Hamilton Business

Tales of transition

Leaving one country and arriving in another creates a variety of issues for immigrants. Adjustments must be made in language, culture, and career. In the New Life section of thespec.com, we read  first-hand testimonials from people who are going through this transition. We are interested in your comments and your stories, and we invite you to share your experiences with us and with our readers. Comment here in this blog. For longer essays about finding your way in the Canadian workplace, email your story, along with your picture (jpg format preferred), to newlife@thespec.com

Let's talk about business in Hamilton

Let’s talk about business in Hamilton.
Whether it’s local retailing, steel, auto parts, mom-and-pop manufacturing, a high tech startup or downtown redevelopment or the labour movement, it’s all part of the fabric that makes Hamilton a good place to live.
What are we going to do about brownfield sites scattered around town? What makes Hamilton tick today? Where are the jobs going to be in the future and are our kids being well prepared for them?
This is also the vault where the discussion about Dofasco’s failed union drive is being kept.
Everything is open. The only rule is keep it civil.
Steve Arnold
The Hamilton Spectator

Troubling numbers for community colleges

Ontario’s community colleges are bragging their graduates have an inside track on good jobs.
According to the latest provincial data released Wednesday, more than 90 per cent of community college graduates found work within six months of graduation. Employers also gave the system high marks, with 93 per cent expressing satisfaction with the quality of the graduates they’d hired within the past year.
Hamilton’s Mohawk College scores well -- 91.3 per cent of graduates found work and 93.3 per cent of employers were happy.
Drill a little deeper into the data, however, and some troubling questions emerge. Province-wide, for example, the graduation rate from community college programs for the 2006-7 school year was only 64.9 per cent. Mohawk’s rate was lower than average at 60.3 per cent while the range swung from a high of 77.4 per cent at Sudbury’s College Boreal to a pitiful 53.7 per cent at Toronto’s Seneca College.
Nowhere in the provincial data is it revealed how many students found work in the fields they had studied.
Education has always been a key to good employment, a link that’s only going to become stronger in the high-tech, skills-starved workplace of the future. Finding ways to ensure every able student has the chance to obtain the best education possible is in everyone’s best interests.
So, what makes for a good college experience? How do we increase the chance of success?
The complete results are online at www.collegesontario.org.
Steve Arnold
The Hamilton Spectator

BCE deal clears last hurdle

A group led by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan has cleared the last regulatory hurdle to its takeover of BCE Inc., Canada’s largest telephone company.
The $52-billion deal includes Teachers’ Private Capital, the private investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Providence Equity Partners Inc., Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC, and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity.
In putting his stamp on the deal today, Industry Minister Jim Prentice said conditions imposed by regulatory agencies will ensure control of the company remains in Canada. The conditions include having six of 13 directors appointed by the teachers’ fund and a requirement the chair and CEO of the company be Canadians.
“I’m responsible for ensuring that in fact control stays in Canada and we’ve worked together with the proponents to make sure that is the case,” Prentice told The Canadian Press. “In terms of both shareholder meetings and all board governance meetings, there will be a majority of the directors who are Canadians.”
The deal is expected to close before the end of the second quarter.
In an age when communication is the key to business success, there may be some valid reasons to worry about control of such a major company passing into the hands of foreigners committed to nothing but the idol of “shareholder value.”
Whether the conditions imposed by the defenders of Canadian interests will be enough to answer those concerns remains an open question.
Steve Arnold
The Hamilton Spectator

Union attacks China trade mission

Ontario has sent a high-level economic mission to China to open a new trade office, and the United Steelworkers are upset.
Led by Economic Development Minister Sandra Pupatello, the trade mission wants to help businesses in Ontario find new opportunities to expand in China.
“I think it’s really important that Canada engage in the world and one of the good ways we have to do that is through business and economic ties,” Pupatello said in a Canadian Press story. “I think we’ve been influential when we engage in countries like (China) ... It’s important that we engage with 1.3 billion people.”
Opposition politicians have expressed outrage at the mission, saying Canada shouldn’t be doing any kind of business with a brutal regime now cracking down on protesters in Tibet.
For the Steelworkers, the issue is even more basic -- with thousands of manufacturing jobs being lost because companies can get cheaper labour in Chinese factories, the union says the “jobs crisis” here should be solved before any overtures are made to China.
“China’s human rights record is directly tied to its surging economic power since so many jobs that used to be done by Canadians have disappeared as companies take full advantage of sweatshop conditions in China,” said Wayne Fraser, the union’s Ontario director in a news release. “No China-owned factories have been opened here. No jobs have been created by trading with China. They have only been lost and our communities are suffering.”
The question of what to do about China has been vexing business and political leaders for years. The argument on the business side is open up trade and human rights will follow economic prosperity. On the other side is the simple fact more Chinese-made goods are coming into Canada than Canadian-made goods are moving the other way.
That’s unfair.
What’s the answer here?
Steve Arnold
The Hamilton Spectator

Separating fact and fiction

Today's decision by the United Steelworkers to back off from the Dofasco organizing effort closes, at least for now, a bitter and divisive debate in the company.
It's clear before the USW comes back to Dofasco it has to mount a major education effort to overcome nearly a century of ignorance about the true role of a labour union in the modern industrial world.
Watching this process from the outside, I've been amazed at the unfounded, untrue and downright malicious allegations raised by USW opponents.
For example, the allegation the union did nothing for the workers laid off at Amcan Castings is simply not true. No labour union can stop a plant closing decision -- but in this case because the company was insolvent the workers were going to lose not only their jobs, but any chance of severance pay as well. It was the United Steelworkers which salvaged some form of payment for them.
Many writers on this blog seemed to be quaking in fear that joining a union inevitably meant going on strike. That's not true. When there's mutual respect and willingness on both sides in a contract negotiation working conditions and pay can be improved without confrontation.
At the bottom of much of the anti-union rhetoric, however, was the belief "The Dofasco Way" would make a union as unnecessary in the future as it had been in the past. The simple truth, however, is that the old Dofasco of the Sherman family is gone. Dofasco today is not the heart of a family's business, it is a tiny piece of a global operation. In that kind of environment workers need protection -- something Dofasco workers haven't had to experience yet.
Their day may be coming.

