Food fight: former Safeway employees prepared to fight the good fight to get jobs back.

• Author: Scarcello, Frank

The sight of three boarded-up former Safeway stores in Thunder Bay suggests the company is gone for good from the community, but many former employees are fighting to the end to get the company to reopen the stores in order to get their old jobs back.

With an 81 per cent strike vote, over 400 Safeway employees in three Thunder Bay stores were sent out to the picket lines one year ago on Oct. 1, 2001.

Today, the former employees are holding onto hope that they will successfully de-certify the union and get their jobs back.

Last year, after extended contract negotiations, talks broke down between the company and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) with a failure to resolve a dispute centered on the elimination of the store's meat departments. Safeway was proposing that local stores receive pre-packaged products, which the union said would lead to the elimination of 30 jobs. Also, the company was proposing that some high-paying full-time jobs be replaced with low-paying part-time jobs.

The company announced in mid-January 2002 that it will be closing its warehouse in Thunder Bay on Mar. 16, 2002.

Safeway spokesperson Toby Oswald said from his Calgary office that the move was being made because the market will be more efficiently serviced from their Winnipeg distribution centre.

The company returned to the bargaining table in April 2002, seven months into the strike.

Wayne Hanley, UFCW Ontario president, said in a union bulletin that Safeway was asking Thunder Bay workers to accept a deal that was less than originally offered.

A spokesperson for Safeway said that if the employees voted "no" to the company's final offer, its three stores would be shutdown.

On May 7, 2002, employees rejected Safeway's final offer by a close vote of 201-195. Following the vote, Safeway president, Chuck Mulveena, said in a press release that the company would lodge a complaint with the Ministry of Labour and ask the ministry to conduct another vote.

The union did not agree to a second vote, and on June 6 Canada Safeway announced the closure of its Thunder Bay stores.

"...waiting an additional indeterminate number of months for a formal hearing and resolution to this issue would only add to the already substantial economic impact of the strike on our company," Mulveena said in a press release. "The union opposed our application for a second vote from the outset. We have therefore, regretfully come to the decision to withdraw cur complaint with the...