Ch 20: Baby names and wildcat strike.

For an outdoor person Kitimat was an excellent place to live. There were hiking trails to Claque Mountain and Mount Elizabeth, canoeing and fishing for salmon in the Kitimat river, fishing for salmon in Douglas Channel  (called the Chuck), or sailing to many anchorages, some with hot springs, and much more. We bought a house, a half of a duplex with “great potential” for $30 000, the maximum we could afford. But the house had a million-dollar view of the Douglas Channel and mountains. Over breakfast at our kitchen table we could watch the fjord, the mountains and how the scenery changed with the weather and the season.

However for many people Kitimat was a transient town. They would stay three to five years and then move away. It was difficult to make and keep friends. Not many seniors could be seen in town, retired people moved south to a warmer climate.

Our house had big potential and great views: Mount Elizabeth from the living room. 

For mothers of a firstborn, Kitimat was not the best place to be. Their life was in turmoil but the family, mother, grandmother or aunt they could ask for advice or help lived too far away.  There were neighbours, friends and other mothers to turn to but it was not the same.

 We found that out when our first son was born. Neither I nor my wife had any experience with infants and the first few weeks were difficult. When the baby came home from the hospital I was afraid to hold him, scared that I could drop him or if pulled on his hand, it could break off like a lizard’s tail. “Your baby is beautiful” I had heard many times. Beautiful? That was a matter of opinion. To me, with a red, wrinkled face and bald head, he looked more like a little monkey.

Shortly after birth, new parents would face the difficult task of giving the baby a name. Many took an easy way out and named it after a grandparent or close relative; others used the name of some famous personality, a flower or something else they liked, not comprehending that their offspring would carry that name their whole life. (I wondered how I would feel about my parents if they named me Adolf). Well, I had a different idea. The name should fit the personality of the baby. I didn’t want to stick a name on the baby just because I liked it. Also I wanted a name that my mother could pronounce and would be somehow familiar with.  It was more difficult than I thought. We kept throwing names at the baby but none would stick. We consulted a book of names and asked other people, but to no avail. So I gave him a nickname - It. Then one day I was repeating names again, looking at It and suddenly Mark popped out. Yes, Mark would fit him perfectly. How could we miss that name before?  So It was named Mark Allistar, second name after the Chalmer’s farmer friend.

Naming our second son was even more difficult. We spent more than two weeks trying to find a name for It (the nickname inherited from his brother), but again nothing would stick. Local newspaper had a page announcing births and we missed the deadline; they wouldn’t put the announcement in the paper without the baby’s name. The second deadline was coming and still no name, nothing would stick to It.   I was thinking naming him Teflon but was afraid of what he would call me when he was a teenager. We were going through the same ritual again, calling out names, and out of the blue we stopped at Michael. “Nice name” I said looking at It. We continued trying other names but always came back to Michael. The Teflon curse was broken and we named the baby Michael Leslie after his aunt. I quickly learned new skills like changing diapers, feeding and cleaning the baby, and strange words like burping, teething and soothing. Time went by, the infants grew into babies and life slowly returned to normal.

Then one night I was woken up by the phone. “Wrong number,” I thought, trying to ignore it. But the phone kept ringing so I picked it up. It was my boss. “We have an emergency at the smelter and need you there. Be prepared to stay for a couple of days, bring a sleeping bag and some work clothes. I will pick you up at five this morning and tell you more.”  CLICK! “He doesn’t drink, could he be into drugs?” I was thinking, packing my sleeping bag. 

At five o’clock his car pulled into our driveway. Three of my co-workers were in the car. Our boss was explaining what has happened: “Our Company has another aluminum smelter in Arvida, Quebec.  The labour contract expired last month and the union went on strike. The Quebec Union is very militant, negotiations for a new contract were very difficult and the company was forced to shut down the smelter .

The union retaliated by sending a dozen of picketers to Kitimat and they set up picket line on the road to the smelter. The local union asked its members not to cross the picket line and the night shift didn’t show up for work. Only shift foremen and a few dozen of the hourly paid workers are in the smelter, keeping the pot lines running.

It is an illegal wildcat strike. The local union recently switched from the United Steelworkers of America to CASAW, a Canadian union and the leadership is trying to show the Company that they would not be a pushover in coming contract negotiations.

The wildcat strike took the company completely by surprise, it had never happened before. According to the company’s lawyers it is illegal for a union from one province to picket in a different province. They are going to get a court order to remove the picket line. But it will take a couple of days and management decided to keep the smelter running with salaried staff. The road to the smelter is blocked by a barricade so the staff will be ferried by boats from the marina across the Chuck into the smelter.”

It was a long boat drive from the marina on the opposite side of the Chuck to the smelter 

At the marina were many people, standing in small groups, talking quietly while waiting to be ferried across the channel to the smelter. The mood was gloomy. Alcan employed almost 3 000 hourly workers. Now the company wanted to operate the pot lines with 800 salaried staff. Many of them had worked in the past as hourly employees and were familiar with the smelter operation, however the majority were pencil pushers not used to the dirty work they were going to face.

Aluminum is produced by a complicated electrochemical process in large cells called pots. The raw material containing alumina is dumped into the pot where an electric current dissolves it into a molten bath of aluminum and crust. The aluminum is siphoned off into crucibles and cast into ingots. The operation of the pot must be constantly monitored and the pot can be put on “hold” for only a few hours. Otherwise it would get “sick” and be shut down. In the smelter were fifteen pot-lines casting 700 tons of ingots daily. If few pots got sick, chances were that the whole pot line could get sick and would be shutdown. Restarting lines was a complicated and expensive process that would take weeks. 

The inexperienced staff would have to maintain the production until the wildcat strike was resolved. There were hundreds of different jobs that had to be done. Many “old hands” were sceptical, predicting that it would be an impossible job to keep the production going and a few ex-union men felt queasy about crossing the picket line and becoming scabs.                                                                

It was a dark, cold and windy morning. One member of my group was a Dutch emigrant. “This morning reminds me of the beginning of the war. I was a small boy but I will never forget the day when the German army attacked Holland. People were gathering on streets, worried, wondering what was going to happen. I’ve got the same feeling now.” he said. I understood what he meant. We would be caught in a war between the Company and the union.