Over 50 SNOLAB employees in Sudbury on strike after turning down latest offer

Picket lines are up outsidea world-renowned physics research lablocated deep inside a Sudbury, Ont., mine as 52workers at SNOLAB voted against a tentative contractTuesday night.

United Steelworkers Local 2020-59 represents dozens of workers,from janitorial staff to physicists,at the dark matter research facility with links to Nobel Prize-winning work in years past.

Pascal Boucher,northeastern Ontarioco-ordinatorfor the United Steelworkers,saidthe workers turned down a tentative agreement two weeks ago, then worked with a conciliator but voted against the deal that came out of those talks.

He didn't give specific details about demands, but said wages and family time are high priorities.

"It's not a get-rich scheme for them," said Boucher. "It's about being respected and being able to live while making SNOLABa world-class research facility."

Bouchersaid workers have been told SNOLABis "tapped out" financially, but he's not sure they believethat, given $2 million in public funding was received last October,in addition to an initial $12 million in funding from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities.

Boucher said everything is peaceful on the picket line as several hundredVale miners represented byUSWLocal 6500 cross to go to work in Creighton Mine.

"People who work at Vale are lawfully required to report to work and we're not stopping traffic here," said Boucher.

"If people want to stop in and ask why our members are on strike, people will answer them."

Jodi Cooley, a physicist and executive director ofSNOLAB, said the research facilityis continuing to operate as usual, with about 75 non-unionized staff.

Cooley said the lab does rely a great deal on the technical expertise of its unionized workforce.

For example, she said, electricians or millwrightsmight be there to help with assembling equipment or hooking up utilitiesto conduct research in the lab, and the specialized cleaning staff are responsible for maintaining the high degree of cleanliness necessary to conduct such precise work.

Non-unionized staff are covering those jobs, she said, so experiments may proceed.

"I mean it would be a lie to say that it's not challenging, butI have to give credit to our non-union staff," she said. "We do have people who are underground today and on the surface who are working underground to help maintain that cleanliness standard."

SNOLAB hopes to return to bargaining table

A statement provided by SNOLABsaid wages for unionized employees range from $43,440 to $81,000, and asa result of the 2021 contract negotiations, the average three-year increase across all unionized employees was11.9 per cent.

SNOLAB offers space to visiting scientists to conduct their research, and Cooley said recruiting new projects may be harder during a labour disruption.

"Being in thisstrike position is not ideal but we are going to maintain trying to keep our status as a leading laboratory in the world for the type of science that we do," she said. "We continue to be hopeful that we will be able to get back to the bargaining tableand in the meantime, we are going to continue to try to attract those experiments to the lab and keep those experiments operating."

Past SNOLAB research on neutrino oscillations earned ArthurMcDonald the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015.

Current SNOLAB experiments include research into dark matter, supernovas and studies on the effects of working deep underground, using fruit flies as a model organism.