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.




Lately, Lillian Rose has been on my mind. Last Sunday, I was preparing to
fly north to write about the 11-month-long strike against Inco, now called
Vale, by 3,000 members of the United Steelworkers Local 6500. The pending
trip evoked memories, and I found myself staring at a faded photo of my
grandmother and me.

Still, I had no intention of writing about her.

My story would be about the culture of a company town from the perspective
of generations of men who went down the mines, or worked in the smelter or
refinery, at what used to be Inco. That seemed the best place to start,
given that Inco’s owner since 2006 — Companhia Vale do Rio Doce — insists
the working culture of its new operations must change.

By that, the Brazilian behemoth that bought Inco for $19.4 billion,
creating Vale Inco (now simply Vale), means lower costs and higher
production. Words of praise for Sudbury and its workers that flowed so
freely after the enormous sale have morphed into terse complaints about a
“sense of entitlement” among miners and veiled threats the whole operation
could collapse.

A strategy document prepared by a Vale working group in Toronto last June,
and leaked early this year to the Sudbury Star, brims with MBA-speak,
upbeat in tone, deadly in intent. It warns: “Sudbury does not have the
capacity to change organically. It will have to be done by us.”

Cory McPhee, Vale’s corporate affairs vice-president, says the language of
a mere planning workshop has been misinterpreted. But people here are
afraid. Although the two sides began bargaining with provincial mediator
Kevin Burkett in Toronto on Friday and are scheduled to talk until Monday,
the future remains wildly uncertain.

Worst-case scenario? The death of a company town and the end of the union
as miners have known it. With their top bosses in Brazil, they worry about
a loss of control over their future — as if they ever had control facing
the swagger of the International Nickel Co., with its American executives
and wealth pulled from Sudbury ground and poured into often ill-conceived
global ventures.

“The Arrogance of Inco” is the headline on a brilliant 1979 story in
Canadian Business magazine by the late Val Ross. The subhead elaborates: “
‘If you don’t like it, take it or leave it,’ rumbled a company founder in
1886. That has been Inco’s attitude ever since — to customers, to labour
unions.”

Could Vale be worse than that? Yes, says miner Michael O’Brien, 29, a
proud Copper Cliff boy who has the smelter and the iconic Superstack
tattooed on his arm. “This company’s so huge,” he says, of Vale. “To me,
they’re nameless, faceless, unknown. The worst of globalization has finally
hit us.”

Clearly, there’s a failure to communicate on a massive scale.

The Steelworkers are suspicious of the Brazilian owners and fear they want
to crush the union and turn once mighty mining operations into a turnstile
for temporary workers. The company counters with cries of foreign-bashing
by the union and allegations of vandalism and dangerous tactics on the
picket line.

There was no room in this story for Lillian Rose.

And yet, by a twist of fate on a muggy Monday, here I am, walking up the
steps of the house where I used to live in Copper Cliff, a few kilometres
west of Sudbury off Highway 17.

It’s on Power Street, a stone’s throw from my grandparents’ former house
on Jones. It sits in the shadow of the Superstack and the Copper Cliff
smelter. There’s a creek in the back that flows with runoff from ore
processing at the nearby Clarabelle mill.

It’s the house I most associate with my grandmother in her last few years.
My family moved in when I was finishing high school. After my first year of
university, I worked a summer in the Inco offices, on the other side of the
tracks.

I’m nonplussed.

A few days earlier, I’d called Local 6500 president John Fera from Toronto
and asked him to hook me up with a striker who represents at least two
generations in the mines. He had more than 18,000 people (3,000 strikers
and 15,000 pensioners) to choose from and picked the Pattersons.

Striking miner Alex, 39, brought me to Copper Cliff to meet his retired
father, Gary, 61. Alex looked at me strangely when I blurted out the
address as we were pulling into the driveway. Almost 25 years ago, Gary
Patterson moved into this house with his family as mine moved out.

What were the odds? It felt like a sign. Lillian Rose had decided how this
story would be written.

She, who never put a foot in a mine, sacrificed as much as anyone to live
here. She made me realize that what wives and mothers (apart from women who
worked for Inco) have given to the mining company makes the story about
more than the sweat of miners. It’s about the bargain whole families make
with the employer in a company town, union members and managers alike.
(With family members in both camps, I got a fulsome perspective.)

My grandmother would never have dreamed of leaving. She loved her husband
and family, and without even thinking about it, she put her needs last. She
fought to stay cheerful and, from her bed, knit glorious scarves the colour
of the sky, cardigans with white angora kittens and a pair of red mittens
on a string, stitched with the faces of two girls with black button eyes,
red felt mouths and pigtails of yellow yarn.

She made me see that I too am of the rock cuts and scrub bush, cold lakes
and loon calls of northern Ontario. I understand why people here feel
alienated from the rest of a country, especially the south, which seems
oblivious to their fate.

