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Workers who maintain track and bridges for Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. have walked off the job, the second strike at one of Canada's national railways this year.
A 2 a.m. EDT strike deadline passed Wednesday without the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference reaching an agreement with CP Rail. About 1,200 employees are affected.
Union leader William Brehl says picket lines are going up across Canada right away.
He says he doesn't expect his union to reach a deal with Canadian Pacific in the next few days.
CP Rail officials say it will deploy 1,300 trained management employees to do the tasks normally performed by striking workers.
But Mr. Brehl, speaking hours before the 72-hour notice period was to run out at 2 a.m. EDT, said he doesn't believe CP management personnel will be able to fill the gap for long.
“What reasonable company in the world has 1,200 managers whose jobs are so inconsequential that they can just pick up and jump out to the track when there's a strike?” Mr. Brehl said.
“There's only 150 supervisory staff in our department. They're getting the rest out of the offices. They're pulling them off desks.”
CP Rail's director of public affairs, Mark Seland, said the company has put off capital improvements and expansion programs until the labour situation is settled.
“And so, by freeing up those managers from that work, we can operate in this mode as long as required,” Mr. Seland said.
Of the 3,200 Teamsters members at Canadian Pacific, only 1,200 work on track repairs and 2,000 of them are normally associated with the capital programs, he said.
“And because those programs are deferred, we won't need to replace those 2,000 members. The 1,200 members that do day-to-day track maintenance are the people we are replacing with 1,300 trained management staff.”
CP Rail has said repeatedly that it won't agree to the Teamster union's demand for a 13 per cent wage increase over three years.
The company says such a deal would be out of line with a wage increase of 10 per cent over three years with other unions at Canada's second-biggest rail operator.
The two sides had been in mediated talks but those broke off and on Saturday the union gave its 72-hour notice required to begin a legal strike.
Via Rail, the country's national passenger rail service, uses primarily Canadian National track so it expects the impact of a CP Rail strike will be negligible.
“There aren't very many of our services that actually go over CP tracks for any great distances. So, at this point in time we haven't identified there being any impact on our services,” Via Rail's Catherine Kaloutsky said Tuesday afternoon.
“The majority of our trains operate over CN tracks or tracks owned by Via Rail.”
Montreal-based Canadian National Railways suffered a two-week strike in February when conductors and yard workers walked off the job, disrupting shipments of commodities like grain and coal, and auto parts.
The February strike interrupted shipments valued at around $1-billion at the Vancouver Port Authority, and created backlogs of inventory which companies said would take months to make up.
Employees then began rotating walkouts in April and the company responded with lockouts, after union members rejected a proposed one-year contract. The workers returned to their jobs after Parliament issued a back-to-work bill.
A federally appointed mediator assigned to the CN Rail talks has until July to review both the union and company offers, then will select one to stand as the binding, collective agreement.
