BY CRAIG GILBERT
Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario president Sid Ryan is coming to town Thursday with a cheque for striking GSU workers in one hand and an ultimatum in the other.
If Ryan doesn?t convince Greater Sudbury Mayor David Courtemanche to end the 102-day-old strike by 82 workers at Greater Sudbury Utilities Plus Inc. before he leaves town Friday, a general union boycott of the city will go into effect.
?We?re at the stage where we?re pulling out all the stops. If (Courtemanche) wants a war, that?s what he?ll get.
?I?m flying in Thursday and staying overnight, so I don?t care if I have to meet with him in the middle of the night,? said Ryan.
The Ontario Federation of Labour has unanimously approved a boycott of all union conferences, meetings or other events economically beneficial to the City of Greater Sudbury.
?Right now, CUPE has a conference of paramedics, maybe 200 people, scheduled for Sudbury in November, and we?re going to cancel that,? said Ryan.
?We?re asking all the other unions to do likewise.?
No union in Canada will stage an event in Sudbury without hearing about it from Ryan.
?Then we?ll sit down and locally come up with other creative ways of putting the pressure on. We?ll check and see if councillors opposed to settling the strike have any business interests in town, and those will be targeted first.
?We?ll put picket lines up around them and whatever else. We?re prepared to do whatever it takes to settle the strike at this stage.?
No matter when the strike ends, councillors seeking re-election in 2006 will have their work cut out for them, according to Ryan.
?We?re going to put a lot of effort into the next municipal election. I want to book somebody off from the community to organize the CUPE local, the school teachers, steel workers, OPSEU, you name it.
?We?re going to target these councillors that kept our members on strike for 101 days for no good reason, and basically take them out of office.?
Ryan will present a $10,000 cheque to the strikers at the picket line.
The money was collected through donations at a CUPE conference. The collection plate will be passed around at another upcoming CUPE conference as well.
