A Lifelong Fight for the Union
Accent:
Homer Seguin
A life spent fighting for a safe workplace
By Carol Mulligan/The Sudbury Star
Local News - Saturday, May 13, 2006 @ 11:00
At 72, Homer Seguin is about to receive the law degree he dreamed of as a boy.
It wasn't earned at an Ivy-League law school, but through decades of detours
through the dirtiest jobs in the mining industry.
Seguin will be presented with an honourary doctorate of laws from Laurentian
University on May 31. The retired Steelworker will be recognized for his work in
safety, health and the environment in mining.
Seguin knows the people who nominated him for the award were adamant he receive
it this year because he might not be around to collect it 12 months from now.
The man being recognized for a lifetime of fighting to improve working
conditions for others is in failing health himself.
Retired since 1992 after a heart attack, Seguin suffers from chronic obstructive
lung disease he's convinced was caused by his first job at Inco's sintering
plant. He's still fighting a claim with the Workers Safety Insurance Board over
it.
A lengthy interview at his Azilda home is interrupted by severe coughing fits,
but Seguin doesn't miss a beat in telling his life story. Not until he has to
deal with the complications of the diabetes he contracted while fighting to
clean up cancer-causing workplaces and battling for laws to allow workers to
refuse unsafe work.
He figures he probably had diabetes for years without knowing it. It damaged his
kidneys and he now has to hook up to an intravenous drip four times a day, five
days a week, to cleanse his body of toxins.
Seguin approaches the half-hour task willingly because he feels so much better
than he did before he started dialysis weeks ago when he was "absolutely
fatigued," had no appetite and felt sick all the time.
But don't go writing Seguin's obituary yet, although he almost died last year of
lung disease. There is still plenty he wants to accomplish.
Topping his list is reminding working people that if we forget history, we are
doomed to repeat our mistakes.
"I'm convinced," he says, "that my efforts saved hundreds and hundreds of limbs
and lives, actually saved lives."
He's quick to point out he didn't do it alone. "In the union movement, when you
talk about I, it's really we."
Who knows if those lives would have been saved if Seguin's father Horace a
Creighton miner and ardent Mine Miller hadn't drowned at age 39, forcing his
16-year-old son to abandon his dream of being a lawyer to support his mother,
Marie.
Seguin dropped out of Grade 11 and doctored his baptismal certificate to add two
years to his age so he could get a job at Inco's sintering plant at the smelter
complex in Copper Cliff in 1950.
In the 15 years it operated, the sintering plant refined semi-pure nickel to
pure nickel. It was also responsible for hundreds of cases of lung and nasal
cancer. Seguin points out one month of working in the sintering plant doubled
the risk of contracting lung cancer. If you survived a decade there, you were
13,000 times more likely to get nasal cancer.
"You and I sitting this close," says Seguin, pointing to a distance of five
feet, "we wouldn't be able to recognize each other."
The plant was full of nickel dust, its windows welded shut so none of it could
escape. His job was to sweep the floors and put the dust back in the furnace.
There were no respirators. Employees wore gauze over their mouths that quickly
grew black on both sides.
"No wonder it killed so many people. They're still dying from the sintering
plant."
Many people didn't last a day on the job. Seguin survived nine months, during
which time he would find the cause to which he would devote his life.
"I remember thinking, If this is what working is about, it's gotta change.' "
Later, Seguin was one of the union leaders who pressured Inco to close the plant
in 1963.
At 17, Seguin left the sintering plant for rival Falconbridge Ltd. and a job
just as bad bagging coal for delivery to the plant and the people who lived in
the company town.
Again, there were no respirators, no protection against the black dust that
coated workers' lungs. Conditions were bad enough to send him back to Inco in
May 1951 to work at the copper refinery where cancer rates were also unusually
high. Still, when Inco announced last year it was closing the plant, Seguin
criticized Inco for the closure and the loss of 140 jobs.
By 1953, Seguin was active in the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter
Workers, whose Local 598 then represented 20,000 workers at Inco and
Falconbridge.
A staunch Mine-Miller, Seguin recalls as a boy being hoisted on his father's
shoulders at union rallies at the old farmers' market on Borgia Street, where
the Rainbow Centre now stands.
