Volume Volume 58 58 Number • Issue 1411
Friday, 2018 Friday,March April 6,16, 2018
Thompson, Manitoba Thompson, Manitoba
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Now president will take USW Local 6166 reins just months before impending shutdown of Vale smelter and refinery BY IAN GRAHAM EDITOR@THOMPSONCITIZEN.NET
A pair of candidates are looking to become United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6166’s first rookie president since 2006 at a time when their members and the company that is their biggest employer are going through an unprecedented transition, with layoff notices anticipated later this month in preparation for the permanent shutdown of Vale’s smelter and refinery in the summer. Both candidates are longtime Thompsonites, one of them a second-generation Thompson miner, who’ve worked at the mining operations since they were still owned by Inco and bring with them a decade or more of union activism under their belts. Warren Luky has lived in Thompson for nearly 25 years after arriving, as so many residents did, on the “two-year plan” before ultimately settling down in the Hub of the North for good. “We really just kind of fell in love with living in the north,” says Luky, who
Nickel Belt News photo by Ian Graham Warren Luky currently serves USW Local 6166 as its recording secretary and lives at Paint Lake. “It ’s a wonderful community and we’re very fortunate to be here, very fortunate to enjoy a lot of things we do here in Thompson. There’s peace and quiet. There’s a lot of advantages living up north. That’s what’s really kept us here and having a good job that’s working towards a good pension, I think, is what everybody strives to be able to do.”
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Nickel Belt News photo courtesy of James Crawley James Crawley
The other choice on the ballot is James Crawley, currently the union’s treasurer, who was born in Thompson and has lived here most of his life, with both a father and a stepfather who worked for Inco as well as numerous other relatives. “I always wanted to be a miner like my dad,” said Crawley in a campaign pamphlet regarding his candidacy. “Most kids dreamed of being things like a fireman, doctor or astronaut. Not me. Miner only.” Luky has 22 years of seniority with Inco and, subsequently, Vale, while Crawley has worked for the company since 2003, after earlier working underground with Mid-West Diamond Drilling. Both candidates say they got involved with unionism as a result of the dangers that mining poses and a desire to ensure that they and their fellow workers are as safe as possible. For Crawley, the catalyst was an incident during the first shutdown of his career with the mine, when a friend of his was seriously hurt do-
ing a job that Crawley was supposed to be working with him on, but Crawley didn’t do it, though he was unaware at the time that he had the right to formally refuse the assignment. “So that made we want to get involved with the union,” he said. The dangers of the smelter were the motivation for Luky to get involved in union activities in Thompson, though he had other union involvement before arriving in Thompson. “It was a very active industrial environment and there was a lot of hazards out there,” he says. “There was a lot of risk to myself and other employees and I got involved because, if I didn’t get involved and I didn’t try to help ensure the safety of myself and the fellow workers there, I knew we could be putting people at risk,” Luky says. “There are so many things there that can hurt people and it’s very difficult for the management team to manage all that. I got on the joint health and safety committee to work together towards ensuring
everyone gets home safe at the end of the day.” Despite similarities in their past activities for the union – both candidates were members of the bargaining committee that negotiated the last collective agreement with Vale in 2014 (which runs until September 2019) – Crawley and Luky have different ideas when it comes to how they envision themselves as union president. “I think for any president the term is a challenging period of time,” said Luky. “It’s very busy this time, we have a lot going on. We have a paradigm shift in how we’re going to mine. We’re going to be a minemill operation. We’ve always been a fully integrated mining operation that provided a lot of work and a lot of stability for the Thompson area and the Thompson workforce. Changing to a mine-mill operation is going to be quite different. There’s a substantial upset to the workforce which is going to resonate throughout town. We’ll navigate this next time ahead of us with due
diligence and be careful so all the members are treated with dignity and respect and that we can move ahead towards a future that we can have a successful operation and have a good contract and have strong understandings and commitments from the employer towards the employees working here, which for the town of Thompson will of course be beneficial.” As for Crawley, he views the upcoming transition and the willingness of governments to help mitigate some of its impacts as an opportunity to expand the training available in Thompson as a way to help retain some of the workforce with less seniority so that they are still around town and available to return to work when more senior union members begin retiring not too far in the future. “We’re going to have a plant closure that we’ve never seen before,” said Crawley, noting that, as an underground worker for his entire career with Inco and Vale, he understand mines Continued on Page 3
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