SKIPPER'S BLOG: Anger Bubbling in Fortune

The very word “union” implies that everyone is “united” under one common goal, but that’s not always the case no matter how deeply rooted the union values and worker beliefs may be.

You are now starting to see evidence of that in Fortune, NL.

See, Ocean Choice International owns the plant, which has been hobbling along doing a bit of fish here and there over the last few years following a period of time when the plant was closed and the freezer unit destroyed by fire.

OCI has some deepsea fish stocks it wants to fish and send out of the province pretty much unprocessed. That’s against current government policy so they have to get a greenlight from the province and the FFAW to do it.

OCI has already shutdown Marystown, its other groundfish plant on the Burin Peninsula. It has told the province that it will open the plant in Fortune and provide fulltime work for some of the employees there, IF the province allows them to ship out fish.

Obviously workers in Fortune want the work, because they voted in favour of it unanimously.

The province’s fisheries minister, Darin King, actually represents the district Fortune is in, so, there’s that.

The FFAW, the union that represents the workers in Fortune, has flatly rejected the notion.

And here’s where things get interesting.

The FFAW is taking serious heat from the town, the area and the workers for saying no to the plan that OCI has proposed. It's an almost no-win situation.

Workers in Fortune are beside themselves with anger, and that's just for starters.

Just this morning Fortune Mayor Charles Penwell took to the airwaves at VOCM to accuse the union of shutting down his town and called on them to develop a counter offer to the OCI proposal immediately.

We know the FFAW is feeling that heat because President Earle McCurdy is going before the microphones today at lunchtime to explain the union’s position (more on that here after it happens).

So here’s the thing.

The workers want the deal, for reasons that are obvious.

The union as a whole is rejecting the deal, for reasons they believe are equally obvious, and McCurdy intends to increase that obviousness today by releasing the union’s written response to the issue, which was submitted to minister Darin King.

It is the epitome of a house divided against itself.

Some of the past and present workers in Fortune have long held some underlying disdain for the union, always feeling they were left playing second banana while the modern, larger facility in nearby Marystown with it's larger workforce got most of the attention. And now there's growing anger over the belief that their union is directly responsible — even if the FFAW believes the reasons are the correct ones for the industry as a whole — for them not being able to go to work and have a full time job.

There are a lot of interesting factors at play in this situation, not the least of which is how it will play out between the Fortune workers and their union.