VANCOUVER (CP) – The game of chess between Crown-owned B.C. Rail and its locked out workers continued Friday with no sign the two sides were ready to go back to the bargaining table.
Unionized workers pulled pickets from the Roberts Bank coal port in suburban Delta but briefly closed B.C. Rail subsidiary Vancouver Wharves in downtown Vancouver.
As at Roberts Bank on Thursday, unionized longshore workers refused Friday to cross the railway employees’ picket line at Vancouver Wharves.
Those pickets were withdrawn after a few hours, since the port facility was scheduled to close for the New Year’s holiday anyway, Bob Sharpe, president of the 1,600-member Council of B.C. Rail Trade Unions, said in an interview.
“When Vancouver Wharves comes back up and running, we’ll be back picketing,” he said.
B.C. Rail later obtained a court injunction preventing future picketing at Vancouver Wharves.
“It’s a sister company, it’s not directly involved in the dispute,” said B.C. Rail spokesman Alan Dever.
Sharpe said Friday evening the unions were not informed of the injunction application and their lawyers would look into the matter. B.C. Rail had also sought an injunction restricting picketing at its North Vancouver headquarters, saying other commercial tenants had trouble entering the building earlier this week.
The application was withdrawn, however, after the union agreed to voluntarily limit picketing.
Meanwhile, Westshore Terminals, which runs the Port Roberts coal port, applied to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board for an order ensuring its operations would not be disrupted again.
Coal loading was interrupted Thursday when pickets blocked an access road and unionized longshore workers refused to cross.
The Roberts Bank superport handles coal delivered by CP Rail and CN Rail on B.C. Rail track. The pickets were withdrawn late Thursday night. There was no sign Friday the railway and its union would get back to contract negotiations anytime soon. Both sides said no meetings were scheduled.
The railway locked out its unionized workers on Monday after the council issued a strike notice against B.C. Rail’s dinner excursion train on Christmas Eve.
A mediated attempt to end the stalemate collapsed Tuesday. The two sides couldn’t reach a compromise on the railway’s demands for concessions to improve its productivity and competitiveness in return for a three-year wage deal worth two per cent in the final year.
About 100 B.C. Rail union members held a rally today on commercial property owned by another railway subsidiary in Squamish, about 60 kilometres north of Vancouver.
“It’s a commercial area right on the highway to Whistler,” said Dever. B.C. Rail, which operates from North Vancouver to Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia, is Canada’s third-largest railway. It mostly hauls resources such as coal and forest products to market but also operates a passenger service into the northern B.C. Interior. Dever said the Christmas-New Year’s holiday period traditionally is the slowest shipping week of the year but its customers are becoming concerned.
“They would like to see this thing settled,” he said. “Obviously a lot of them are having to find other means to transport their goods and that adds to their cost.” Some of the mines and mills that rely on B.C. Rail normally take holiday downtime, said Dever, but not all of them.
“It’s already hurting certain producers,” he said. “The big sector which never shuts down at this time is pulp. But there are a lot of other sectors that have seriously reduced activities this week and they’ll be starting up again after the new year.”
Despite pleas from the union and the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, B.C. Premier Dan Miller has so far ruled out intervening in the dispute. Given the short duration of the lockout, no significant damage to the economy had yet occurred, he said.
But Sharpe questioned Miller’s perspective, saying the province’s unions, business community and municipal leaders all agree “that every day the lockout continues is terribly damaging.”
The union council said in a news release the B.C. Labour Relations Board ruled Friday that B.C. Rail was guilty of unfair labour practices in contract bargaining.
The council complained earlier in December that the railway bypassed the unions by threatening employees directly with a lockout and with unilateral changes to their wages.
Sharpe said the ruling carries no specific penalty but hoped it would help end the lockout quickly.
