ACA Co-Operative workers "rally for fairness"; fraud looming on the horizon Shunpiking Online Vo.6 No.3

HALIFAX (14 February 2009) - AFTER Kentville's ACA Co-Operative announced the termination of over 300 jobs at its poultry processing facilities, affected workers have come out in full force. On Sunday 8 February, over 200 people flooded the small town's Central Square courtyard for a "Rally for Fairness" to press the workers' just demands and to show solidarity with ACA workers.

On January 22, ACA Co-operative Ltd. cut 300 jobs at two of its Kings County poultry processing facilities, both located in the Annapolis Valley, one of which is closing permanently. The cuts included the layoffs of 75 union employees at ACA in New Minas and the permanent loss of 40 non-union ACA and Eastern Protein Foods employees and 187 Eastern Protein union positions. Eastern Protein, a subsidiary of ACA located in Kentville, is being closed permanently. ACA Co-operative Ltd is reportedly business co-operative owned by 57 poultry producers.

The company is refusing to release the vacation and severance pay owed to the workers, and in doing so has retreated under the time-tested umbrella of "creditor protection" at its Eastern Protein plant. The company was given a $3.5 million capital loan by the province of Nova Scotia last fall, $2 million of which has already been advanced. Workers have been demanding for over a week that the Kings County municipality lobby the provincial government to withhold the remaining $1.5 million of that loan and put it in a trust fund until Eastern Protein's "creditor protection period" expires.

Workers are explicitly placed at the bottom of the company's priority list as part of the so-called creditor protection program. Some are owed as much as $6,000. "I'm told the company has a list of 57 creditors and the workers are No. 56 on the list," said Tim Brown, president of Local 2216 of the Canadian Auto Workers, which represents the workers.

Brown then summed up the matter correctly and succinctly: "We think we should be No. 1 on the list." The workers are also implying that the company's actual insolvency is suspect and openly stating tjat whatever cash flow problems it has being having are the fruit of bad management.

As of January 22, ACA Co-operative had 30 days of creditor protection for Eastern Protein. The plant would still be operating for a few days after the protection period ended and management is asking for a 45-day extension to the protection period so they can come up with a proposal for secured and unsecured creditors. It is further threatening that the "unreasonable" disbursement of the $1.5 million to the laid off workers will adversely affect the livelihood of the remaining 350 workers who should put their faith in management "to make the situation as good as possible." The union is charging that a secret agenda exists to transfer all debt of the remaining plants onto the books of the Eastern Protein plant which is being closed down.

Under provincial legislation the maximum payout allowed to workers is $3,250, and only after bankruptcy is declared. By all rights, and despite the dictates Canada's capital-centred laws, the number one creditor of ACA and Eastern Protein are the workers, without whom the pockets of their bosses would swell to nought. Instead banks are at the top.

The Kentville situation brings commercial law which enshrines the right of monopolies and the banks into complete contempt. In an attempt to sugarcoat the bullet, Labour Minister Mark Parent said in an interview in response to the workers' "Rally for Fairness" on the following day, February 9 that "I've never understood the rationale behind that." He said, "The banks may be lending money, but the workers are lending their time, which is a form of money. Both should be treated equally." Parent stressed that "he has asked his department to make sure employees are treated fairly." These statements are made to disinform. The government is responsible for defending the public good and save Eastern protein from anti social financial wreckers. Yet Parent can give no guarantee of their demands or initiative to create pro labour laws is taken and defend the public good while the victims are to believe that "everyone is in it together, labour and capital alike."

Far from being in a unique situation, however, workers in the Annapolis Valley should pay attention to the experience of the class across Canada. Before Hamilton's Stelco steel processing plant was sold off piecemeal to US Steel, the company declared itself bankrupt and entered "creditor protection" under the auspices of the Companies' Creditors Protection Act (CCAA) in order to facilitate a massive theft of added value produced by the workers, and a similar fraud is now looming on the horizon for workers in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley.

