Inside Sudbury’s bitter Vale strike, By Linda Diebel, for the Toronto Star, published: Sun. Jun 06 2010

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 Pittsburg, 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?