The Teamsters union has served Canadian National Railway (CN) with a 72-hour strike notice, hours after saying it was taking down picket lines and workers were returning to the job.
“Please find this letter as official notice to the company of our intention to withdraw the services of our combined membership of approximately 6,500 members,” reads the notice sent to CN on Friday morning by the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference.
The notice says that the union does not believe any of the ongoing issues between the railway and the Teamsters to be “insurmountable” and that it remains open to negotiating with the company in order to prevent any “further work stoppage.”
Speaking in Calgary, François Laporte, the president of Teamsters Canada, said the company’s demands would have broken the union’s collective agreement and that its priority is to ensure union members have “decent and reasonable working conditions.”
“We believe in fair and honest bargaining and that’s what we want, we want a fair and honest bargaining with the company,” he said.
🚩 François Laporte, President of Teamsters Canada, and Sean O’Brien, General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), are on the picket line this morning at CPKC’s headquarters in Calgary.<a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/canlab?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#canlab</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/teamsters?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#teamsters</a> cc1 <a href=”https://twitter.com/Teamsters?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@teamsters</a> <a href=”https://t.co/2Fl2xDXE1t”>pic.twitter.com/2Fl2xDXE1t</a>
—@TeamstersCanada
The work stoppage at Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) also continues pending an order from the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB).
Following months of increasingly fraught contract talks, Canada’s two biggest railways both locked out workers after failing to reach deals with the union by a Thursday deadline.
The unprecedented work stoppage prompted federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to refer the dispute to the CIRB to impose binding arbitration.
The union and CPKC officials met with the board on Thursday and will meet again Friday.
CPKC said it was prepared to discuss the resumption of service at the meeting with the CIRB, but the union refused and wants to make submissions to challenge the constitutionality of MacKinnon’s direction.
CN and CPKC locked out 9,300 engineers, conductors and yard workers just after midnight Thursday, capping months of increasingly tense and bitter labour negotiations. CPKC’s 3,500 workers went on strike at the same time.
Jonathan Abecassis, director of public affairs and media relations at CN, said that without an agreement or binding arbitration, the company “had no choice” but to lock out employees. CPKC also called for binding arbitration, saying the union has made “unrealistic demands.”
Less than 17 hours after the lockout began, MacKinnon announced he would use his powers as labour minister to step in. Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code allows the government to refer a labour dispute to the CIRB to find a solution.
Laporte of Teamsters Canada said on Friday that the minister’s actions were not acceptable to the union.
“The best way to have a contract is at the bargaining table,” he said. “We don’t believe to let a third party to decide what’s going to be our working condition.
“We know the … railway operation are very complicated,” he added. “The union knows the operation, the company knows the operation, and they know what we need to operate this and to provide the workers with decent working conditions.”
Laporte said the union will use its “constitutional right” to fight the company for a fair deal.
“We are here and we are going to stay here,” he said.
Cargo and commuter disruptions
Pressure from industry groups and provincial governments to resolve the conflict has been mounting for weeks.
The companies haul a combined $1 billion in goods each day, according to the Railway Association of Canada. Many shipments were pre-emptively stopped to avoid stranding cargo.
The impasse affects tens of thousands of commuters in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, whose rail lines run on CPKC-owned tracks. Without traffic controllers to dispatch them, passenger trains cannot run on those rails.
Industries affected by the work stoppage include agriculture, mining, energy, retail, automaking and construction. U.S. railways also have had to turn away Canada-bound shipments.
Shippers south of the border also rely on Canada’s two main railways, whose tracks run to the Gulf of Mexico and, in CPKC’s case, to several Mexican ports.