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The Regina refinery produces 90 per cent of the network’s profits – roughly $1 billion in each of the past two years. Management has made all sorts of interesting noises about how times are changing in the industry, a new regulatory environment requires adaptation and innovation and investment. But it’s difficult not to notice that the company seems bent on making its workers do the adapting and the innovating, and pay for it all, in the bargain.

Local 594 won a mandate of 97 per cent of its members to take job action if necessary last Dec. 3, and two days later, the company issued lockout notice. The workers have been on a picket line in brutal weather, for weeks now. There’s no evidence that anyone has packed it in and crossed the line to go back to work, and the union leadership says every indication is that the rank and file is not wavering.

It is not as though FCL Ltd. simply threw up its hands after having failed to convince Local 594 to accept reasonable amendments to the company pension plan. Three years ago, the company won major concessions from the union that severely weakened the contract’s pension benefits for newly hired workers. Now the company is back with a plan to gut the pension plan altogether, and the company went into this round of talks with that “scab camp” in the back of its mind.

The company was already building the camp by last October, and over the past three years, the company has taken on dozens of union-excluded “management” workers, preparing for a showdown with Unifor. And now the company has got the confrontation it was looking for – the first work stoppage at the refinery in its seven decades of operation.