After a wait of nearly 16 months, the Newfoundland and Labrador Labour Relations Board finally released a much-anticipated report into the quest of The Federation of Independent Sea Harvesters of Newfoundland and Labrador (FISH-NL) to trigger a certification vote with the aim of representing inshore fish harvesters.
However, the report’s findings might not have been the result FISH-NL was hoping for.
Submitted to the Labour Relations Board on Dec. 30, 2016, FISH-NL’s application for certification included membership cards signed by 2,372 inshore harvesters, collected over a two-month certification drive from more than 300 communities around Newfoundland and Labrador. The upstart labour group needed to sign up 40 per cent of the province’s inshore fishermen to trigger a vote away from the rival Fish, Food and Allied Workers union (FFAW).
Throughout the entire process, the FFAW maintained that its membership list contained around 10,000 harvesters and that FISH-NL never did sign up enough fishermen to trigger a vote — and it appears the union was correct.
In a press release, the FFAW said it provided detailed membership information to the Board to account for the Union’s claim of between 9,000 and 10,000 members. “The cumulative summary showed that the investigating officer matched 9,458 names with correspondence from fish buyers to the 2015 and 2016 membership lists supplied to the investigating officer by FFAW,” the release stated.
“The report presented to us by the labour board confirms that FISH-NL does not have adequate support and their application should be dismissed without delay,” said Keith Sullivan, President of FFAW.
“According to the report, if the Labour Relations Board accepted that every card signed by FISH-NL was in good order, which FFAW believes is not the case, then FISH-NL would have only signed up 25.1 per cent of fishers,” the released stated.
“For more than a year FISH-NL has misrepresented our industry, slandered the good work of the union and its members, and impeded progress on issues of tremendous importance to the inshore fishery. After a very thorough investigation by the Labour Relations Board, we believe it is time to dismiss this application and get back to focusing on the serious challenges facing our fishery,” Sullivan said.
However, FISH-NL is not rolling over and accepting defeat just yet.
The organization is questioning whether thousands of dues-paying members of the FFAW are actually inshore fish harvesters.
“The membership figures made public by the FFAW-Unifor are misleading in that they’re paper numbers only — not representative of the number of true bonafide, full-time, boots-on-a-deck inshore harvesters,” says Ryan Cleary, President of FISH-NL.
“We’ve requested the board proceed with a vote for real harvesters to decide their union fate.”
FISH-NL had estimated the number of inshore harvesters in the province at around 4,500, while the FFAW pegged the number at as high as 10,000.
“The difference is in definition. The FFAW-Unifor defines a harvester as anyone who pays union dues from the sale of fish. FISH-NL’s stance is that because dues are automatically deducted in a person’s name from a fish sale cannot be the determining factor in deciding who is/is not an inshore harvester for the purposes of a representation vote. That point was made with the Labour Relations Board at least twice by Derek Butler of the Association of Seafood Producers (ASP), whose members operate more than 65 processing plants in the province. The plants/buyers automatically deduct dues from a fish sale and remit them to the FFAW-Unifor,” FISH-NL explained in a press release.
“Producers remit union dues, for anyone receiving payment for any share of catch as directed by enterprise owners. This would include harvesters and others who may not have fished (as in any business, an enterprise owner can decide who to pay from the value of the landed catch; producers provide a payroll service, pure and simple),” Butler wrote in an April 10, 2017 e-mail to the board investigator.
“Whether they are harvesters, as worded in the order, is the debatable point. Assuming some who receive payment or shares of catch payments are not actual harvesters, producers would have little ability to determine from payroll alone who they are. The order says to provide names of harvesters, but more accurately, it should read anyone for whom union dues are remitted. The task before the board is then to decide who the commercial harvesters are,” FISH-NL explained.
“The Association of Seafood Producers is clear in stating the fact a person pays union dues does not necessarily make them a bonafide inshore harvester,” said Cleary, adding FISH-NL has provided the Labour Relations Board with a detailed definition of an inshore harvester for purposes of a vote.
“The FFAW-Unifor is saying that a person who may or may not have fished aboard a boat one day in their life and had a fish sale put in their name with dues automatically deducted from their cheque, has the same vote on their union future as an enterprise owner with 30-plus years on the water and tens of thousands of dollars of investments,” said Cleary. “That’s clearly wrong.”
Both FISH-NL and the FFAW had until April 25 to formally respond to the investigator’s report.
