Montreal - Hourly workers at Quality Meat Packers Ltd.'s two pork plants in the Canadian province of Ontario voted to accept a new contract offer, ending an eight-week strike, a union official said.
“The vote was 68% for the contract. It means they will be going back to work, probably by Wednesday,” Bryan Neath, Ontario director of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, said.
The strike by 800 meat cutters idled the plants for eight weeks and forced thousands of Canadian hogs into the United States for processing. American pork industry officials had complained the influx of Canadian hogs was depressing already sliding U.S. hog prices.
Quality Meat's two family-owned plants in Toronto and the nearby suburb of Bramalea can process 26,000 hogs a week. The plants employ 950 people.
Company President David Schwartz said in a statement that “we're very glad it's over and anxious to begin rebuilding relationships with our people, our customers and our suppliers.”
Schwartz said the company's two facilities could be operating within a week.
The Quality Meat contract is similar to one accepted in March 1998 at Maple Leaf Foods Inc., another large Canadian meat processing company.
The pact will reduce wages between C$3 and C$6 an hour for the union members at the Quality Meat plants. The greatest rollback would cut to C$10.40 an hour the wages of a worker earning C$16.72 an hour.
Neath said failure to approve the wage-cut contract would probably have closed the plants. The pact includes lump sum cash payments ranging from C$3,500 to C$20,000 for each worker, depending on years of service.
Earlier Friday, Chicago Mercantile Exchange lean hog and pork belly contracts closed lower. Much of the selling was a correction from strong gains made Thursday when hog futures jumped on news the Quality Meat strike could end.
The U.S. National Pork Producers Council had said the strike was partly responsible for low U.S. hog prices in December. That was because Canadian hogs normally processed at the Ontario plants were being shipped to the United States, competing with an abundance of U.S. hogs, the council said.
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