The ideological root of this fraud- repeated ad nauseum by the political cartels and in the monopoly media- is the claim that workers are merely a cost of production whose claims are secondary to the monopolies and the financial oligarchy and who are expendable in the drive of those parties to make profit. This view is propounded not only in the case of ACA, Eastern Protein and their creditors, and in that of Stelco, but also in the cases of several other monopolies who have similarly dismissed the claims of workers in recent days. The auto monopolies GMC and Nissan are planning massive lay-offs that are almost sure to effect workers at their Canadian facilities.

Meanwhile, 24 unionized employees at the Halifax Herald, representing 23 per cent of its news staff, have been given layoff notices on February 2. In December, Magna International shut down its Atlantic Castings Ltd.'s die-cast manufacturing plant in North Sydney was shut down, affecting a total of 45 full-time and 10 part-time jobs. Workers there have been keeping watch with an eagle eye and aim to block any maneouvre by Magna to ship the plant's equipment to one of its other operations. Furthermore, the French multinational Michelin, which operates three plants in Nova Scotia, announced on 5 February that 95 workers at its Waterville plant (also located in the Annapolis Valley), which produces truck, small OTR and earthmovers' tires, would be let go in April, on the heels of scores of other lay-offs in the company's plants in South Carolina and Oklahoma. The latter case prompted Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald to give some free promotional support to Michelin and all other monopolies with the mantra that "we're not (immune) to what's happening in the global economy."

MacDonald's use of the royal "we" is deceptive. In reality, all possible measures are being taken to immunize the monopolies and their creditors from the disastrous effects of a crisis of their making. It is the workers who are not immune to the effects of this crisis, as it is their claims that are being relentlessly attacked under the assumption that they are a cost of production whose value is as fickle and manipulable as any market commodity. On this basis, the monopolies and the financial oligarchy are demanding their proverbial pound of flesh before the workers can see one cent of what is justly owed to them.

In response to these attacks, workers at ACA and Eastern Protein recognize that the value of their work is fixed according to the amount of labour-time that is put into their products, and that all of this value- in the form of pensions, severance pay or any other form- is something upon which they have a rightful first claim. Shunpiking Online hails this just and true stand of ACA and Eastern protein workers, whose powerful example should be followed by their brethren at Michelin, Nissan, GMC and all other monopolies who are attempting to shelter themselves from the consequences of their own self-destructive impulses.

Nova Scotians cannot stand back and allow this travesty of monopoly right to proceed without comment, opposition and widespread denunciation, and to put the monopolies on notice that they are not going to be able to operate in the dark with impunity and without active opposition. As one organized force, the workers of ACA Co-operative, laid off and still employed, must oppose all attempt to pit one against the other. Further, recognition of workers' centrality to production on the part of ACA and Eastern Protein workers is one that must form the basis for building an independent politics of the entire Canadian working class. This imperative is made all the more pressing by the inability of even the most skilled of bourgeois orators to sugar-coat the reality faced by the working class, and by the fact that this class has no just or sustainable solution to today's economic and political quagmire.

Concessions are not Solutions!
Defend the Dignity of Labour!
Whose Economy? Our Economy!

Endnotes

1. For more on the lay-offs at ACA Co-Operative, see Shunpiking Online, February 2009
http://www.shunpiking.com/ol0603/0603-AC-morelayoffs.htm

2. For more on Stelco and CCAA, see TML Daily, 16 January, 2006," Stelco's CCAA Fraud / Sanctioning Secret Intrigue and Theft: A Matter of Monopoly Power and Control Over the Process,"(http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmld2006/D36001.htm#1) and continuing coverage through to the present.

3. For more on the drive for "efficiency" on the part of the food monopolies, see "Maple Leaf Forever; the Crisis in Farming and Food," Shunpiking Online, Vol. 4, No. 4, May/June 2007).
http://www.shunpiking.com/ol0404/0404-index.htm