The New Year will come with a certain uneasiness for employees at Stora Enso’s Port Hawkesbury mill, in Point Tuppe…
The New Year will come with a certain uneasiness for employees at Stora Enso’s Port Hawkesbury mill, in Point Tupper, NS. The facility, scheduled to shut down a week longer than normal during the Christmas holidays, might not reopen on January 3rd, as was originally planned, the CBC has reported.
The company elected to lengthen the traditional two-day hiatus to nine days, from December 25th to January 3rd. However, now the company is hesitating to say whether or not the third day of the New Year will in fact see a restart of the mill.
“Nobody knows the answer to that question,” the CBC reported Gary Parafincnuk, vice president of human resources, as saying.
The prolonged shutdown is adding fuel to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers’ Union’s fire. Mill members of the union are currently in a 48-hour legal strike position and are awaiting the details of Stora Enso’s most recent contract offer. The CBC reported that the union’s chief negotiator, Don MacKenzie, has confirmed workers will be entitled to their Christmas pay, but that should they be laid off, those days will not be compensated.
“People are not happy,” the CBC reported him as saying. “If this is another tactic toexert more pressure on them to soften them up in an attempt to try to get them to accept what’s been tabled, I think the company is clearly wrong.”
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