CanWest bent on eviscerating
circulation
department at Montreal daily
Montreal Newspaper Guild | CWA Canada
Local 30111
Management of The
Gazette in Montreal,
determined to lay off 45 employees and export their
work to a call centre in Manitoba, is resorting to
bully-boy tactics to gets its way.
The company, which cancelled its
initial plan to lay off the Reader Sales & Service
(RSS) workers on May 30 after the Montreal Newspaper
Guild (MNG) filed a grievance, did an about-face and
resurrected the layoffs, to take effect June 13.
The MNG is fighting back with everything in its arsenal,
says president Mona Leroux.
In addition to filing a fresh
grievance over the plan to export work to CanWest
Global Corporation's non-unionized operations in
Winnipeg — a "clear violation
of our jurisdiction," says Leroux — the
Guild is seeking a safeguard order (a form of injunction)
from either an arbitrator or Quebec Superior Court
to prevent the company from going ahead with the layoffs.
Despite having agreed to an expedited process on the
initial grievance, the employer this time refused the
Guild's request to go directly to arbitration.
Meanwhile, management has eschewed regular negotiations
to renew collective agreements with four MNG bargaining
units, three of which have contracts expiring on June
1. The company has applied for conciliation with the
RSS unit.
The MNG responded by applying
for conciliation for the advertising and editorial
units. (The contract for workers in Classifieds — a
first collective agreement imposed by an arbitrator — expired
Dec. 31. Conciliation for that unit is ongoing.)
"The company is basically saying
it wants to bargain only with RSS," says Leroux.
It's a classic "divide
and conquer" strategy in that "management
wants to isolate RSS from the other three units. They
want their 45 layoffs."
She says the employer's underhanded
tactics are creating unrest among the membership: "It's an anxiety-provoking
situation for everyone" who works at the venerable
English-language daily.
The MNG, which had already
filed grievances over electronic photo desk and newspaper
pagination work being transferred to a CanWest plant
in Hamilton, says language in its contracts "clearly
prohibits the assignment of such work either to employees
of the same employer not covered by our collective
agreement or to employees outside The Gazette."
Leroux notes that their contract language is similar
to that found in collective agreements negotiated by
another CWA Canada Local, the Victoria-Vancouver Island
Newspaper Guild. Attempts by CanWest to export work
from the Victoria Times-Colonist to Winnipeg have been
thwarted by rulings in the union's favour.
In a news release issued last
month, the MNG denounced the impending "dismissals of loyal and hard-working
employees who have established a strong relationship
with the newspaper's subscribers." By getting
rid of 45 of the 59 employees in RSS, management would
be eliminating "a group that functions easily
in French and English, and other languages."
Noting that this would be "the first layoff in
anyone's memory at The Gazette," the release said
the transfer of work outside the province "can
only erode service and the quality of Quebec's most
important mass medium serving close to one million
people in English."