Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

NNSL (Aug 11/99) - Workers at Giant Mine are looking toward a bleak future with no offers to purchase the troubled gold mine and now, they have to deal with an unfunded pension plan.

Since the financial collapse of Royal Oak, the future of Giant Mine has been held in the hands of court-appointed receiver, PricewaterhouseCoopers, who, according to workers, have stopped payment on the mine employees' pension fund.

"Payments are not being made," CAW President Marc Danis said.

"PricewaterhouseCoopers asked the court if they could suspend making the payments and the court agreed."

Danis said the only way to get the receiver to commit to the payments guaranteed by the miners' collective agreement, is to get it back the same way it was taken away.

"I know we're going to have to go back to court," he said.

Together with the United Steelworkers from Royal Oak's former mine in Timmins, Ontario, Danis said the two unions have teamed up to battle the firm.

"Our lawyer from the CAW national and the Steelworkers have hired a lawyer and they are in the process of trying to get that pension plan funded again," he said.

He believes the receiver has earmarked funds for the pension, but has not had a commitment from the receiver to fulfil the pension obligation.

"What I've been told, is that the money is still coming out of general revenue but it's not being put towards the pension," Danis said.

The pension plan was under-funded since before PricewaterhouseCoopers took over the mine, Danis said.

"If someone was to retire right now, they're only going to receive approximately 80 per cent of their pension," Danis said. "The plan is under-funded right now and nobody gets more than that until the payments start back up."

"Royal Oak had the plan under-funded, but they were catching up -- had the payments been made, they probably would have been caught up by now," he said.

Vice President of the Federation of Labour, Steve Peterson, said the pension plan is wholly the employers' responsibility according to the contract.

"The company is obligated to contribute a dollar sixty-five, or something like that, for every hour worked," he said. "We average about a two-thousand-hour year, so it's about three of four thousand dollars per employee per year."

Peterson said the receiver assumes the responsibility for pension payments until such time as the mine has a new owner.

Further, he said the receiver is dragging its feet on the obligation, because of Royal Oak's previous debt to the pension fund.

"PricewaterhouseCoopers had appealed to the court and requested that they not make those payments until such time as a successor company took us over or until the shortfall that was in existence when they took over is taken care of," Peterson said.

"What they are afraid of is that if they were to start making payments, that they would somehow deemed responsible for making up the shortfall that existed prior to their takeover."

"What happened was, Royal Oak neglected to pay the increase that we had negotiated through our collective agreement, so that created this shortfall," he said.

Peterson said one of two things could happen to the pension fund.

"That could either be a wind-up, which means the pension plan will be shut down at this point and distributed to various individual RRSP contributions," Peterson said. "Or a successor company could come over and make up the short fall."

PricewaterhouseCoopers is not returning phone calls.