Food fight: former Safeway employees prepared to fight the good fight to get jobs back.

The sight of three boarded-up former Safeway stores in Thunder Bay suggests the company is gone for good from the community, but many former employees are fighting to the end to get the company to reopen the stores in order to get their old jobs back.

With an 81 per cent strike vote, over 400 Safeway employees in three Thunder Bay stores were sent out to the picket lines one year ago on Oct. 1, 2001.

Today, the former employees are holding onto hope that they will successfully de-certify the union and get their jobs back.

Last year, after extended contract negotiations, talks broke down between the company and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) with a failure to resolve a dispute centered on the elimination of the store's meat departments. Safeway was proposing that local stores receive pre-packaged products, which the union said would lead to the elimination of 30 jobs. Also, the company was proposing that some high-paying full-time jobs be replaced with low-paying part-time jobs.

The company announced in mid-January 2002 that it will be closing its warehouse in Thunder Bay on Mar. 16, 2002.

Safeway spokesperson Toby Oswald said from his Calgary office that the move was being made because the market will be more efficiently serviced from their Winnipeg distribution centre.

The company returned to the bargaining table in April 2002, seven months into the strike.

Wayne Hanley, UFCW Ontario president, said in a union bulletin that Safeway was asking Thunder Bay workers to accept a deal that was less than originally offered.

A spokesperson for Safeway said that if the employees voted "no" to the company's final offer, its three stores would be shutdown.

On May 7, 2002, employees rejected Safeway's final offer by a close vote of 201-195. Following the vote, Safeway president, Chuck Mulveena, said in a press release that the company would lodge a complaint with the Ministry of Labour and ask the ministry to conduct another vote.

The union did not agree to a second vote, and on June 6 Canada Safeway announced the closure of its Thunder Bay stores.

"...waiting an additional indeterminate number of months for a formal hearing and resolution to this issue would only add to the already substantial economic impact of the strike on our company," Mulveena said in a press release. "The union opposed our application for a second vote from the outset. We have therefore, regretfully come to the decision to withdraw cur complaint with the Ministry of Labour and will immediately permanently close our Thunder Bay stores..."

Many workers were shocked with the announcement of the store's closure. Cindy Normand, a grocery clerk for over 30 years with Safeway, spearheaded a petition to press the union into allowing a re-vote. Despite a majority 241 signatures, the UFCW vetoed a second vote, requesting a better deal be tabled by Safeway.

The employee group filed a complaint with the Ontario Labour Relations Board against the UFCW alleging that they were improperly represented.

"I believe it is important to make people understand that our group has never been against unions," Normand says. "The whole crux of this problem is that our union, the UFCW, was not representing the majority's wishes, and that's what we are paying them to do."

Colby Flank, a local UFCW official who was involved with the negotiations, denied the allegations that the union was not representing the majority's wishes. In an interview with Northern Ontario Business, Flank said that the vote was conducted through a secret ballot and it was a free vote.

In July the Ontario Labour Relations Board directed former employees to provide more information on their call for a second vote, adding that the board might not have jurisdiction to order a second vote.

Former employees have not given up. They have now chosen to seek decertifying the union. On Sept. 26 a government supervised de-certification vote was held.

"I feel confident we probably have the de-certification," said Normand. About 400 former employees showed up to vote. The votes will be counted by the Labour Board in October, but there is still a hitch. The board has to deem that terminated employees are still classified as employees of Safeway for de-certification to be valid.

"I'm pretty confident that the labour board is going to rule in our favour, and then we can seek out another union to represent us and accept Safeway's last, best and final offer, and have our old jobs back," says Normand.