A conciliator with Quebec’s provincial labour ministry is set to meet Friday with striking employees from meat packer Olymel’s Beauce-region hog slaughter plant.
The Vallee-Jonction plant’s 940-odd employees represented by CSN (Confederation des syndicats nationaux) walked off the job on March 18.
Union and company officials have been in talks with the provincial conciliator, Jean Nolin, since March 26, the company said.
Nolin has submitted his report to the executive committee for CSN’s Vallee-Jonction local, and has also asked to present it to assembled union members, the union said in a release Wednesday.
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CSN said it has called a members’ meeting for Friday at 1 p.m. at nearby Tring-Jonction and won’t comment further before the end of that meeting.
Olymel, in a separate release Wednesday, said its management has also received Nolin’s report and won’t comment further until after the members’ assembly Friday.
In a previous release Sunday, however, Olymel said the union and company had both signed an agreement in principle with a “favourable recommendation” from the provincial conciliator.
But the company also said Sunday that union brass “refuse to recommend” to Vallee-Jonction members that they should vote in favour of the agreement.
Olymel said Sunday the “inexplicable attitude” from the union “can only mean a continuation of the strike at the Vallee-Jonction plant.”
The company, which last week announced layoffs effective March 30 for most of Vallee-Jonction’s non-union staff, said Sunday the strike is “already compromising the resumption of operations, specifically on the second shift.”
The strike “has already led to the cancellation of supply contracts (from Ontario hog producers) that will be difficult to recover unless there is an agreement in the short term,” Olymel said. — AGCanada.com Network
