Falconbridge and the baffle of "the chair".

• Position: Strike settled but at what cost to labor relations - Brief Article - Column

When I was in my early teens I found a great job at the old CBC studios in Toronto. The name of the job was "audience relations person".

Basically an "audience relations person" was an usher. My mandate was to direct people into the show, tell them where the washrooms were if the need arose, remind them not to talk during the show, and generally clean my teeth and look wholesome.

I always felt this was one of the best jobs in the world, next to being an underage bartender at the Empire Hotel in Huntsville, Ont.

Anyway, one day I was being an industrious little "audience relations person" for the Front Page Challenge TV show when; just before it was time to go on the air, it was discovered a chair was missing for the guest panelist of the week. The director started screaming for a chair and being the perky little audience man I was, I bounded to the rescue and moved a chair in place.

All hell broke loose with just minutes to go to air. You see, I was not a member of the union. I was a lowly "audience man" and to my total and absolute disbelief I was ordered to return the chair to where I had found it, and an officially designated union member under the category of maintenance or props or whatever, moved the chair at a snail's pace back to the set.

I've never forgotten the absurdity of the situation nor the indignation of the union members at the time..nor I might add the pathetic resignation of the director of the show.

Which brings me to the recently settled strike at Falconbridge Ltd. in Sudbury.

For seven months, members of the Canadian Auto Workers have been on-strike about "the chair." "The chair" in this case consisted of contract language; language the company wanted for increased flexibility on the job, easier contracting out freedoms, sensible bumping rights and a host of other, shall we say, environmental issues. What was not an issue was money. The offer was generous and didn't change much in the seven months between first offer and final settlement.

Both parties paid a huge price for this battle. The company left multimillion dollars of lost profits on the table and the union paid in the blood of the financial deprivation of its members. The community paid the economic price, but also the social cost of living through a war of attrition in its own backyard.

A month or so ago I weighed in myself, through columns written in my weekly newspaper in Sudbury (Northern Life) about what I considered to be the intransigence on both sides...