Last week, management at the Cargill meat processing plant in Guelph, Ontario, broke a month-long silence by emailing a new contract offer to the striking United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local union. UFCW representatives described the offer as even lower than the pitiful deal that was rejected by members late last month by a margin of 82.4 per cent. While it fell far short of workers’ expectations for a wage increase, the rejected tentative contract was unanimously recommended by union leadership.
Sam Caetano, regional director of UFCW Region 6, however, seemed more concerned about Cargill’s snubbing of the union bureaucracy than the plight of the plant’s 960 members, taking particular exception not to the insulting new offer but rather to the way it was presented. “We just informed the members of the company’s position and we just told the employer that we will not negotiate via email and that we want to get back to the table,” he said.
The strike at the Cargill plant is now in its fifth week. An article published in the Guelph News describes the steady increase in the number of strikers using a local food bank. Jaya James, executive director of Hope House – a major food and community service provider in the city – told reporter Mark Pare that over the past two weeks of the strike, there has been a growing influx of strikers signing up for food assistance. The increase is so high that Hope House may soon be forced to introduce a waiting list for new registrations. “A normal day for us in terms of the number of people coming through our food market is 36 households,” she said. “Last Monday, we served 63 households.”
Since the strike began, over 100 new households have accessed food assistance, almost triple the monthly average. When looking at poverty numbers in the region, the latest census shows that 11% of people living in Guelph are low-income families. With children being disproportionately affected by poverty, the child poverty rate was 15% for the same period. Since the start of the 2020 pandemic, these numbers have only increased.
Workers at the Cargill plant, especially temporary foreign workers on poverty wages, had been using the services of various charities even before the strike began. They have been joined by a growing number of workers on higher wages.
On average, workers at the plant currently earn just over $42,000 Canadian per year, according to company statistics. The highest job categories pay about $27 an hour for master butchers, barely above the current provincial standard for “base wage.” Workers in lower classifications earn much less, with some earning barely more than Ontario’s minimum wage. Cargill management employs hundreds of low-paid temporary foreign workers from around the world.
Full details of the initially rejected four-year contract proposal have not been made public, although Cargill boasted of a 9.3 percent pay increase in the first year, but significantly smaller increases in the following three years.
Over the past four years, the cost of living in Canada, as elsewhere, has skyrocketed, with inflation reaching nearly 9%. While inflation has fallen to about 3% over the past year, workers’ basic expenses, including food, gas, rent and mortgages, continue to rise. The recently released inflation figures for May show that inflation is on the rise again.
The last four-year contract at Cargill’s Guelph plant was reached in 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 price spike. It provided an average total increase of $1.90, or less than 50 cents an hour for each year of the contract, meaning workers effectively took a substantial cut in real terms. It was such a terrible compensation for the backbreaking and oppressive work they did at the plant that workers told reporters at the World Socialist Web Siteduring several visits to the picket line, that they were determined to obtain a significantly more advantageous contract offer.
A global conglomerate known for its profits, Cargill employs 160,000 people in 70 countries and has revenues of $177 billion for 2023. The company consistently reports significant profit increases year after year. Twenty-three members of the Cargill-MacMillan family own 88% of the company, and fourteen of them are billionaires. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were raking in $20 million a day in personal profits. After being forced to pay a $2-an-hour bonus to limit absenteeism during the pandemic, the company quickly stopped the payment as soon as its high production levels were restored.
Beef producers in the province are becoming concerned about the rising costs of shipping their cattle to slaughterhouses in the United States and Alberta. “Ontario is the second largest beef producing province in the country and the impact on the feedlot sector, beef supply chain partners and farmers’ ability to generate cash cannot be underestimated,” said Craig McLaughlin, president of the Beef Farmers of Ontario (BFO).
Conditions are extremely favourable for the development of a broad working class movement to oppose the continuing corporate assaults. As the strike continues in Guelph, 400 other UFCW-union meatpacking workers employed at Cargill Case Ready in Calgary, Alberta, have already voted 100 per cent to strike and could walk off the job as early as the end of June. In Guelph itself, hundreds more local Case Ready workers will see their contracts expire next year. The struggle of these workers to defend their standard of living and to oppose management’s ramping up of production and destruction of health and safety standards is generating great sympathy across Canada, and indeed around the world.
But Guelph Cargill workers should be warned. A vast gulf exists between the workers at the plant, facing miserable wages and conditions, and the UFCW bureaucracy, which was enthusiastically lobbying them last month to accept the initial, pitiful tentative agreement. The UFCW apparatus, like all major union bureaucracies, is on the side of corporate management, with which it has developed close corporatist relationships over the past forty years.
The main concern of the UFCW bureaucrats is to keep the strikers isolated on the picket lines until they can force them to accept another deal full of concessions, and to prevent the fight against Cargill from becoming the catalyst for a broader movement against miserable working conditions and real wage cuts.
Workers must immediately establish a strike committee independent of the union apparatus to prevent a sellout and extend their struggle to other sections of workers to combat the ruling class’s assault on their working conditions and secure decent and safe jobs for all. For more information on how to develop this struggle, contact us.
(Article published in English on June 29, 2024)
