Strike at Vale Inco looms

Information, ratification meetings set for later in week

Posted By Carol Mulligan

Updated 7 hours ago

To view the company's proposal for Local 6500, please click HERE.

To view appendices to the company's proposal, please click HERE.

To view the company's proposal for Local 6200, please click HERE.

There is a one in a trillion chance Vale Inco will sweeten its final contract proposal containing unacceptable concessions before more than 3,000 United Steelworkers receive it at information meetings Wednesday and Thursday, says USW District 6 director Wayne Fraser.

Contract talks broke off Monday at 11:30 a. m. between the Steelworkers and Vale Inco Ltd. after negotiators for the mining company told the union the proposal it had presented late Sunday night was its final offer.

Wayne Fraser, director of Steelworkers' District 6, told reporters Monday afternoon his bargaining team will recommend members reject the company's offer at ratification meetings set for Friday and Saturday, just hours before a 12:01 a. m. strike or lockout deadline July 12.

A rejection of Vale Inco's offer is essentially a vote to strike, although the bargaining committee was already given a 90% strike mandate in a vote held in May.

Both the union and Vale Inco insist they are ready to return to bargaining, but Fraser said he cannot see that happening unless the company changes its bargaining position.

Fraser told reporters in a

small meeting room at the Radisson Hotel he was "really saddened and disappointed" that his union's efforts to bargain a collective agreement protecting the rights of members and the community had gone virtually nowhere since contract talks began April 7..................just thinking out loud here, but with our product going over seas, and fetching this higher ni price quoted on the LME, inventory levels (lme ) should not effect our production levels. Traps7