Picket at Detroit Comerica: Workers demand severance pay
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Workers demand severance pay: Comerica Silent
Picket at Detroit Comerica, November 24, 2009
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Contact: David Sole: 313-680-5508
Supporters of 80 Canadian workers will picket outside Comerica bank, 500 Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan on Tuesday, November 24 at noon.
Canadian workers of Adraco and Aramco a division of Catalina Precision, have been denied their severance, termination, and vacation pay by the Catalina’s creditors Comerica Bank.
The two plants based in Windsor, Ontario employed 80 members of CAW Local 195 and a number of non-union office and supervisors, all of whom are left out in the cold.
“Ontario labor standards afford the right to severance and termination pay in circumstance such as these, however the inaction of the Ontario Government to enforce the provision of the legislation is a disgrace,” said the President of CAW Local 195.
Workers are owed $2.4 million Canadian.
“We are targeting Comerica because they are the ones holding the purse strings for Catalina. Comerica is the major creditor, looking to sell off or auction off the assets in both of these facilities in order to attempt to recoup any debt Catalina owes them. Yet the workers both union and salary staff have not received a penny from this employer or Comerica,” concluded the CAW president.
Comerica received $2.3 billion in bailout funds from the federal government in 2008 through the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program).
According to reports in newspapers, The Windsor Star and LeMonde, Catalina’s principle officers, Katherine Zickfeld and Gregory Willis, were recently convicted and sentenced to five years in jail and 20 million Euro fine by a court in France for embezzlement and fraud, leaving 300 French workers unemployed.