It was there he met Bob Carlin, a president of Mine Mill Local 598, who was
elected MPP for the CCF/NDP for Sudbury in 1943, 1945 and 1948. Carlin
introduced legislation providing for the first paid vacations for Ontario
workers.
Mine Mill was an outlaw union then, having been kicked out of the Canadian
Labour Congress and the Ontario Federation of Labour for "Communist activities."
A self-described "staunch anti-Communist," Seguin says he never believed the
union was Communist-led.
By 1956, he was chair of the local's health and safety committee and, by 1961,
was on its bargaining committee.
When the United steelworkers of America took over Mine Mill at Inco by 1963,
Seguin became a trustee for Local 6500, serving on its bargaining committee and
chairing the safety and health committee.
In 1965, he got his first full-time job with Local 6500 when he was elected
vice-president.
Seguin served as president from 1967 to 1970, then went to work as a staff
representative for the steelworkers, becoming area co-ordinator in 1981.
It would take a book to do justice to Seguin's accomplishments. He pioneered
joint safety and health committees and union-appointed, employer-paid worker
safety and health inspectors.
Laurentian cites his efforts on behalf of uranium, gold and nickel miners and
their families that led to tougher regulations and bigger compensation payouts.
Two of his accomplishments are the stuff of which legends are made. In the late
1960s, Seguin was part of a group of union and community activists who took on
Inco over its sulphur dioxide emissions.
The air was literally blue in some Inco plants and it wasn't much better in the
community. Both Inco and the Ministry of the Environment claimed ground-level
emissions were acceptable, but "we knew it wasn't so."
The union installed an air quality monitor atop the steelworkers' Hall, and
forwarded readings to Judy Erola, who was reporting for CHNO radio at the time.
Erola would go on to serve as a Liberal MP and on Inco's board of directors.
Back then, she included emission levels in newscasts along with the weather.
"And they were high," says Seguin. "They were high."
The union trained 100 safety and health members to use drager meters to test S02
levels in the smelter. They smuggled the meters in their lunchpails until
management discovered them and threatened employees with discipline if they
didn't stop.
"We got horrible readings," says Seguin. The union presented them to the
province, but it required they be taken again and verified by witnesses.
The ministry finally relented, says Seguin, and promised to erect six air
quality monitors in Sudbury if the union would take down the one on the Steel
Hall.
A couple of months later, the province ordered Inco to reduce its emissions
although it gave it five years to do it.
In 1972, Inco built the Superstack. Designed to move emissions out of Sudbury,
"it wasn't the big solution to the world," says Seguin.
But it did improve air quality in Inco plants and in the community, making the
regreening of Sudbury possible.
Seguin bristles when people take credit for painting the city's devastated
landscape green by liming the soil and planting millions of tree seedlings.
"The regreening was not possible before with the fallout," he insists. The
community owes a huge debt to union members for that.
Erola remembers how "absolutely wretched" air quality was before the Superstack.
Erola says she loved working with Seguin.
She's delighted the university is recognizing Seguin, whom she considers the
quintessential union man. "Homer was always thoughtful, useful, responsible and
extremely effective."
By the mid-1970s, Sudbury's air quality was improving, but trouble was brewing
in the uranium mines in Elliot Lake.
In 1975, Seguin moved to Elliot Lake, where he found working conditions as bad
as those at Inco's sintering plant. "The dust was horrendous," he recalls. "The
ventilation was terrible."
Uranium miners were dying of lung cancer at three times the average rate, and
suffering from silicosis.
The union was pressing the mining companies to improve working conditions, but
Seguin says they didn't do it unless forced to to avoid compensation claims.
If the uranium dust weren't deadly enough, workers had to fight the prevention
method a blast of aluminum dust they breathed in as they entered the mines to
coat their lungs so deadly radon gas wouldn't penetrate them. It was a case of
the cure being almost as bad as the disease because it, too, increased the
incidence of lung cancer.
Workers staged wildcat strikes over many issues, says Seguin, including "the
friggin' dust." One such strike occurred in 1974, just before Seguin went to
Elliot Lake. "It was the straw that broke the camel's back."