Steve Arnold
Hamilton Spectator

Is it time?

Talking about forming a labour union at Dofasco used to be a firing offence. Now the company is throwing open its doors to give the United Steelworkers union the chance it has been seeking since the 1930s.
In an unprecedented moved Dofasco’s European owners announced they’ve “reached an understanding on a unique process that will allow ArcelorMittal Dofasco employees the opportunity to test the suitability of a union to its unique working culture ...”
The deal allows union organizers into the plant to talk to workers about the potential benefits of organizing. If enough workers agree, a bargaining committee would be set up to negotiate a contract with the company. If that deal is ratified, the ArcelorMittal Dofasco would recognize the United Steelworkers as the bargaining agent for the hourly workers.
Back in the “good old days” of the “Dofasco Way” workers may have been justified in feeling they didn’t need an organization to speak for them. But the days of founders Clifton and Frank Sherman -- when workers could go straight to them with issues -- are long gone. Today, the owners are in Europe.
Maybe it’s time for Dofasco workers to consolidate into a union the way the their employer is consolidating into a global industry.

Steve Arnold

The Hamilton Spectator
 

Lively Dofasco discussion

Dofasco discussion on the specthread opinion blog has been so active that we decided to create a separate forum specifically for Dofasco posts and comments. Here are some recent comments:

Sustainability is secret to growth

Dofasco and their employees forged a culture based on mutual respect, which has spanned many generations. The overwhelming majority of Dofasco employees feel that safety is the top priority in the company and our results support this. Unions did not gain a foothold in Dofasco because of their being condemned by management. In fact, very little attention has ever been given to them. We have always shared our views and concerns in an open and frank manner, which led to a mutually beneficial and rewarding relationship, as well as sustained employment for decades for most and a lifetime for many. Granted, global competition has required us to do more with less; this is a reality in the new millenium, particularly for integrated steel over the last several years. Failing to accept this and to take action is a recipe for disaster. Dofasco has taken appropriate steps to meet challenges in the past and will continue to do so in the future. I am not aware of any examples of how third party representation has altered any of these undeniable truths. Remaining sustainable is the only way to survive.
How does unionization of the workers really contribute to this goal?

Posted by: Bob

Our strength is people?

Whatever happened to "OUR PRODUCT IS STEEL OUR STRENGTH IS PEOPLE" What can the Union do for people who have worked for 30 years or more and helped build Dofasco to where it was before the takeover.
The only thing I can see is the Union taking my Union dues every pay. They must be rubbing their hands together just thinking about the $5,000,000 per year from over 4,000 employees. It is a sad day for my father,the retirees and their families who worked for and protected the Profit sharing Plan and Benefits. Don't let history repeat its self. Just look at the last 40 years and see what a Union has done for Stelco and Dominion Castings.

Posted by: Brad

Don't do it.

It would appear that the it is not the workers looking to unionize but the company. My feeling is that the union is playing hardball with Arcelor Mittal and that if Dofasco doesn't unionize this could cause problems for them at other facilities.

Today's unions are too powerful, too political and too greedy. They take your money, give little in return and create wealth for only those at the top.

DON'T DO IT!

Posted by: Robbie

Unions not in the future

Unions have outlived thier usefulness in todays buisness world - to have this voted in place for Dofasco is definitely not a move forward into the future. If Arcelor was interested in the future of its newly found executives and workers from Dofasco it would see the value and resources it has to tap without adding unions into the mix. Arcelor wake up and smell the roses Dofasco has a well built reputation and has not failed for years and it is willing to move into the future without unions involved!

Posted by: m. Johnson

Pros and cons

Many interesting points here, both pro and con. Personally, I question why the company initiated this union "drive". They must think they, and not the workforce will win something in the long run. If Dofasco starts a barganning session, it will start at zero and work up. Most ArcelorMittal companies in North America enjoy a maximum of 5 weeks vacation per year. Dofasco offers as many as 8, plus the 15 bonus weeks at retirement. New contract? Expect 5 at the most, and no bonus. Dofasco pays it's people on the higher end of the iindustry average. Expect negotiations to start at a much lower point, and then fight for years to get back what you lost. What will happen to the subsidized programs at the Rec Park? Expect the Park to be sold or donated to Stoney Creek, or maybe plowed under for a big box complex. Maybe you won't mind paying $1,200 a year to get your kid into city hockey. I hope your new, lower wages will support that. Always had your eye on that Team Leader's job? You'll be waiting a lot longer for it with a union. Dofasco currently promotes those who deserve the job. Unions insist on promoting by seniority, right? How many bad supervisors will you work for before it's your turn to shine? I'm sure the younger folks will vote yes, and that's too bad. They are the ones that will be hurt the worst. Don't make plans for your VCP or Fund in a couple of years. They may soon both be distant memories. Let's hear from the unionized workers at Camco, Westinghouse, Firestone, Dominion Castings... We can talk to them tonight on the way home as they are packing our groceries at Fortinos.

Posted by: Robb

Intro to Dofasco Choice blog

Welcome to the Dofasco blog. Feel free to join the discussion.