Edmonton Ironworkers protest loss of arena jobs to U.S. TFWs

UNA President Heather Smith attended the Jan. 15 protest by about 300 Edmonton Ironworkers and their supporters at the site of the city’s new downtown professional hockey arena, built with taxpayer dollars but employing Temporary Foreign Workers from the United States to do some of the work.

With support from members of United Nurses of Alberta and other unions, Edmonton Ironworkers passed over for jobs on the city’s new arena took their protests to the street in front of the huge jobsite on Jan. 15.

Instead of hiring some of the 300 qualified ironworkers who are on the jobs list at the hiring hall a few blocks from the arena’s location, the company that was awarded the lucrative contract for the construction of the $480-million arena applied for and was granted federal approval to hire Temporary Foreign Workers for the job.

Some of the more than 300 Ironworkers and their supporters protesting at 104th Street and 104th Avenue in Edmonton carried signs reading “Built for Edmonton, Built By Edmonton,” and “Where’s The Home-Ice Advantage?”

“Denying an application to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program should have been an easy call when there are 300 workers qualified and ready to do the work just blocks away,” Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan told the crowd. “It should have been an easy stop. Have the TFWP regulators pulled their goalie?”

Since the contract was awarded, and the applications were submitted, Ironworkers Local 720 has lobbied the city, the contractor and the federal government asking for jobs to be made available to qualified Canadian workers and for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program permits to be revoked. Their requests have been rebuffed.

“In thirty years, local workers who had a part in it will point to it and tell their kids, ‘I built that,’” Ironworkers Local 720 business agent George Papineau said. “We have literally hundreds of qualified tradespeople who are eager to do this job.”

Most of them are Edmontonians, he added, “the sort of folks who haven’t given up on the Oilers season yet – which is why it’s so galling that the company building the new home of the Oilers has turned its back on them.”

Construction on Rogers’ Place – set to become the new home of the Edmonton Oilers in 2016 – began in March 2014. The 20,000-seat venue will require hundreds of thousands of man-hours to complete. Since the project was first proposed, it has been plagued by concerns that the economic benefits would not go to residents of the city.

Bruce Fafard, president of the Edmonton & District Labour Council, asked: “Is it good for the city for our tax dollars to go to American workers with no investment in the community? … The arena is being paid for by tax dollars, and most citizens would rather see their tax dollars going to their neighbours than being sent out of the province and out of the country.”

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