It led to the Ham Royal Commission on Mining Safety, which led to the creation
of Bill 70, which established the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act,
giving workers the right to refuse unsafe work.
Amazingly, says Seguin, the act applied to all workers in Ontario except those
in uranium mines, which were a federal responsibility.
"Now you can believe how devastated we were," says Seguin. "We said, We got no
law,' so we have to establish the law ourselves. What else could we do? You
know, what else could we do? So we got pretty tough."
Seguin recalls one example of the disregard uranium companies had for employees.
Drinking water samples were collected at Dennison Mine, and half were good and
half were terrible. It was determined the good samples came from Dennison
offices and managers' homes, and the bad from the mines and miners' residences.
It turned out that management water was coming from a spring-fed lake, whereas
the bad water was being piped in from a contaminated lake.
"This is true," says Seguin. "This is a true story."
The union engaged in several illegal wildcat strikes over issues like that one,
says Seguin. "What was the choice? Letting the guys you represent be killed or
doing something about it?"
He also led the drive to have the mining companies pay to remediate homes, built
on uranium sites, in which even concrete wouldn't prevent the transfer of radon.
Seguin spent seven years in Elliot Lake, and served a term on town council from
1978 to 1980.
Looking back on his career, Seguin figures his greatest strength was his ability
"to lead the rank and file."
"They were wild miners" in Elliot Lake, he says. You could not control them so
he tried to channel their militancy into constructive uses.
Leo Gerard, international president of the United steelworkers of America,
worked in Elliot Lake under Seguin when he was the union's area co-ordinator.
Gerard scoffs when told it's difficult to find anyone with a bad word to say
about Seguin. "Talk to some of the old Dennison mine managers," he says. "They
thought he was a real bastard."
That is not Gerard's opinion. He describes Seguin as a good teacher, not to
mention an excellent student. The high school dropout was once sent by Steel to
an international conference in France on radiation, the first time a lay person
had attended.
"By the end of it, they thought he was some kind of radiation and exposure
expert," Gerard says from his Pittsburgh office.
Seguin is probably the most informed and effective labour voice on occupational
health, safety and the environment in Canada in the last 25 years, says Gerard.
Steel's Falkowski-Seguin Award was named after Seguin for dedication and
perseverance in occupational health, safety and environmental matters.
Paul Falkowski and Seguin were long-time health and safety committee colleagues
in Sudbury. The first award was presented to Local 6500, for work Seguin led
there.
Sudbury author Mick Lowe nominated Seguin for the Laurentian honorary doctorate.
"He's had such an impact on the lives of everyone in Sudbury, whether we know it
or not."
Gerry Lougheed Jr. is a long-time admirer of Seguin's.
As well as making a difference, he says Seguin empowered others to believe they
could do the same.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lougheed worked with Seguin and Dr. George
Walker to document workplace cancer. It was done by exhuming the bodies of
miners and doing autopsies on their lungs. Before that, companies were claiming
cancers were being caused by workers' lifestyles, not by their jobs.
Seguin was instrumental in establishing the precedence of workplace carcinoma,
says Lougheed, an issue that needs further addressing by the province.
Seguin would agree. One of the things he didn't get to do was have a policy
established for adjudicating lung cancer in all Inco mines. "That should be
done."
He continues to speak against the Sudbury Soil Study, a $5-million look at
levels of toxic chemicals in our soils to determine if they pose health risks to
humans.
Seguin has been critical of the fact the study is funded by Inco and
Falconbridge, who will have a say in any recommendations about soil remediation,
for which they will have to pay.
Seguin intends to continue fighting the good fight. He formed a company after he
retired called Homer Seguin Workers Side Consultant, specializing in
occupational diseases, health and safety, and the environment. He represented
the Innu Nation before the federal environmental assessment board over Inco's
Voisey's Bay project, and remains an adviser to them.
Despite his life's work, Seguin never dreamt he would receive an honorary
university doctorate.
"All my safety and health work was in the union, so it's quite a compliment to
the union."
He says it's good to be recognized after hardly getting any thank-yous over the
years because "most of the people I won criteria for were dead or dying. And
they don't take time out to thank you.
"It's nice to get a thank-you once in a while."