FCL estimates trucker payments could cost up to $1 million

Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL) is working out details of a plan to spend up to $1 million to pay back trucking companies for income lost while the Co-op refinery and other facilities were barricaded by Unifor.

Speaking to Gormley on Thursday morning, FCL executive vice-president Vic Huard said the idea came from a simple conversation he and CEO Scott Banda had with a couple of truck drivers outside the barricaded fuel storage facility in Carseland, Alta., last month.

“We had a chance to talk to these two guys about the impact this had had on them and their families,” Huard said. “We talk about being able to pass the ‘red-face test’ as a senior team. We talk about, ‘When we make decisions, can we look in the mirror and pass the red-face test?’ Well, that day we had to pass the red-face test in front of these two truckers.”

Huard said he and Banda talked on the way home about how they could do something to help.

“We had kind of lost sight, to be honest, of that impact and so we sat down with our finance team and with our logistics team down at the refinery and we came up with this idea, this plan to compensate as best we could, these people who had foregone a considerable amount of income through no fault of their own,” Huard said.

FCL works with about 40 different trucking companies which operate a total of 160 trucks shipping fuel out of the Co-op refinery in Regina. Huard said FCL will review the impact on individual operators based on how much they earned prior to the labour disruption and the company will base payments on those figures.

“It’ll vary. We think somewhere between $800,000 and $1 million is probably going to be the (total) cost,” Huard said. “We don’t think of it as a cost, we think of it as an investment. This is an investment in individuals and families and the communities they live and work in.”

When asked if this type of payment would pre-emptively stop the trucking companies from taking legal action against either Co-op or Unifor to recoup their losses, Huard said FCL legal counsel determined it would not.

Heather Day is the president of C.S. Day Transport Ltd., which she believes is the largest of the 40 trucking companies working with FCL with a fleet of 21 trucks and up to 45 drivers.

She said the labour dispute at the refinery has been difficult for all of the companies, noting that some are just one person in a truck.

“It really means a lot to everybody that (FCL) just kind of stepped up and offered to look after us that way,” Day told Gormley on Thursday.

When asked if her company took a significant financial hit during the labour dispute, especially after blockades went up around the refinery, Day said yes.

“It was kind of like watching a slow-moving train wreck happening, but we were able to send some of our trucks over to Manitoba to try and get a little bit of fuel out of Winnipeg there until that was blockaded. But the majority of our trucks were just parked in the yard so that was quite upsetting to see,” Day said.

Day said the payment from FCL is expected to recover about three-quarters of the financial losses for her company. She noted several trucking companies are still looking into the possibility of suing the union to recoup additional financial losses.

The lockout at the refinery began Dec. 5 after the union issued strike notice.

Truckers have been delayed at picket lines or locked out of Co-op facilities. In one case, trucks were locked in at the refinery when Unifor erected fences after the vehicles had entered through a gate.