ReturnToTheTarSands

This entry comes from dialogue the following 4 workers.

Bruce currently works as an Operating Engineer for Syncrude and his wife Morgan used to work at the Oil Sands Discovery Center and as public affairs representative for Syncrude. The 17 To the Tar Sands bikers stayed at their home for two nights in Fort McMurray.

Johnny is also an operating engineer but lives at a work camp outside of town. We met him outside of this work camp on the way to Gregoire Lake. He came by our campsite that night, brought us a bunch of food, beer, and talked with us around the campfire for a while.

Bob is a friend of mine who graduated from Civil Engineering and now works for Syncrude in the geotechnical mining division. He worked as a summer student in Fort McMurray and is now has a full time position, a ridiculous salary, and a beautiful condo, that some of us stayed at.

I worked as a construction laborer, framing houses in Calgary, and at work camps, as a tree planter in BC this spring. I was considering moving in with Bob and working in Fort McMurray immediately after this trip, but left for reasons that had more to do with my interests in music and agriculture than my dislike for Fort McMurray or the work that I could have done there.

Bruce is a second generation worker at Syncrude and is a part of the Fort McMurray community. When his uncle came out from England, northern Alberta was an opportunity, and chance for a dream. There were no guarantees, and he packed up the whole family to come along for the adventure. Now it is much different. There is more certainty. “With forty billion in investments announced in the last two weeks, the price of oil doesn’t really matter any more,” according to Bob. Newfoundlanders are arriving all the time for better wages than they can get at home. They come with nothing and can finance a $50,000 truck, 4 quads and snowmobiles and are making $150,000 per year, right away. Even David Suzuki drove around Fort McMurray in a Ford Excursion!

There are a lot of foreign workers that may not be fully qualified. Johnny describes an accident that occurred on a site where he was working because some unsuspecting foreign workers used funky knots instead of cable clamps – in ¾” steel cable – and the 40 foot walls came down. Every minor accident on site is considered an incident, and workers are immediately taken for a “piss test,” even before they are taken for medical aid, to determine whether they have drugs in their blood. A medic told me she had seen few serious injuries but that a lot of incidents are reported. With some companies, there is a zero tolerance limit for drugs, racism, and rudeness towards women, and any such behavior will get you canned right away, according to Johnny.

At the beginning of the day you have to make a detailed schedule called a “day sheet” of what you will do and where you will be throughout the day. If you go off track, and there is an incident, it is automatically your fault. The companies have a lot of cover your-ass liability techniques.

Shifts for machine operators like Bruce are generally 12 hours. Most operators who live in Fort McMurray work 3 day shifts, 8am to 8pm then 3 night shifts, 8pm to 8am, and then get 6 days off. There has been a lot of research gone into this schedule and it works best. Whereas at work camps, you are allowed to work up to 24 days in a row with 4 days off. The minimum wage at a work camp is around $24, up to $30. Free room and board is provided, all you can eat. I got a taste of this food, it was delicious. Its like subway, you can pick exactly what you want on your sandwich. The work camp rooms are like a jail cell. Around 20% of the camp is women. Women get double overtime for an hour if they choose to clean the floors in the rooms (a 45 minute task).

“I’m here for the money,” say Johnny and Bob. They don’t pretend to have an interest in the community of Fort McMurray. But the companies do. All of Syncrude’s upper management lives in Fort McMurray. Morgan met the president of Syncrude in the grocery store when she first moved here and totally freaked out. The president came over to Bruce, knew his name and joked about how much of his family was employed by Syncrude. He couldn’t get rid of the family. Not that he’d want to. It seems part of the motivation for a company to invest in the community is to hold on to workers. As soon as your name is known in Fort McMurray, you start getting competing offers of employment from other companies. Families that live in Fort McMurray do care about the future of the community. And they are lucky to have Suncor and Syncrude to fund the brand new health complex, the public library, etc. Fort McMurray United Way set the goal of raising $2.5 million this year, and has already raised over $3 million.

Fort Mackay has the highest high school graduation rates for an aboriginal community, and is also the only one with a growing population, in Canada. They are run more like a corporation than a family. This means that when a new chief comes in, he doesn’t replace everyone with members of his family, rather, he works with existing people, in the best interest of his shareholders, e.g. the community. Sometimes cash is distributed to the band members when money comes in from the industry, for example last winter everyone got checks for $4,000.

We also heard that a memo had been circulated with some companies that said something like “The 20 activist cyclists can be considered terrorists. Do not let them on company property.” Bruce and Morgan’s employers went ballistic when they heard that the cyclists were staying at their home! “The Sierra Club is bad news here. They seem to want to put 80,000 people out of work.” But Bruce and Morgan argued that it was good for the cyclists to be exposed to people who truly believed in the community of Fort McMurray and to see the positive side of the industry here. Their employers eventually agreed that it was better than us camping on public land or outside of a work camp where we may be exposed to the crude habits and unsatisfied individuals who give Fort McMurray its reputation. Morgan argues that these people make up a very small minority of the regions population. It is true that everyone I met at the several work camps was very friendly, and no cruder than your average tree planter or construction worker. The infamous reputation of Fort McMurray’s inhabitants can be explained by the fact that local and international news don’t remember the good things and don’t forget the bad things.

Filed under: Commentary, Fort McMurray, Labour, TTTS on September 24th, 2007