Winnipeg - A top union executive predicted a long strike as workers at Canada's Quality Meat Packers Ltd. entered their third day of a labour dispute on Wednesday.
“We're anticipating a long strike. We're too far apart,” Bryan Neath, the Ontario director for the United Food and Commercial Workers, told Reuters by telephone from Toronto.
Company officials could not be reached for comment after 830 workers shut the plant down one minute after midnight on Sunday, following a strike vote in which the majority rejected a company wage offer.
The family-owned hog processor is one of two in Ontario, Canada's most populous province, with a processing capacity of 26,000 hogs a week.
Neath said the company had slaughtered the last of its hogs prior to the strike and had stopped buying new hogs.
“They're a family-owned company so it would be difficult for them to make different arrangements at other locations like the bigger companies can,” he said.
Quality Meat has two kill and cut plants in the Toronto area, plus the Toronto Abattoires plant.
The most recent contract expired on October 31 after employees voted a year ago to extend it by one year.
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