It’s still nearly seven months before Thompsonites as a whole head to the polls in municipal elections to choose seven school board trustees, a new mayor and an-as-yet-undetermined number of councillors – possibly eight, perhaps as few as six – but election year is getting started this month for members of United Steelworkers Local 6166, with advance polls April 5-6 and election day itself next Monday.
Much like for the municipal government come Oct. 24 and for the company that many of the union’s members work for, this election represents a big transition for USW Local 6166, which will bid goodbye to current and retiring president Les Ellsworth, who served two terms, the first one from 2006 to 2009, the second from 2015 to 2018, sandwiched around back-to-back terms by Murray Nychyporuk from 2009 to 2015. Come next Tuesday, the new president will be either James Crawley or Warren Luky, both long-time Thompsonites and union activists. One thing, however, is certain: the term of the mandate of whichever candidate wins will see great changes in the work done by their union members as well as the number of them that there are, given that Vale’s Manitoba Operations are set to shut down the smelter and refinery within a few months of the new president taking the reins.
Though the job losses from the changing of Thompson’s mine operations to a mining- and milling-only operation for the first time in the history of the community have yet to take effect, unionized miners (and employees of other companies such as Calm Air and Garda Security) do not represent as much of the population of Thompson as they once did, since automation and other technological improvements have seen the number of people employed by Vale shrink to slightly more than 1,000, or about a quarter as many as Inco had at the height of Thompson operations when their workforce totalled approximately 4,000. Still, while the fortunes of mining operations workers and the community of Thompson as a whole are no longer in lockstep as they once were, the truth is that the economic fortunes of the city are still very much tied to this group of workers, who will remain hundreds strong even after the shutdown of the smelter and refinery, and who earn good wages thanks to a combination of in-demand skills and the ability to bargain collectively.
It is literally not a secret that Vale is forcing independent units within its corporate structure – such as Manitoba Operations – to be self-funding and that Thompson management and workers are working together to try to lower costs and make extracting ore as profitable as possible under low nickel price conditions. Whoever becomes union president next week will have the unenviable task of negotiating a new collective agreement in 2019 from a position of relative weakness and they will likely have a fight on their hands to maintain what they have gained over the years and to try to improve on it. The rest of Thompson should hope, for the economic sake of the community as a whole, that they are successful, since well-paid workers invest their earnings, for the most part, back into their community, buying homes and shopping for services, while the multinational corporations that, these days, more and more workers are employed by, are focused on creating value for shareholders, for whom Vale’s Manitoba Operations are likely nothing more than a few lines of numbers on a balance sheet.
