12/20/2016
For Immediate Release
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
FISH-NL Fails to Win Support of Fish Harvesters
St. John’s – In a clear sign of insufficient support, FISH-NL announced today that it is extending its deadline for filing an application to the Labour Relations Board, breaking a months-long commitment to file by December 20th. Further highlighting their lack of province-wide support is FISH-NL’s ongoing effort to lower the bar on the threshold for securing a vote and its suggestion that the best way forward for fish harvesters is a fractured harvester labour movement, creating dozens of small and weak unions.
“The writing is on the wall,” said David Decker, Secretary-Treasurer of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union (FFAW-Unifor). “Not only is this group not up to the challenge of representing harvesters, their plan to divide harvesters into many separate bargaining units would only benefit the companies by pitting fish harvesters against one another.”
While FFAW-Unifor has made it clear that breaking fish harvesters away from other members of the Union would weaken their bargaining power, the suggestion of filing separate buyer-by-buyer applications would further diminish the bargaining power of harvesters and undoubtedly threaten their ability to negotiate higher prices.
Since the beginning of their campaign to raid FFAW-Unifor, FISH-NL has claimed they require 50% support from fish harvesters in order to file an application and that they would easily attain, at minimum, 70% support by their deadline. If this were the case, an application would be filed today.
“Today’s announcement is a very good indication of how disorganized this group is,” continued Decker. “Their self-appointed deadline has come and gone and clearly they’ve fallen short.”
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For media inquiries, please contact:
Jessica McCormick, FFAW-Unifor Communications Officer
709-576-7276 (office)
jmccormick@ffaw.net