More than 10 collective agreements have already been signed in PepsiCo operations this year in Canada. One of them was negotiated between NAPE local 7003 and the one of the few privately owned PepsiCo bottlers in Canada, Browning Harvey, in St. John’s Newfoundland. Local 7003 is an active member of the Canadian Soft Drinks Worker’s Council, a coordination body uniting workers from different soft drinks producers and organized in different unions, among them Teamsters, CAW, RWDSU/UFCW.
The union has 60 members operating one canning line and one bottle line. Rick Kieley, local chairperson, says: “We had a team of four and the employer had two compared to the last round when we had seven and the employer had four. We met at the union offices or dept. of labour. The smaller team and not meeting at hotels was a cost saving for both sides. We have a strong economy in Newfoundland, the strongest in Canada and we used that to our advantage. We had a seven week strike in 2006 which was an all out war and both sides payed dearly back then, but the employer more so! I think they would avoided a strike at any cost this time. Browning Harvey won the bottler of the year last year for North America and a labour dispute would have been like a black eye after a small private bottler in Canada won such a big award. Since the strike, we have worked with the employer for solutions. We are firm when we need to be and compromising also when appropriate. The employer this time tried to correct some bad feelings over the years and should be commended for that.
During the negotiations, main issues were pensions – we have an average age of 58 at the plant - and temporary work. There is a law in Canada that says you can work as long as you like (changed from 65 as a defined pension age). We used that as a bargaining tool to get a pension top-up of 25,000 Canadian Dollars to encourage workers to retire during the life of this contract- We had a defined contribution pension that was under funded for years and addressed this now so members can plan for retirement with more clarity.
We had a rate of $10/hr for temporary employees and doubled that to $20/hour - again this is a result of a strong economy.
We used the experience from attending our Canadian Soft Drinks Council Workers conventions. This was a great advantage for us and the employer was at a disadvantage because they could not bring up examples on the different topics like we could. We had a great negotiator who was very knowledgeable and listened to his team and a union and members who gave us their full support.