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Over 50 SNOLAB employees in Sudbury on strike after turning down
latest offer
(HTM) Source
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Picket lines are up outside a world-renowned physics research lab
located deep inside a Sudbury, Ont., mine as 52 workers at SNOLAB
voted against a tentative contract Tuesday night.
United Steelworkers Local 2020-59 represents dozens of workers, from
janitorial staff to physicists, at the dark matter research facility
with links to Nobel Prize-winning work in years past.
Pascal Boucher, northeastern Ontario co-ordinator for the United
Steelworkers, said the workers turned down a tentative agreement two
weeks ago, then worked with a conciliator but voted against the deal
that came out of those talks.
He didn't give specific details about demands, but said wages and
family time are high priorities.
"It's not a get-rich scheme for them," said Boucher. "It's about being
respected and being able to live while making SNOLAB a world-class
research facility."
Boucher said workers have been told SNOLAB is "tapped out"
financially, but he's not sure they believe that, given $2 million in
public funding was received last October, in addition to an initial
$12 million in funding from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.
Boucher said everything is peaceful on the picket line as several
hundred Vale miners represented by USW Local 6500 cross to go to work
in Creighton Mine.
SNOLAB says that with some dozens of non-union staff, operations at
the underground laboratory should continue as usual during the strike.
(Bridget Yard/CBC)
"People who work at Vale are lawfully required to report to work and
we're not stopping traffic here," said Boucher.
"If people want to stop in and ask why our members are on strike,
people will answer them."
Jodi Cooley, a physicist and executive director of SNOLAB, said the
research facility is continuing to operate as usual, with about 75
non-unionized staff.
Cooley said the lab does rely a great deal on the technical expertise
of its unionized workforce.
For example, she said, electricians or millwrights might be there to
help with assembling equipment or hooking up utilities to conduct
research in the lab, and the specialized cleaning staff are
responsible for maintaining the high degree of cleanliness necessary
to conduct such precise work.
Non-unionized staff are covering those jobs, she said, so experiments
may proceed.
Dr. Jodi Cooley, executive director of SNOLAB, is a physicist on
secondment from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. (supplied by
SNOLAB)
"I mean it would be a lie to say that it's not challenging, but I have
to give credit to our non-union staff," she said. "We do have people
who are underground today and on the surface who are working
underground to help maintain that cleanliness standard."
## SNOLAB hopes to return to bargaining table
A statement provided by SNOLAB said wages for unionized employees
range from $43,440 to $81,000, and as a result of the 2021 contract
negotiations, the average three-year increase across all unionized
employees was 11.9 per cent.
SNOLAB offers space to visiting scientists to conduct their research,
and Cooley said recruiting new projects may be harder during a labour
disruption.
"Being in this strike position is not ideal but we are going to
maintain trying to keep our status as a leading laboratory in the
world for the type of science that we do," she said. "We continue to
be hopeful that we will be able to get back to the bargaining table
and in the meantime, we are going to continue to try to attract those
experiments to the lab and keep those experiments operating."
Past SNOLAB research on neutrino oscillations earned Arthur McDonald
the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015.
Current SNOLAB experiments include research into dark matter,
supernovas and studies on the effects of working deep underground,
using fruit flies as a model organism.
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