IBEW 230 members Pat Ferguson and Steve Kolic have been accepting union registration from Silian employees

Bracing for the New Boss

The spectre of working life under the thumb of the Chinese government has pushed employees of a small Victoria electronics plant to seek union membership to ensure their rights are respected by the facility’s new overseas bosses.

This week’s drive to join International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 230 has been percolating since the former Honeywell Electronic Materials plant on Vanalman Avenue was purchased by China Silian Instrument Group in August of this year, muddying the working waters for the facility’s approximately 50 employees.

Silian is a manufacturing firm owned wholly by the government of the People’s Republic of China, an industrial leviathan that employs almost 8,000 workers, mostly in the Chongqinq industrial area of Sichuan province.

If successful, IBEW provincial organizer Jason Mann says the unionization of Silian’s Victoria workforce may be the first time employees of an overseas enterprise owned by the Chinese state in North America have joined a trade union.

The prospect of organizing has clearly not been far from the mind’s of Silian employees, as by the end of the membership drive’s first day, IBEW representatives manning a table in the Silian parking lot had signed cards for seven of the eight workers on the plant’s first shift.

Employees of the Victoria facility, who work on a specialized line that manufactures sapphire wafers used in LED lights, declined to go on record for fear of being identified as a union organizer or sympathizer, but IBEW’s Mann says they bring a laundry list of valid concerns—starting with job security.

Silian is currently building a 45,000-hectare plant in China, one unit of which will be dedicated to manufacturing sapphire wafers identical to those being made at the Victoria facility. Silian recently transferred a handful of Chinese employees to Victoria to study the manufacture of the wafers, while Victoria plant managers have travelled to China to oversee the start-up of that factory. All this has the Victoria workforce worried they are simply training the workers that will one day take their jobs across the Pacific.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” says Mann. “They want to have a secure future knowing that after the plant opens in China, if things should head for the worst and they do have to close down, they want to know that if they’ve been there for five or ten years, that there’s some re-training or at least some severance money to put them back up on their feet again when they’re out finding a new job.”

Corresponding to the issue of the visiting Chinese workers is what employees told Monday amounts to censorship on the job site, as they’ve been instructed by management that certain topics are not to be discussed within the confines of the plant. Workers say although they have yet to be given a document of taboo topics, it has been “suggested” by management that Tibet, Falun Gong, fair wages and other subjects would be best left out of the workplace.

“It’s this idea that they’re limited in the conversations that they can have in the break room,” says Mann. “They don’t want people talking about anything to do with China and human rights. They’ve pretty much said that it’s forbidden to talk about that and, quite frankly, you’re not allowed to tell people what they can and cannot talk about in the lunch room on their own time.”

One employee Monday spoke to put it less diplomatically: “If I want to put a fucking Free Tibet sticker on the back of my car, I should be able to put a Free Tibet sticker on the back of my car and park it wherever I want.”

Prior to the plant’s purchase by Silian, employees were already concerned about health and safety standards in the workplace. They say calls for a review of potentially carcinogenic materials used in the sapphire manufacturing process went unheeded for too long, and when an industrial hygiene assessment was finally conducted—by an employee on the Honeywell payroll—the results were withheld for months before finally being turned over to employees.

“The health and safety program they have really looks at making sure that management is safe from lawsuits,” says Mann.

Employees worry that under Chinese government ownership, company executives may grow even less responsive to worker’s concern.

Also on the table is the issue of wages. Mann says starting wage at the factory is $15, and after several years employees could expect to earn $18 an hour. He says the average wage in the Canadian manufacturing sector today is $21 an hour.

Silian’s Victoria product line manager David Reid did not return Monday’s call by deadline. M