LINDSAY — Workers at Lindsay’s Armada Toolworks plant could face a lockout as early as Dec. 30 after workers voted 68% in favour of rejecting the company’s final offer.

The contract for 146 Armada workers represented by the Canadian Auto Workers Local 222 expired at the end of November.

Armada has filed for a no-board report which would put the company in a legal position to lock out workers as of Dec. 30, according to a news release from the union.

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Workers at Armada Toolworks Lt. in Lindsay, Ont., have voted to give their union a strike mandate in contract negotiations.

Local 222 of the Canadian Auto Workers says 89 per cent of those who voted Sunday approved the strike mandate.

Their current contract expires Nov. 30.

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BOWMANVILLE — The strike at Bowmanville’s St. Marys Cement has entered its 18th week, and talks between the two sides have broken off.

Approximately 100 Canadian Auto Workers Local 222 workers hit the bricks March 12, with pensions as the major issue.

Talks broke off last Friday, CAW local president Chris Buckley said.

“We’re waiting to get a signal the company’s ready to go back to the table,” he said, noting the union’s willingness to bargain to end the “terrible dispute.”

But, “St. Marys has no desire to end the strike, because they’re running the plant with scabs,” Mr. Buckley said.

Replacement workers are bused in and out, past the picket line on Waverley Road, south of Hwy. 401, each day, and the plant is said to be running at 60 to 80 per cent capacity, Mr. Buckley said, calling on the Province for anti-scab legislation.

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Frustrated by a lack of action at the bargaining table during a strike in its 16th week, miners from CBM/St. Marys cement manufacturing plant in Bowmanville brought their protest to the company’s Windsor location on Tuesday.

Members of CAW Local 222 — backed by about a dozen local union officials and supporters — slowed cement trucks throughout the day from entering St. Marys’ riverfront Russell Street plant location on the city’s west end for 15 minutes each.

The company is one of Canada’s largest quarry, gravel and cement operations. Almost 90 workers in Bowmanville have been without a contract since Jan. 31 and have been fighting changes to their pension plan.

There have been no talks since the strike started in mid-March. Local St. Marys employees are Teamsters members and not part of the strike.

“What we are hoping to do is get the company’s attention,” said Enzo Vizza, a member of the bargaining committee in Bowmanville who was leading the rally in Windsor. “We don’t want a raise and just hold the contract the way it is.”

Problems with the company started when it was purchased about six years ago by a corporation based in San Paolo, Brazil, Vizza said.

The pension plan of the workers has been defined, so what they were expecting to receive is predetermined. But the corporation is seeking changes that could bump the current prospect of receiving $44,000 annually in retirement to as low as $7,900, Vizza said.

“They say it’s a cultural change and they are going to change the way to do business here,” he said. “We want people across the province to know there are 87 families in real jeopardy in Bowmanville as a result of this foreign company.”

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