W. A. Young to Toronto Plant Employees on the Second Week of the Strike (1971)

A two-page letter of July 8, 1971, from W. A. Young, plant manager of Canadian Johns-Manville's Toronto plant, to the plant's striking employees as "the strike is now winding up the second week." Young enclosed a computer comparison of each worker's last full week of pay with what it would have been under the company's final offer, and noted that the offer would have raised the $94,736.45 weekly payroll for 487 employees by $5,907.65. He then wrote that the union had "obtained a great deal of publicity for the strike based on the few unfortunate individuals who are suffering from asbestosis," implying the company was "continually exposing you to dangerous levels of asbestos fibre," which he called "simply not the case."

What it shows

Young denied that the company would not share dust counts, saying it had offered before the strike to widen the safety committee's work to environmental control, to "educate" the committee to interpret results, and then to review company and Department of Health surveys with it. He called the asbestos issue "a smoke screen" for the union's handling of the talks. The company's press handling of the same strike is described in Patterson's memo to VanDerbeek.