No quick return for mill workers
Power, tax issues must be settled: Stora
GUYSBOROUGH - Workers at the Stora Enso mill in Port Hawkesbury wouldn't have been returning to work anytime soon, even if this week's negotiations hadn't broken down.
A meeting between representatives from the company and Local 972 of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union broke down on Monday afternoon.
In a press release issued late Monday, mill president Tor Suther said the union's response to an offer tabled by the company on April 15 "did not advance the bargaining process toward a new collective agreement nor does it improve the mill's business recovery effort".
"We really have to assess where we are at this point," said Gary Parafinczuk, Stora's chief negotiator. "We'll spend the next day or so figuring out what happens next. "Our expectation was that the bargaining committee would work with the company to help position the mill for reopening.
"However, the response today indicates that the bargaining committee sees the current negotiations as a traditional process where they give as little as possible and continue to say 'no'. This process needs to be about problem solving rather than traditional bargaining."
But even if the negotiations had concluded with the company accepting the offer, workers wouldn't return to the job until other factors - including a proposal for lower, fixed power rates and municipal tax issues - were settled, the mill's woodlands unit vice-president Russ Waycott told The Journal last week.
"A return to work would require us to get some of the other pieces in place," Waycott said.
"We'd need the power rate issue settled; we also have some work being done on municipal taxes which needs to be settled. Then we would need to get our order book in place so we could arrange a start up."
Waycott refused to speculate on how long it might take to settle those issues but said the company was hoping to "have things resolved here over the next month or so because we can't go on indefinitely".
Waycott also welcomed last week's news that the province would give Stora Enso $65 million over seven years in exchange for the province no longer having to honour a commitment to supply the company with 81,000 hectares of Crown land by 2013.
"We were pleased that we were able to come to this agreement with the province…the cash flow will be very helpful for us in our operations but we also need to point out that this alone will not allow us to restart our mill," he said.
When asked whether a failure to reach an agreement on power rates would spell the end of the operation, Waycott said: "I think we'd have to look at the total situation but we do need a competitive power rate to go forward. Long-term we do need competitive and stable power rates to go forward."
He said the deal with the province would ensure private woodlot operators would see "the status quo maintained and the share of wood they've been getting to the mill over the last number of years will continue".
