for its employees would want to address these issues in the democratic Canadian way – at the bargaining table with the employees’ legally-sanctioned and democratically-elected representatives.

Roman Catholic Bishop Jean-Louis Plouffe is one such impartial – and very concerned – observer.

"If 89% of the workforce rejected it, it must have been something not acceptable," Bishop Plouffe said of Vale’s contract offer.

Such thoughtful and reasonable views are dismissed outright by Vale.

In fact, in its latest finger-pointing letter, Vale accepts no responsibility for the overwhelming rejection of its contract offer. Just as it accepts no obligation to compromise and return to bargaining. Just as it accepts no responsibility for provoking, or prolonging, the labour dispute.

Instead, Vale blames the resounding denunciation of its contract offer on “fear-mongering” and “manipulating facts” by United Steelworkers’ elected leaders.


[ Read the rest ... ]