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Niagara Falls Business Manager Arrested Protesting Out-of-State Contractors

 

August 2, 2012

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In June, Business Manager Russell Quarantello, Niagara Falls, N.Y., Local 237, was appointed to the celebrated town’s bridge commission by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. 


One month later, Quarantello was handcuffed by the town’s police during a picket targeting Norampac, a Canadian company that has been using out-of-state construction workers to build a $430 million plant to produce packaging materials, despite receiving $142 million in state funding for the facility’s construction. Quarantello, who was later shackled at his arraignment, says:

The IBEW and the Building and Construction Trades started protesting two years ago, when Norampac contracted with a Louisiana-based nonunion electrical contractor to build the factory. In January, 2011, 400 building trade members showed up at the construction site to protest.  Nonunion electricians first started coming in about six weeks ago, so we went back out to call attention to this deal.

During the most recent picketing, Quarantello crossed a street to check on a pickup truck owned by a Local 237 member that police were threatening to tow.  He was handcuffed and shackled and held seven hours.  Quarantello told the Niagara Falls Reporter:

I guess I felt embarrassed to have shackles on my ankles at first, but then I started to think, ‘You know, maybe these people don’t know it, but I felt like I’m fighting for the people of Niagara County, not just union, but union and nonunion.’

 Once completed in 2013, Norampac’s plant will house the largest cardboard containerboard production machine of its kind in North America.  The factory is expected to employ about 100

About $16 million out of $19 million in electrical work has gone to out-of-state contractors. Out of 150 cars on the construction site’s parking lot, Quarantello says 50 percent are out of state. That’s a raw deal, when “such a large portion of the construction cost is subsidized by the state,” says Quarantello, who adds, “And Norampac still has their hands out.”

More than 26 percent of Niagara Falls’ residents have incomes below the poverty level. The region suffers from 7.3 percent unemployment. Richard Lipsitz, Western New York AFL-CIO Area Labor Federation president, says:

Watching companies bring in workers from out of town instead of investing in local workers and the tax base is a crazy system. It just doesn’t lead to the type of jobs we need.

Funding incentives for the Norampac plant include $60 million in brownfield (redeveloping old industrial site) tax credits, 10 megawatts of hydropower form the New York Power Authority, $5 million in Empire.