Waiting for details
Posted Feb 23, 2011 03:28:26 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Weston Foods has been granted court approval to purchase the assets of Colonial Cookies in Kitchener. But that doesn’t mean hundreds of workers are back on the job.
“One of the conditions of their bid is that they’re able to either renegotiate or amend the current collective agreement (with employees),” said Rob Nicholas, union representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 175, in an interview with 570 News. “What that means, exactly, we don’t know at this point in time.”
Nicholas admits to having reservations about the conditions but says the union will be open-minded enough to listen to Weston’s pitch and take it to the membership. The current collective agreement for more than 340 workers at Colonial Cookies continues until February, 2012.
While those workers have been off the job since Christmas and are ready to go back to work anytime, Nicholas is hesitant to describe Weston’s purchase of the plant’s assets as an immediate return to “business as usual.”
One of the primary reasons for those reservations, according to Nicholas, is that the Colonial plant on Otonabee Drive had been making cookies under its own label and supplying them to several different grocery stores.
“Weston’s has its own brand of cookies and I don’t foresee them agreeing to make cookies for the competition,” Nicholas says bluntly. “But that’s just my own opinion and I certainly could be wrong on that.”
Asked whether Weston’s could turn the Kitchener plant into a factory for its own cookies, Nicholas admits that’s a possibility.
“We have, as I said, 340-plus experienced individuals who are prepared to walk into that facility tomorrow and continue working if that’s the outcome,” Nicholas states. “And certainly that’s the outcome we’re hoping for.”
As 570 News told you yesterday, a court has given the go ahead for Weston Foods to purchase the assets of the now bankrupt Colonial Cookies.
A spokesperson for the court-appointed receiver, PricewaterhouseCoopers, says they’re speaking with Weston about how they want to move forward.
The deal is expected to close in the next couple of weeks.
