LETTERS TO THE EDITOR — Gerard defends labor leaders

Your editorial “Self-serving labor leaders” (T.N.M., June 15/92) is quite out of character for The Northern Miner. It is such a gratuitous, hysterical, falsehood-laden personal attack on myself and the United Steelworkers that it seriously risks the reputation of your paper for objective commentary on the mining scene.

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) meeting is biennial, not annual, and was held this year in Vancouver. Your claim that the CLC had “little to say about the strike at Royal Oak Mines’ Giant mine in Yellowknife” indicates that you had no reporter present, as the strike was the subject of an emergency resolution, debate and protest demonstration.

The violence on the scene was the centrepiece of the discussion, especially the state-sponsored strikebreaking and paramilitary support called in to intimidate the miners and their families.

Your unbelievable nonsense about our union’s activism on health and safety issues flies in the face of the historical record, as even the management of Inco Ltd., Cominco Ltd., Rio Algom, Noranda Inc., Denison Mines and others will tell you.

Countless examples throughout Canada — from Ontario’s Ham Commission to Bills 70, 208 and the institutionalization of the right to refuse, from the Sussex inquiry in New Brunswick to the worker-inspector innovations in Elliot Lake Ont. — contradict the cheap lies in your editorial. A serious examination of the bonus discussion would show that our union has always taken the full import of that issue head on in our struggle for better laws and practices.

But I fear that making these points may be a waste of time. Your editorial begins with obvious unease that we dared to show our emotions over the disaster at Westray. Clearly that’s what bugs you, and to the extent that your paper reflects a certain trend of thought among mining employers (not the only trend, I hope), you are only showing that the Westray disaster has struck a very raw nerve.

As Steekworkers leaders have indicated at recent human resources conferences held by the Mining Association of Canada, and in informal discussions with key management officials in recent months, our union is prepared to discuss an entirely new regime of labor-management interaction for the sake of the industry’s future.

Several important experiments in novel working relationships are already in place in centres such as Trail and Thompson, and in other industries we deal with. This is hardly a union with a simple-minded investment in preserving a dysfunctional status quo.

Assuming for the moment that the barking, foaming slander of your editorial represents some part of the industry, we clearly have a long distance yet to travel. In the meantime, the Steelworkers is not about to toss out its militancy to soothe your bad conscience over the dead at Westray.

Leo Gerard

National Director for Canada

United Steelworkers of

America

Toronto