The longest strike in the history of bruising labour conflict in the rich Sudbury mining region has ended after almost a year.

The United Steelworkers confirmed Thursday night that 3,100 striking members at Vale SA’s sprawling operations in the northern Ontario city and a small refinery in Port Colborne had voted about 75.5 per cent for a five-year contract containing wage improvements and some concessions.

Picket lines will come down during the next week as the Brazil-based mining giant starts a recall of many unhappy workers and a long process of rebuilding labour relations to improve productivity.

“We never got everything we wanted but taking a stand and fighting made a difference,” said Wayne Fraser, the union’s Ontario and Atlantic director. “It was necessary because if you choose to roll over, you are sure to lose. It is historic what happened here. It made change.”

Vale vice-president John Pollesel said the company looks forward to a return by workers after “a long, hard year for everyone.”

“It’s now time to come together and focus on building the strong and sustainable operations that Sudbury and Port Colborne require,” he said in a statement.

The strike became a classic labour-management struggle where Vale used its economic power as one of the world’s biggest mining companies to push for cost cuts against the Steelworkers in a union stronghold.

Vale hired replacement workers to continue operations, fired employees for alleged misconduct, sued the union and spent millions of dollars on extra security.

The strike, which started last July 13, marked the first time the company’s mines and other operations resumed partial production during a strike in more than 50 years that the union had represented workers. It left a lasting impression with them that labour relations had changed, and the strike would be long and hard.

The strike marked the ninth walkout at the former Inco operations since 1958 including an 8 ½-month walkout by more than 11,000 workers in 1978-79. That was the biggest strike in Canadian history in terms of worker-lost days.

Labour watchers say the outcome may prompt other multinational companies in Canada to take similar tough stances against unions to drive down costs and increase profits as global competition increases.

Vale officials have acknowledged the company, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars in output, faces a lot of work in winning the trust and support of workers to boost productivity as costs rise in mining the region’s ore reserves of nickel, copper, silver gold and other minerals.

Vale and the union finally reached agreement on all terms last month, but the deal stalled for several days on the issue of dealing with the fate of 12 fired workers. A provincial labour board will start hearing arguments to settle the lingering dispute on Friday.

Fraser, a former Inco worker, called negotiations with the company “horrifying” during the last year.

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The negotiating committee for United Steelworkers Local 2724, representing more than 600 salaried supervisory and technical personnel inside Essar Steel Algoma Inc., is seeking strike authorization from its membership less than a month prior to the expiration of its three-year contract.

The local will conclude two days of special membership meetings Tuesday at the Days Inn.

The update meeting is scheduled to begin at noon, with strike authorization voting from 6 a.m. through 8 p.m. at 2724′s Days Inn office, while Monday evening’s meeting and vote was at the Marconi Hall.

A strike authorization vote is essentially a show of membership solidarity for its bargaining committee and puts the local in a legal strike position, if necessary, at the expiration of its contract.

Three-year contracts between the Sault Ste. Marie steel maker and its two unions, including Local 2251, representing more than 2,500 hourly production, maintenance, service and clerical employees, and Local 2724, expire at 12:01 a.m. Aug. 1.

As of Monday afternoon, the 2251 negotiating team had not yet called on its membership for strike authorization, but has called special membership meetings for Wednesday, at 9 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. at the Great Northern Hotel and Conference Centre, to discuss the company’s proposed asset integrity proposal in the event of a labour disruption.

The asset integrity proposal, according to Mike Da Prat, president of Local 2251, relates to staffing in such areas as “the coke oven batteries and other ancillary operations that need to be maintained and kept operating in the event of a labour disruption.”

During the last negotiations, in 2007, the company trained its more than 100 non-union personnel and hired contract workers to augment its non-union people, on operating tasks such as the coke ovens, utilities and material handling, as well as fire and flood patrolling throughout the steelworks.

While Da Prat says negotiations, which began with an exchange of proposals more than a month ago, on June 1, are “plodding along” the local’s website is reporting that 2251 submitted its monetary proposal to the company a week ago, on June 28.

Monetary proposals are traditionally one of the last items of discussion in the negotiating process.

“We are still awaiting the company’s response … I wouldn’t read too much into the proposal at this stage, there are still outstanding issues on the table,” said Da Prat.

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VAUGHAN, Ont. – Locked-out workers at a Sears Canada warehouse in Vaughan, Ont., have voted to reject the latest contract offer by the company, the union representing the roughly 500 employees said Tuesday.

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The month of May has been designated by United Steelworkers Local 6500 in Canada as “anti-scab” month, a reference to the strikebreakers that the Brazilian mining company Vale is using in efforts to break a ten-month strike in the provinces of Ontario and Labrador/Newfoundland.

Some 200 steelworkers and other supporters rallied in Queen’s Park, Toronto, on 29 April to support introduction of legislation in the Ontario Parliament that would outlaw the use of striker replacements during economic strikes or lockouts. Many of the steelworkers arrived after long bus rides from Sudbury, Ontario, where they experience first-hand the family hardships and community strife brought on by the bargaining intransigence of a company content to use scabs to regain partial production.

On 29 April, the Private Member’s Bill that again would prohibit companies operating in Ontario from using scabs passed a first reading in Parliament by a 32-3 vote. The bill was introduced by New Democratic Party legislators France Gelinas and Peter Kormos.

