Efforts are underway to reinstate full railway services in Canada after a labour board ordered more than 9,000 railway employees back to work today, while the workers’ union plans to fight the ruling in court.
The Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) restarted rail operations at 12:01 a.m. ET Aug. 26 after a four-day work stoppage, bringing an end to a dispute that had disrupted the nation’s supply chains.
Canadian Pacific asked its workers to return to the job Aug. 25, the railway said in a press release, but a union spokesman said it declined the company’s request to return before Aug. 26.
CPKC described the request as a bid to “get the Canadian economy moving again as quickly as possible and avoid further disruption to supply chains.”
“Our team is executing its restart plan for the safe and orderly resumption of rail service across Canada,” the company said. “We are working with customers on a balanced return to normal operations.”
CN also said it is focused on resuming operations and getting “goods moving again, as efficiently as possible.”
“While CN is disappointed an agreement could not be reached at the bargaining table, the company is satisfied that this order effectively ends the unpredictability that has been negatively impacting supply chains for months,” the railway said in a statement.
The move comes after the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) imposed binding arbitration on the railways and the union representing their workers over the weekend and ordered rail shipments to resume.
Trains across the country came to a standstill Aug. 22 when Canada’s two primary rail companies locked out 9,300 employees after attempts to reach a new contract failed. The shutdown came after months of negotiations between the railway companies and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, the union representing 6,000 CN workers and 3,300 CPKC workers.
The unprecedented work stoppage led to a request later that day by federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon, asking the CIRB to resolve the stalemate between the parties. MacKinnon also asked the board to order the railways to resume operations under the terms of the existing collective agreements until new deals are enacted.
CN lifted the lockout Aug. 23 following MacKinnon’s directive. The union responded by delivering a 72-hour strike notice to the company. Workers at CPKC had also remained on picket lines as the union challenged the directive for binding arbitration.
The board’s ruling voids the strike notice issued by the union, a move that the Teamsters union plans to protest in federal court.
Union Challenging Order
Teamsters Canada Rail Conference president Paul Boucher called the CIRB ruling disappointing in an Aug. 24 press release.Boucher said the decision “signals to Corporate Canada that large companies need only stop their operations for a few hours, inflict short-term economic pain, and the federal government will step in to break a union.”
Boucher was also critical of the federal government, saying that by directing CIRB to begin the arbitration process, it was siding “against middle- and working-class Canadians.”
MacKinnon described Ottawa’s intervention in the labour dispute as necessary, saying failure to do so would have been “an act of economic self sabotage.”
Allowing the rail shutdown to continue would have equalled $1 billion a day of economic losses and “virtually every sector of the economy affected,” MacKinnon said during an Aug. 25 press conference. And, with roughly one-third of products shipped by rail in Canada heading to the U.S., it would have had a negative impact on trade relations as well, he added.
“We took a decision that we believed was in the public interest and in workers’ interest. We were confronted with exceptional circumstances where we made a decision that was in the interest of Canadian workers,” MacKinnon said.
The union says the companies have failed to meet its demands on rest periods and scheduling, as well as ending a scheme that it says forces relocation to remote locations for several months to fill labour shortages.
CN says the union has been dismissing its “serious offers” of better pay and improved rest and schedules, and CPKC similarly says its efforts to bargain in “good faith” with the union have been in vain.
The Epoch Times contacted the railways for additional comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
