Workers at a Montreal glass factory, the last of its kind here, are on strike

On a summer day, temperatures can soar near 50 C inside the O-I Glass plant, a towering structure of smokestacks and steel that looms over Pointe-Saint-Charles, a neighbourhood in southwestern Montreal. 

Mark Langlois, a defect specialist in the bottle-forming department, has worked at the factory for 32 years — long enough for his face to bear a perpetual tan from the heat of the molten glass — and he wants a raise. 

"We just want what we deserve," said Langlois, as striking factory workers blew horns and waved their union's flags in a park near the plant last Friday. "We're just asking for the minimum. Everything going up today: the cost of living, gas, food, mortgages, rentals. It's just crazy."

Langlois is one of 330 workers — members of the United Steelworkers (USW) union — who walked off the job six weeks ago. It's the first strike in nearly 40 years at the plant, which has been making brown beer and other glass containers in this working-class neighbourhood for more than a century. 

The pickets chanted labour slogans as they marched down St-Patrick Street, near the old Redpath Sugar refinery, which has been turned into luxury condos, and past the old Northern Electric plant, which once made components for land-line telephones and is now home to a number of hi-tech businesses. 

These old factories used to dominate Pointe-Saint-Charles. In the middle of the 20th century, nearly 15 per cent of all industrial workers in Canada lived and worked in the neighbourhoods around the Lachine Canal. 

Now, O-I Glass is the last plant standing in "the Point" — and one of only a handful of such factories on the island of Montreal. 

Change to recycling rules

Madeleine Goupil, 69, has lived in the Point her whole life. She emerged from her residence on Ropery Street to see what all the noise was about as the striking procession went by. 

"It's tough, the job," she said.

Goupil remembered seeing the workers leaving the factory, hot and tired after their long shifts. For decades, it was known as the Dominion Glass factory, before it changed owners a couple of times, first in the 1980s then again in the early 2000s.

"I hope it won't close," said Goupil.

O-I Glass, a multinational headquartered in the U.S., has closed most of its plants in the country. The Pointe-Saint-Charles plant is one of just two that remain.

But union stalwarts like Langlois, who is on the negotiating committee, said the Montreal plant is efficient, and O-I has been profitable. That makes the company's offer of a three per cent pay increase over three years "a joke," he said.

The average salary at the factory is around $28 per hour, according to the union.

USW is asking for a seven per cent increase immediately and four per cent for the two subsequent years afterward. 

It's an increase striking workers say they deserve in part because the union helped push for changes to Quebec's recycling rules, expanding the number of glass containers that can be turned in for a deposit. 

"It was us, the workers, who saved this factory through our mobilization efforts," said Dominic Lemieux, the Quebec USW director.

The changes allow O-I to save money. Producing bottles from recycled glass takes less energy than using silica sand. 

"We're recycling as much as we can," Langlois said. "It costs a lot cheaper to make the bottles."

"You can recycle them forever. So they're saving money that way too, and it's just not coming back to us."

The glass recycling changes led O-I to announce a $70-million investment in new equipment for the Pointe-Saint-Charles factory, helped by a $21-million injection from the Quebec government.

"The employer is coming to the table not acknowledging the efforts we've done," said Lemieux.

O-I declined an interview request, but a spokesperson said in a statement that Quebec's Labour Ministry has appointed a conciliator to help the parties reach an agreement.

"We look forward to returning to productive, good-faith negotiations with the union that represents our employees," the statement said. "We hope we will quickly achieve a fair and equitable agreement that will resume the recycling of glass packaging into high-quality bottles for companies throughout our region and beyond."

A different kind of strike

The workers have been taking shifts to staff the picket lines in front of the factory gates on Wellington Street around the clock since the strike began on May 11. 

Drivers of passing cars occasionally honk their horns in support. 

But it's a different kind of strike than the ones that used to paralyze factories in the neighbourhood. 

Steven High, a historian at Concordia University who interviewed residents in old industrial areas of Montreal for his book Deindustrializing Montreal, said people used to live in the industrial district where they worked, and a strike would unite the entire neighbourhood.

The Point "was known as a tough neighbourhood, and so the strikes were tough," High said. 

In 1977, a six-month strike at the Robin Hood flour plant, not far away from Pointe Saint-Charles, in Little Burgundy, culminated in the shooting of eight strikers who were part of a group trying to stop the plant from bringing in outside, non-unionized workers, known as scabs. 

Today, most O-I workers commute from other neighbourhoods to their jobs on the shop floor.

"So this strike isn't so much a community strike in the same way as it would have been 30 or 40 years ago," High said.

Goupil, the longtime resident of the Point, said it used to be common for pickets to march through the streets of the Point.

But it is no longer such a tough area, she said. The march on Friday, while noisy, remained peaceful. 

And it is no longer the working-class neighbourhood it was. Most of the O-I workers live elsewhere, a consequence, in part, Langlois said, of gentrification and sky-high real estate prices.

The working-class factory neighbourhood is now home to more restaurants and cafés. The canal has been cleaned up. No longer a maritime industrial passageway, it's an urban park beloved by joggers, dog walkers and cyclists.

"It's changed a lot, yes," Goupil said, "but it's good. With time, there have been improvements."