The strike that began this spring at a pork processing plant in Quebec may soon be over.
After a lengthy bargaining session that began Aug. 27 and ended Aug. 29, Olymel announced it had reached a settlement with the union at its meat packing plant in Vallee Jonction, Que.
Union members will vote on the agreement, sometime this week.
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Olymel did not provide details or terms of the proposed labour agreement, in its Aug. 29 press release.
“A favorable vote will end a strike that entered its fifth month yesterday and has had extremely negative economic impacts on the company and the region,” said Paul Beauchamp, Olymel vice-president in a statement.
The Olymel plant, southeast of Quebec City, has the capacity to slaughter 35,000 pigs per week and employs about 1,150 workers. Employees have been on strike since the end of April, causing a backlog of pigs in Quebec’s pork industry.
An Olymel spokesperson said, at the beginning of the strike, that worker demands were unreasonable. The union was asking for a wage increase of 35 percent in the first year of the agreement 51 percent by the end of the deal.
“The union filed wage requests on April 19 that would have put this plant out of step with its competitors and jeopardized its viability, especially since it already leads its competitors by 21.7 percent in total compensation,” Olymel said in June.
The union representing workers has said Olymel needs to boost compensation, because worker turnover is a massive problem at the Valley Junction plant.
“The employer has to realize it has to pay people properly if it wants to keep them. For that, we need to be talking dollars, not cents,” said Martin Maurice, the union representative for Olymel Vallée-Jonction employees, told Radio-Canada.
The deal between Olymel and the union comes after the company threatened to shut down the evening shift at the processing plant and lay off 500 workers.
That decision is suspended until the workers vote on the proposed agreement.
Hog producers in the province and their association, the Éleveurs de porcs du Québec, have been extremely frustrated at the four-month strike and the failure to reach a deal because many could not ship their pigs to market.
“The financial losses (for farmers) are enormous, the psychological distress of breeders is omnipresent, pigs are piling up on farms, we fear for the well-being of our animals,” said Quebec Pig Breeders president David Duval, in August.
The plant in Vallee Jonction is one of a number of Olymel meat processing plants in Quebec and Ontario. The company also operates a pork processing plant in Red Deer, Alta.
Olymel employs 15,000 at its hog farms, processing plants and other facilities in Canada and around the world. It is the largest hog producer in Canada.
Contact robert.arnason@producer.com
