(The Canadian Press circulated the following on May 16.)
TORONTO — Workers who maintain tracks and bridges at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. walked off the job starting early today, bringing the country its second national railway strike this year.
But officials at Canadian Pacific have said the railway will deploy 1,300 trained management employees to do the work normally done by workers represented by a division of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference.
Ottawa-based union leader William Brehl said he doesn’t believe CP management personnel will be able to fill the gap for long.
“What reasonable company in the world has 1,200 managers whose jobs are so inconsequential that they can just pick up and jump out to the track when there’s a strike?” Brehl said.
“There’s only 150 supervisory staff in our department. They’re getting the rest out of the offices. They’re pulling them off desks.”
CP Rail’s director of public affairs, Mark Seland, said the company has put off capital improvements and expansion programs until the labour situation is settled.
“And so, by freeing up those managers from that work, we can operate in this mode as long as required,” Seland said.
Of the 3,200 Teamsters members at Canadian Pacific, only 1,200 work on track repairs and 2,000 of them are normally associated with the capital programs, he said.
“And because those programs are deferred, we won’t need to replace those 2,000 members. The 1,200 members that do day-to-day track maintenance are the people we are replacing with 1,300 trained management staff.”
CP Rail has said repeatedly that it won’t agree to the Teamster union’s demand for a 13-per-cent wage increase over three years.
The company says such a deal would be out of line with a wage increase of 10 per cent over three years with other unions at Canada’s second-biggest rail operator.
The two sides had been in mediated talks but those broke off and on Saturday the union gave its 72-hour notice required to begin a legal strike.
Via Rail, the country’s national passenger rail service, uses primarily Canadian National track so it expects the impact of a CP Rail strike will be negligible.
“There aren’t very many of our services that actually go over CP tracks for any great distances,” Via Rail’s Catherine Kaloutsky said Tuesday afternoon.
“The majority of our trains operate over CN tracks or tracks owned by Via Rail.”
Montreal-based Canadian National Railways suffered a two-week strike in February when conductors and yard workers walked off the job, disrupting shipments of commodities like grain and coal, and auto parts.