President's Message

Hello Sisters and Brothers,

Welcome to our new website. I would like to thank Kevin Boyd and Kim Kmit for working with the National Office to get up and running again.

It has been a year already; I have visited the plants on numerous occasions and will continue to do so. We have been throughout the division and continue to schedule visits twice a month.

There have been some significant management changes and they seem to be complete now.

Bargaining is approaching in one year and we are preparing by making sure the relevant committees are meeting. The benefits we have are important to us and we have also been listening to your suggestions as they come in. The Joint Health Care Committee is reviewing our process to keep the enrolment data current and maximize the coordination of our benefits. This will help us get an accurate measurement on the costs.

The workload of the Placement Committee (Norm Rivard and Todd McLeod), Grievance Committee (Ray Hammond, Ken Hill, Goncalo Valentim and Vice President Kevin Boyd), Health and Safety (Mike Bond and the Worker Safety Representatives) and WSIB (JP Mrochek and Leo Bigras) are being managed, and even though we continue to have struggles, there have been numerous successful resolutions for our members. These committees will continue to represent you with your best interests in mind.

Our future is very promising with the upcoming hand over of South Mine and our other known reserves in Sudbury. In meetings with the Company, our Contracting Out rep, Tom White, the Grievance Committee and I will continue working to secure this future work for our members.       

We recently had a pension update meeting. Both plans are in very good shape. The target date funds in the DC plan have improved our members’ opportunity to maximize the benefits of their plan by considering the individual’s retirement date and tailoring the investment risk level.

Seventy-four percent of the DC plan members are contributing to the optional six percent option. Forty percent of our DC plan members have not designated a beneficiary, so please take the time to check on this and designate someone if you have not yet done so.

We have been selected as the 2019 United Way Community Leader Award recipient. This is excellent news and thank you for donating. This joint campaign has raised over 18.5 million dollars for Sudbury since its inception in 1982. Amazing work, and thank you to Tina Vincent and all the plant canvassers that worked to help raise $468,000.00 in 2018.

We have just been informed that Leo Gerard is retiring in July. I would personally like to thank Leo for all of the hard work he has done for not only Local 6500, but the whole United Steelworkers Union.

This is an amazing feat for a Sudburian and Local 6500 will have a retirement celebration for Leo. Stay tuned - the plans are underway!

Thank you.