Somewhat surprisingly, 21 members of the ruling Liberal Party joined with eight New Democrats and three Progressive Conservatives to pass this first reading. The bill must proceed through two more hearings before becoming law, and that could happen by year’s end. In Canada, most labour code is enacted at the provincial level.

Quebec and British Colombia are currently the only two provinces that prohibit the use of replacement workers during strikes or lockouts. In Ontario, such a prohibition was on the books from 1992 to 1995, but was repealed in 1995 when Liberals took control of the Parliament. Gelinas presented proof that legislation banning companies from using replacement workers leads to shorter strikes, less volatile picket-line scenes, less family and community stress, and overall, better labour-management relations.

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614 days.

On a makeshift wooden sign affixed to a post, striking workers at Engineered Coated Products keep a tally of the number of days they’ve been off the job.

For 20 months, the workers, initially about 80 and now an estimated 60, have been camped outside the Elgin Street company as busloads of replacement workers are brought in daily to keep the packaging plant operational.

There has been no negotiation between the workers, represented by the United Steelworkers union, and the company since last July when the two sides met with a government conciliator.

And it seems unlikely they will be talking any time soon.

“It takes a toll,” admitted Rick Willson, a 33-year employee at ECP. “There’s nobody here to help.”

The strike began on Aug. 23, 2008 when Saul Marques, secretary- treasurer for United Steelworkers, Local 1-500, said the company demanded workers take a 25% wage cut, along with a cut in benefits and changes to their pension plan. The company, said Marques, also wanted to implement “continental” 12-hour shifts that would have resulted in job losses.

The workers, who earn between $17 and $23 an hour, had offered to take a 12% pay cut and other concessions in a three-year deal.

“The company wants us to agree to a 25% wage decrease or they won’t even talk,” said Marques. “It’s blackmail. Collective bargaining is supposed to be an exchange of facts. They’ve never provided us with any information.

“It’s been long enough. It’s time for the company to tell us their intent.”

ECP is part of the Intertape Polymer Group, which operates 10 plants in North America. The company bought the Brantford plant several years ago.

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Down the road from the Copper Cliff smelter, where the Inco Superstack reaches 380 metres into a clear winter sky, striking Steelworkers stamp their heavy boots and feed a smoking fire pit with scrap wood. Massive ore trucks, engines growling, wait for permission to drive through the picket line. It is a familiar ritual; after 10 or 15 minutes, the picket captain signals the drivers to proceed and go about their business at the smelter-their business being strikebreaking.

When Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers walked off the job at the Vale Inco nickel mines, it was mid-July. The progression from agreeable summer weather to minus 20 C has been brutal. The best to be said about minus 20 is that it’s better than minus 30, just like strike pay of $200 a week is better than no pay at all. It’s hardly surprising that there’s little of the bravado that usually sustains picket lines.

The downbeat atmosphere may also reflect a sense among the strikers that the world has changed and that their strike has not been noticed by Canadians. There have been many strikes in Inco’s history-but every other one was decided in Canada. Now Inco is a subsidiary of a company based far away.

If the long stalemate in Sudbury had a sound, it might be that of the other shoe falling. When the takeover binge of the mid-2000s saw many of Canada’s pre-eminent companies disappear into foreign hands, the debate over the “hollowing out” of the domestic economy was muted. After all, Vale, like other acquisitors, made undertakings to preserve jobs and, in fact, to carry on much like before.

Now, it appears, things look very different to Vale.

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The intent of United Steelworkers Bridging the Gap Rally may have been to send a message about international union solidarity to strike-bound Vale Inco Ltd.

But for one single mother of three, it was an experience that empowered her to believe more than ever that the fight she has been waging for a long eight months can be won by workers like her.

Nancy Marchand, a 13-year employee on Frood-Stobie’s shaft crew, hoisted her daughter, Emily, 2, in the air and raised the girl’s tiny arm in victory with her own when speaker after speaker at the rally earned standing ovations for their powerful messages.

Marchand, her daughter, and sons Maxim, 8, and Gabriel, 10, were among a crowd of about 4,000 who took over Sudbury Communty Arena after marching and chanting from the Steelworkers’ Hall on Brady Street.

Organizers estimated as many as 5,000 placard-bearing, flag-waving strikers, family members, members of other unions and community supporters — hundreds bused in from southern Ontario — took part in the parade.

It could have been deja vu all over again because Bridging the Gap was similar to a rally organized by USW in September with an international solidarity theme, two months into the strike by 3,400 Steelworkers in Sudbury and Port Colborne, and in Voisey’s Bay, NL.

But Monday’s rally built on the momentum established by the Jan. 13 six-month rally that attracted more than 2,000 people, and demonstrated that strikers are more committed to winning their “fair deal” now than they were in the fall.

The rally was held 10 days after 88% of voting Sudbury Steelworkers and 98% of voting strikers in Port Colborne rejected an offer to settle the strike from Vale Inco.

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Talks between the United Steelworkers in Voisey’s Bay and Vale Inco aimed at finding common ground have failed, according to radio station VOCM.

The station says Steelworkers spokesman Boyd Bussey claimed the union offered to modify its monetary proposals to kick start talks, but the company insisted on concessions to the nickel bonus to restart discussions.

The station quotes Bussey as saying the government-appointed conciliators adjourned the meetings.

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