People here believe they have a deal with Vale and the other big local
nickel miner, Xstrata, once Falconbridge and now based in Switzerland. It’s
hard work in return for good wages, benefits and pensions. Hourly pay is
$28.14 for miners, slightly more for mechanics and electricians, but in
boom times, nickel bonuses can be very lucrative.

Few dwell on the downside of that bargain, but they all know the risks,
including injury or death on the job and pollution-related health problems
for their families.

Gary Patterson, tall, burly and nicknamed “Red,” sits in his sunroom and
recounts the years in the mines before he ran for the union and, over 21
years, worked up to the presidency. He overcame the skin cancer he thinks
he got from sun exposure at the Clarabelle open pit.

On his first day as Steelworkers’ vice-president in 1987, four men died
when a load of ore fell on them as they inspected the shaft at Levack Mine.
It set a tone. Another year 12 died. “We worked hard alongside Inco to
improve things,” says Patterson. “It’s better now, but still risky. It’s
been a culture of blood.”

“Big Al” Patterson, a carbon copy of his father, remembers his first day
going underground. His manager told him: “We kill somebody every nine
months. So work safely.”

Decade after decade, Inco was a conveyor belt, with young men arriving,
putting in their 25 to 30 years or more, getting the big send-off with the
watch and a photo in the Inco Triangle and, in too many cases, ending up in
the obituaries a few months later, dead of lung diseases or worn-out
bodies.

Every family has a story. My grandfather Reg risked his life to pull a
co-worker off a high-voltage line at the Copper Cliff smelter, almost
getting electrocuted in the process. Or so says the family story. He burned
his arm badly in the incident, losing a thumb and forefinger and spending a
year in hospital during the Depression, while his kids shot rabbits to
survive. A supervisor apparently changed the accident site in his report to
shield the company from blame.

Alex’s wife, Sheila, 41, talks about her concerns over her husband’s job
during an early evening interview at the family home in Lively, another few
miles west along Highway 17. An administrative assistant at the
Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers (where staffers assist local
people whose disability claims have been rejected), she says she was
worried all the time when Alex worked underground. She persevered in
pushing her husband to get a surface job. “Some people go down breathing
and come up dead.”

The guys on the South Mine line near Copper Cliff talk nonchalantly about
regular blood screening, provided by the company, for nickel, arsenic, lead
and other carcinogens. It’s part of that bargain for the good pay with
benefits, pension and job security.

But now the men are angry, say strikes on picket lines across the city,
because they think they make sacrifices and now the company wants to renege
on the trade-off.

The strike began on July 13 last year after talks broke down on a number
of issues — most notably Vale’s bid to change the pension plan for new
hires, reduce profit-sharing, and, in the union’s view, open up the
industry to temporary workers, thereby eroding job security.

But McPhee, a Sudbury native who now works for Vale in Toronto, insists
the company is actually offering an improved pension plan and has no
intention of undercutting the union. “What we are doing is creating a
longtime future for operations in the Sudbury region — not five to 10 years
but 50 years,” McPhee says. “There is no intent on our part to threaten
people’s job security.”

It’s a jolt to hear men in their 20s and 30s talk about pensions, as if
they’re about to totter off to a rest home. But that’s how the thinking
goes in a company town, especially with Vale wanting to go to a different
pension plan for new employees the union says is less generous.

Young picketers talk about their post-secondary degrees in geological
engineering, chemistry, biology and physics — you name it. But they give up
their specialties to go into the mines. The pull of their fathers and their
fathers’ fathers is too great, as is the haunting call of the land. They
fish, hunt, go to their camps, jump naked into the lake from their saunas
in wintertime. They scoff at life in the Big Smoke.

Now they’re scared because they don’t believe, despite Vale’s
protestations, that the Brazilian company understands the culture here.
There’s a story —apocryphal perhaps — about a visiting delegation from
Brazil that came to Sudbury in winter and saw all these yellow cords
hanging in a parking lot. Bemused, they asked what they were, only to be
told they were electrical cords to keep car batteries warm in sub-zero
weather.

Gasped one visitor: “Your workers have cars?”

Such stories prompt company accusations that the union is foreign-bashing
when it portrays Third World conditions being applied to Sudbury. In a
public message released in March, Vale CEO Tito Martins said: “How do
across-the-board wage increases, production bonuses, profit-sharing and
pension improvements threaten Canada’s national heritage or quality of
life?”

Martins also said it was “ironic that the USW. (United Steelworkers) —
itself a foreign union — has relied so heavily on a global campaign of
misinformation, racism, intolerance and xenophobia (an unreasonable fear of
hatred of foreigners) to further its position in a country like Canada that
prides itself as a model of multiculturalism.”

Strikes aren’t new to Sudbury, nor are raw feelings among people of just
about every ethnic background who’ve had to get along, sometimes against
their instincts, in the claustrophobic grip of company towns. It got so bad
when the Steelworkers fought the Mine, Mill and Smelter union for members
in the 1950s that fist fights would break out in parking lots.

