Over 50 SNOLAB employees in Sudbury on strike after turning down latest offer

Picket lines are up outside a world-renowned physics research lab located deep inside a Sudbury, Ont., mine as 52 workers at SNOLAB voted against a tentative contract Tuesday night. 

United Steelworkers Local 2020-59 represents dozens of workers, from janitorial staff to physicists, at the dark matter research facility with links to Nobel Prize-winning work in years past. 

Pascal Boucher, northeastern Ontario co-ordinator for the United Steelworkers, said the workers turned down a tentative agreement two weeks ago, then worked with a conciliator but voted against the deal that came out of those talks. 

He didn't give specific details about demands, but said wages and family time are high priorities.

"It's not a get-rich scheme for them," said Boucher. "It's about being respected and being able to live while making SNOLAB a world-class research facility."

Boucher said workers have been told SNOLAB is "tapped out" financially, but he's not sure they believe that, given $2 million in public funding was received last October, in addition to an initial $12 million in funding from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities.

Boucher said everything is peaceful on the picket line as several hundred Vale miners represented by USW Local 6500 cross to go to work in Creighton Mine. 

"People who work at Vale are lawfully required to report to work and we're not stopping traffic here," said Boucher.

"If people want to stop in and ask why our members are on strike, people will answer them."

Jodi Cooley, a physicist and executive director of SNOLAB, said the research facility is continuing to operate as usual, with about 75 non-unionized staff.

Cooley said the lab does rely a great deal on the technical expertise of its unionized workforce.

For example, she said, electricians or millwrights might be there to help with assembling equipment or hooking up utilities to conduct research in the lab, and the specialized cleaning staff are responsible for maintaining the high degree of cleanliness necessary to conduct such precise work.

Non-unionized staff are covering those jobs, she said, so experiments may proceed.

"I mean it would be a lie to say that it's not challenging, but I have to give credit to our non-union staff," she said. "We do have people who are underground today and on the surface who are working underground to help maintain that cleanliness standard."

SNOLAB hopes to return to bargaining table

A statement provided by SNOLAB said wages for unionized employees range from $43,440 to $81,000, and as a result of the 2021 contract negotiations, the average three-year increase across all unionized employees was 11.9 per cent.

SNOLAB offers space to visiting scientists to conduct their research, and Cooley said recruiting new projects may be harder during a labour disruption.

"Being in this strike position is not ideal but we are going to maintain trying to keep our status as a leading laboratory in the world for the type of science that we do," she said. "We continue to be hopeful that we will be able to get back to the bargaining table and in the meantime, we are going to continue to try to attract those experiments to the lab and keep those experiments operating."

Past SNOLAB research on neutrino oscillations earned Arthur McDonald the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015.

Current SNOLAB experiments include research into dark matter, supernovas and studies on the effects of working deep underground, using fruit flies as a model organism.