CFAC severance talks underway

In a new development at the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. plant, union representatives recently met with a labor attorney for Glencore to begin negotiations over severance pay.

Aluminum Workers Trades Council vice president Dave Toavs said he was surprised to hear from Glencore in early August when they called and said they wanted to settle severance pay issues.

About 220 craft and production hourly workers have recall rights at the smelter in Columbia Falls, Toavs said. The plant has been shut down since 2009, and talks are underway between Glencore and the state about cleaning up the 60-year-old industrial site.

Toavs said he, council president Kenny Beck and council recording secretary Brian Doyle met in a CFAC conference room in late August with a labor attorney representing Glencore. A United Steelworkers business agent from Billings also flew in for the meeting.

With Toavs now working for BNSF Railway and others likewise busy with various occupations, the focus of the initial meeting was how to schedule future talks by telephone. He said talks will pick up again this month. Whether severance pay will be a lump sum or based on seniority is not known at this time, he said.

The Aluminum Workers Trades Council was set up shortly after the Anaconda Aluminum Co. smelter opened for business in 1955. It’s a unique form of union representation, Toavs said, and the AWTC is the last of its kind in the U.S.

Many initial workers at the AAC plant were construction workers who built the Hungry Horse Dam and the smelter, and many were craft workers — electricians, ironworkers, masons, carpenters, machinists and pipefitters.

When discussions began to organize plant workers, the workers got advice from the United Steelworkers, which represented aluminum smelter workers across the U.S., and the International Union of Mine and Mill Workers, which represented many Anaconda Company workers.

The Mine-Mill representatives urged the Columbia Falls workers not to join the Steelworkers and instead to form a council, with workers belonging to separate craft or production unions that acted jointly through a council.

Local workers took the Mine-Mill advice and created the local council. At its height, the AWTC represented a dozen different craft and production unions.

In 1996, the Aluminum, Brick and Glass Workers Union, which represented CFAC’s production workers, merged with the United Steelworkers, and CFAC’s production workers formed Local 320.