While thousands of liters of milk had to be thrown away because of the labor dispute at the Agropur plant in Granby, both parties say they are sorry for the situation.
The employer says it is doing everything to prevent milk from being wasted again, while the union criticizes Agropur for not having prepared for the situation and for thus seeking to blame the odious waste on union members.
The 250 workers, members of a union of the Central of Democratic Trade Unions (CSD), called an indefinite strike on June 29, after voting 100% for the strike mandate. In an interview on Monday, Bernard Cournoyer, union adviser at the CSD, said that it was the employer’s desire to considerably modify the schedules that set fire to the powder and triggered the strike. He reports that the employer would like to extend the workdays from 8 to 12 hours during the week, and have employees come to work at different times depending on the day of the week and the needs of the company.
“They’ve had these working hours since 1983. And there the employer wants the employees to be flexible about starting and ending shifts, i.e. one morning you can start at 7 a.m., the next day the employer can say “you start at 8 a.m.” and the day after, it can be at 9 a.m. It completely changes family life, ”protested Mr. Cournoyer.
And this reorganization of schedules would result in the elimination of 30 positions, says the union adviser. “It’s the sinews of war,” he said.
The union representative states that the employer has made 158 demands affecting 32 of the 33 articles of the collective agreement. And he assures that the salary issue has not even been addressed yet.
Agropur wants “some flexibility”
Asked about this, Agropur management said it did not want to negotiate “in the media”. “We prefer to negotiate at the bargaining table” and reach an agreement with the union, said Mylène Dupéré, vice-president of corporate communications for the company.
She admitted, however, that management was looking for “some flexibility” from workers to be able to process more milk when there is more need. She explains that Agropur “wants to make major investments in this plant” and that the company has a “vision for the future”. The Granby plant processes 800,000 liters of milk per day, which makes it a major player in the industry, she said.
Asked about the thousands of liters of milk that had to be thrown away because of the labor dispute, she says that “every effort is being made to minimize waste”, such as trying to redirect milk to other factories.
Les Producteurs de lait du Québec, the organization that negotiates for producers, estimated that the total of “milk disposed of since the outbreak of the dispute at Agropur” was two million litres.