President's Message

One of the pillars of our Local Union and the entire labour movement is ensuring that power rests with the workers.

From taking part in proposal, ratification, and strike vote meetings, to bringing concerns to the attention of your Stewards or Health & Safety members every day – you are an important part of this Union. And the more active you and your co-workers are, the stronger you are as a unified force in your workplace.

And, ultimately, you get to vote. You and your co-workers get to decide if you go on strike. And you and your co-workers get to determine when an agreement is acceptable to you.

A lot of what we see about union workers in the media –especially when workers vote to go on strike – is negative. The news might portray the strikers as greedy, disruptive, and just out to inconvenience the public in some way.

And corporations will always rely on trying to sell the impact a work stoppage has on their customers as worker greed. Those companies love when they can divide the public over a strike and certainly when they can divide the members of a bargaining unit.

But when you see stories about working people, whether on strike, in bargaining, or in any way represented in the media, I encourage you to think about the context and source of what you are seeing.

Consider what may have brought those workers to the point where they were willing to sacrifice their regular paycheques to go on strike.

Like many issues plaguing our world, it is hard not to be self-protective in difficult times. We are all prone to forgetting the bigger picture when someone's actions have a negative impact, however temporary they may be, on our own expectations, routines, and potentially on our own livelihoods.

As we publish this issue of Checkout, the 960 members of UFCW Local 175 at Cargill Dunlop in Guelph have just ratified a deal, bringing an end to their nearly six weeks on the picket line.

You can read more about the strike and its resolution on page six of this issue.

And while we celebrate the end of this strike for these workers, please ask yourself why. Why did our members at Cargill have to take to the picket line to try and achieve fair pay from this global behemoth?

Solidarity and true workers’ right advocacy, and all human rights, advocacy asks us all to always remember the bigger picture. We have a greater responsibility to each other. And recognizing that responsibility is one of the hallmarks of what it means to belong to a Union.

Please take care of each other, and enjoy the summer.

In Solidarity,

Kelly Tosato president@ufcw175.com

President’s Message