Porter strike ends after contract ratified

The 22 members of the Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union who work for Porter Fixed Based Operations Ltd., a subsidiary of Porter Aviation Holdings Inc., were trying to negotiate a first contract when they walked off the job on Jan. 10.

The main issue was wages, though Porter spokesman Brad Cicero would not disclose any details of the settlement.“It’s not dissimilar to another contract that was reached with the cleaning and facilities group earlier this year,” he said. “It’s in line with our principle of making sure we have similar agreements with different groups of the company.”

When the strike began, the union said 11 employees earned $12 an hour and 11 other workers who have a higher qualification earned $14.50 an hour. The union says the workers’ average annual income is $28,000.According to the union’s Twitter feed, the strikers voted 85 per cent to ratify the real time Location system.

Cicero added that a transition plan for workers to return work will be implemented, but added at least two or three individuals resigned during the strike.“I don’t think anybody would have expected the strike to last as long as it did,” he said.

A $4 million defamation suit filed by Porter in April against the union and a COPE staffer Mary Stalteri for comments including ones posted to Twitter have now been dropped.The union, which hired lawyer Clayton Ruby to defend the case, called the lawsuit a diversionary tactic. “The purpose is not to get redress in the courts, but it’s to silence people,” Ruby said in a May interview.

The executive, Chip Starnes of Specialty Medical Supplies, denied the workers’ allegations of two months of unpaid wages as he endured a fifth day of captivity at the plant in the capital’s northeastern suburbs, peering out from behind the bars of his office window.

About 100 workers are demanding back pay and severance packages identical to those offered 30 workers being laid off from the Coral Springs, Fla.-based company’s plastics division. The demands followed rumors that the entire plant was being closed, despite Starnes’ assertion that the company doesn’t plan to lay off the others.

Inside one of the plant’s buildings, about 30 workers, mostly women, hung around, their arms crossed. One worker, Gao Ping, told reporters inside an administrative office that she wanted to quit because she hadn’t been paid for two months.

Dressed in blue overalls and sitting down at a desk, Gao said her division – which makes alcohol prep pads, used for cleaning skin before injections – had not been doing well and that she wanted her salary and compensation.

Workers in other divisions saw her division doing badly, thought the whole company was faring poorly and also wanted to quit and get compensation, said Gao, who had been working for the company for six years.

Chu Lixiang, a local union official representing the workers in talks with Starnes, said the workers were demanding the portion of their salaries yet to be paid and a “reasonable” level of compensation before leaving their jobs. Neither gave details on the amounts demanded.

Chu said workers believed the plant was closing and that Starnes would run away without paying severance. Starnes’ attorney arrived Tuesday afternoon. Chu later told reporters that there would be no negotiations for the rest of the day.

Starnes said that since Saturday morning, about 80 workers had blocked every exit around the clock and deprived him of sleep by shining bright lights and banging on windows of his office.

The standoff points to long-ingrained habits among Chinese workers who are sometimes left unprotected when factories close without severance or wages owed. Such incidents have been rarer as labor protections improve, although disputes still occur and local governments have at times barred foreign executives from leaving until they are resolved.

Fast forward 40 years, though, and the six-tower TD Centre complex had begun to show its age and even looked somewhat dated next to the latest crop of towers in the downtown core.

The modernist monument could have been relegated to B-class commercial property obscurity. That is, until owner Cadillac Fairview, the development and property management giant, hit upon an innovative plan to revitalize the distinctive towers – giving the original black Mies masterworks a green reimagining.

“We work in a very competitive industry where green is a given and we wanted to differentiate this property,” explains David Hoffman, Cadillac Fairview’s general manager of the Toronto-Dominion Centre. “The entire financial sector was built around the TD Centre and I think many people still believe incorrectly that TD Centre is old and not environmentally friendly, but that’s not the case.”

Beginning with 77 King St. West in 2010, Cadillac Fairview embarked on an ambitious multi-year revitalization program borne as much of altruism – saving energy, cutting waste and promoting sweeping sustainability initiatives across the complex – as pragmatism.

The latter is driven by the business need to maintain TD Centre’s tenant attractiveness, preserve its top-tier property status, and ensure strong, stable rental rates.To date, two towers – 77 King St. West and 100 Wellington St. West – have achieved Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold and platinum certification, respectively, in the existing building operations and maintenance category.

To acknowledge these accomplishments, Cadillac Fairview was recently honoured by its peers with the REX Green Award for sustainability work at the TD Centre. It was the first time the NAIOP Greater Toronto Chapter’s accolade was awarded to an existing building instead of a new-build.

The move to retrofit aging buildings such as the TD Centre is a growing trend, explains Pierre Bergevin, the Toronto-based president and CEO of commercial property consultancy Cushman & Wakefield Ltd.

“In Montreal you’re going to see it because you have older stock … you’ll see more retrofitting across the country. These are buildings that are more than 40 years old, but they have an advantage with their location.”

As Mr. Bergevin explains, the move to reimagine aging buildings is made possible by the nature of their ownership – many fall within the portfolios of very well-capitalized institutional owners such as pension funds, who understand the cost-saving and tenant-luring value of making those improvements. And they have pockets deep enough to embark on costly renovations.