Brazil-based mining giant Vale Inco tries to conceal financial impact of lengthy strikes

Sudbury native and Steelworker's International President Leo Gerard has adopted a truly global fight-back strategy to trump a globalized mining giant. In doing so, he just may have waged the 21st century's first post-modern strike, using his union's global reach and the power of international union solidarity to check Brazilian mining giant Vale Inco at every turn across the global board.

He has also given the lie to two oft-repeated truisms that sounded plausible in Sudbury just weeks ago:

Forced to disclose a steep decline in third quarter year-over-year profits last week, Vale nonetheless insisted that its operational results were "strong".

Turns out both assertions are wrong, especially the latter. More and more evidence points to an impending union victory decided by the International Steelworkers — or, as as retired Sudbury Steelworkers staff rep Homer Seguin says fondly, "the Big U".

Kicking off a frightful Halloween week for the boys from Brazil, the conservative National Post newspaper ran a weekend article headlined, "Politics, labour unrest beset Vale". The article detailed Vale's many woes, including the strikes at nickel operations across Canada in Thompson, MB; Sudbury; and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Facing the threat of union pickets at investor confabs on Wall and Bay Streets, Vale made a highly-public, and embarrassing, decision to cancel the events.

But the union's reach didn't stop there. When the strike-bound mining giant scraped together enough copper recently to fill an order in Germany, the Steelworkers sent a contingent to Germany to "greet" the ore-carrying ship as it arrived. They informed the ship's captain and crew, as well as local dock workers and reporters, of the high-handed treatment Vale was according its Canadian workforce.

The union's globe-girdling mischief began just after the start of the strike — waged since mid-July over corporate demands for major union concessions, despite healthy profits — when a pair of Sudbury Streelworkers were dispatched to Brazil to drum up public awareness of the dispute in Vale's back yard.

To their alarm, the pair discovered that Vale was accustomed to treating its Brazilian employees as little more than disposable parts. There were twelve workplace fatalities on Vale premises in Brazil last year, and workers are hired and summarily fired depending on corporate demand.

The company has tried to bluff and bluster its way through the strike. Forced to disclose a steep decline in third quarter year-over-year profits last week, the company resorted to outright falsehood in an unconvincing attempt to maintain that it didn't feel the loss of its entire Canadian nickel operation.

In its news release that revealed disappointing Q3 results, Vale insisted that its operational results were "strong," an absurd claim given the near-total absence of nickel, copper, and precious metal production from the Canadian subsidiaries for which it shelled out $17 billion just a few years ago.

The firm's Brazilian bigwigs have chosen to try to ignore the strikes here. But in choosing to focus solely on its iron ore production and sailing so close to the wind of fiduciary falsehood in a statement to investors and the financial world at large, their silence spoke volumes. Either the company really does not feel any effects from the picket lines — hard to believe after the dismal Q3 reports — or else Canada's Steelworkers just might be inflicting a wound that is so deep and so tender that the company cannot acknowledge it publicly.

But a head-in-the-sand approach will not feed this bulldog. Until very recently this strike appeared to be a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. But ultimately something had to give. Now it appears increasingly likely that the company will soon utter, in its native Portuguese, "não mais".