By Rob Ashton

BC longshore workers stand in solidarity with striking Montreal Dock workers, April 27, 2021.
Rob Ashton is the President of The International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada
We’ve been fairly successful in keeping COVID-19 off the waterfront. In the longshore industry we’ve been able to, from March to March, keep it to about 140 positive or presumptive cases out of 7,000 people. We have really good protocols in place on the waterfront that we’ve developed over the last year, most developed jointly, some by the union locals. Each local has their own protocols with the employers. If we do have a bit of an uptick, if someone tests positive, it gets squashed quickly because of the policies we have in place. We changed the way we do dispatch in a couple of the locals until the pandemic is over because we can’t all come into one place for dispatch now, so some locals went to an automated or phone dispatch. Everybody does the check-in at the start of the shift. There are cleaning crews at most sites, almost every shift, depending on the terminal. Continue reading