After the Steelworkers won in 1962, they struck Inco seven times,
including a 261-day walkout in 1978-79, almost bringing the community to
its knees.

But this one is particularly vicious.

Vale plays by different rules, workers say, shattering the code by
bringing in strikebreakers to keep some production going. Inco never did
that. Many believe the company wanted the strike anyway — a premise hotly
denied by Vale — because there was an overabundance of supply in the
international nickel pipeline.

Gary Patterson’s judgment is harsh: “The strike will be over when Vale
wants it to be over.”

Recently, Premier Dalton McGuinty said his government “strongly urges and
encourages the employer not to hire replacement workers.” But how much
influence does he have when his province allows scab labour?

“We’re kinda defeated, man,” says a picketer at the Clarabelle mill. His
buddies regard me with disgust, then duck out with their “scab” placards
behind the shack.

Outside the Copper Cliff smelter Moe Brisson, 47, with 19 years on the
job, says it’s different this time. He’s married with a son, and his wife
works. “What I hate about them is that I’ve always been a good worker. But
it doesn’t count anymore. I don’t have the same trust. Nobody does. Young
guys are moving away ... and a lot of people are suffering.”

Vale doesn’t pull punches. In a column for the Sudbury Star in February,
John Pollesel, general manager for Ontario operations, said Sudbury
productivity is 50 per cent lower than comparable operations by their
competitors worldwide. He didn’t give examples. He accused the union of
“shouting that Sudbury is the richest ore body in the world — it quite
clearly isn’t, and hasn’t been for some time.”

The union maintains Vale wildly overbid on Inco. It may be the company
agrees. Martins admitted in one interview that Vale didn’t exercise due
diligence when it bought Inco. He explained that for the most part, the
only information the company obtained was on the public record. “I’m not
saying we were irresponsible in buying something we did not know, but
clearly for us, some of (Inco’s) commitments, the size of those
commitments, were not public.”

Strikers and their families feel betrayed by Ottawa, particularly Industry
Minister Tony Clement. In April 2009, Inco announced temporary summer
layoffs affecting 4,000 workers, as well as some permanent cuts. Clement
called it unwelcome news, and said he would investigate. He referred to the
terms of Vale’s original purchase agreement (which has remained
confidential), adding the company “made legally binding commitments under
the Investment Canada Act at that time that I expect to be fully respected
on behalf of the workers.”

Apparently, there were to be no layoffs for three years and net benefit to
Canada. By June 2009, he’d changed the tune.

“One of the things I look for is (whether) there an equality of pain
around the world in these international enterprises,” Clement told
reporters in Ottawa. “And judging from the shutdowns in Brazil for
instance, and other parts of the world, it seems they haven’t targeted
Canada or targeted Sudbury for their shutdowns. So that’s obviously
something in their favour.”

He pledged to keep an “eagle eye” on Vale’s Canadian operations (workers
are also on strike at Port Colborne and Voisey’s Bay in Newfoundland), but
there would be no legal action.

“So is he saying as long as the company treats workers in other countries
badly, it’s allowed to treat workers here that way?” Local 6500 president
Fera fumes. “He’s not a politician in a Third World country. He’s in
Canada.”

A Clement spokesperson ignored repeated requests for comment from the
Toronto Star.

The Sudbury strikers notice the Conservative government sending cabinet
ministers around the world to fight on behalf of private banks with
billion-dollar profits. They notice, too, that Clement made a videotaped
commercial in 2008 to be used in China on behalf of a company in his own
Parry Sound-Muskoka riding. Then health minister, he sent “my greeting to
the people of China, the People’s Republic of China, on behalf of myself
and the Government of Canada.”

“People here are hurting,” says Mike Kritz, 31, who works with his twin,
Matthew, at the Copper Cliff smelter. “Why is he even in office if he is
not going to do anything for the people of Sudbury?”

Even Mayor John Rodriguez, who’s moved on from his position of economic
nationalism for Sudbury as an NDP MP from the region, bristles that Sudbury
doesn’t get royalties from Vale or, in his view, proper value-added
research and development.

Rodriguez may say Sudbury will survive and that the community is
diversified beyond mining. But for striking miner O’Brien, it’s a sad time:
“This has been an Inco mining town for as long as anyone can remember. It
has a rich, rich union history, and that all seems to be at risk.”

From Pittsburgh, International Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, another
Sudbury kid who cut his teeth in local union politics, sees events as “the
death of a culture that says community solidarity is important, even though
people don’t always agree with each other.”

If that’s gone, if Vale truly doesn’t understand the culture here, what
gives meaning to the sacrifices of all the Lillian Roses who gave up
quality of life to stay in this punishing, infuriating and hopelessly
adored land?

http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/819684--inside-sudbury-s-bitter-vale-strike?bn=1