A new era in labour history may have begun in early February, when a fishing vessel, the Newfoundland Lynx, pulled away from a pier in the town of Bay Roberts, Nfld., shortly after midnight.

On board the trawler were two dozen crew, all of them hired by the ship’s owner, Ocean Choice International, to replace locked-out unionized workers.

For several days, a standoff between OCI and the strikers, members of the Fish Food and Allied Workers Union, had kept the Lynx from heading to sea. The union appeared to have gained the upper hand when a busload of replacement workers  turned back from a picket line. Union officials declared this was proof of their ability to force the company to bargain.

But within 24 hours, it was the union staring at defeat, as RCMP officers rounded up the few pickets standing guard outside OCI’s gates in order to allow replacements workers through.

The apparent ease with which the FFAW had surrendered comes as a surprise in this province, since this union has a well-earned reputation for extracting tough terms from industry. Established 40 years ago, the FFAW represents fishermen and fish-processing workers, and has consistently won favour with it’s members with its “bare knuckles” approach to collective bargaining.

Expansion of the fishery had entrenched the union’s clout, particularly during the 1980s. But the fishery’s influence has eroded since 1992 with the moratorium on the cod fishery, an economic catastrophe that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

However, growth in the high-value shrimp and snow crab fisheries has mitigated the effects of the moratorium in some areas of rural Newfoundland, particularly when exchange rates favour the Canadian dollar.

But that advantage has disappeared in recent years, and world prices for shellfish have largely stagnated while changes in world seafood markets have softened demand for filleted and packaged fish. OCI argues that its customers, particularly in southeast Asia, are demanding whole packaged fish; this can be produced on board fishing trawlers, thereby cutting out the need for land-based processing plants.

The consequences of these shifts have proven dire. Last autumn, OCI closed long-standing plants in Marystown and Port Union, leaving several hundred unionized workers without jobs. And the fact that a company could brush aside the FFAW and staff a ship with non-union workers is significant.

The prognosis for communities that rely on seasonal fish-processing jobs is not positive. The union, the companies and governments at all levels agree that seasonal processing plants should close in favour of larger, year-round facilities.

However, every town that has a fish plant — large or small — argues that their facility is economically feasible, and workers expect their union to fight for all of those jobs.

So, the FFAW must attempt to keep plants open, even though it agrees that the industry needs streamlining. The two plant closures by OCI last year, combined with the Bay Roberts standoff in February, have shown the limits of the FFAW’s influence in the province’s fishery.  IE