Location: Edmonton
Vince Westacott appears in the ALHI documentary video about the meat packing plant on 66th Street here.
Profile: Vince Westacott was a white-collar employee from 1947 to 1988 at the meatpacking plant on 66 Street in Edmonton. That was Swift until 1980 when Peter Pocklington acquired the plant and made it a Gainers plant. Westacott had left the army a year before joining Swift as a standard checker. In that role he filled production sheets and paid bonuses to high achievers. He used a stopwatch to measure productivity. That lower management role excluded him from the union and he worked through the strike in 1948 at the plant. Later he became a department clerk, providing inventories to department heads, and hunting pigeons on the plant roof with a shotgun.
A company man, Westacott nonetheless viewed UFCW positively as a force for getting justice for individual workers and the workers collectively. He was uncomfortable with Pocklington, unlike earlier managers whom he viewed positively. Pocklington “was taking out lots of money every month out of the plate,” including “buying an aircraft.” Westacott says Pocklington lied to the workers about sharing profits and insisted on impossible speed-ups. While Westacott had to cross the UFCW picket line during the 1986 strike, he sympathized with the workers’ demands.
Keywords: Department clerk; Gainers; Gainers strike, 1986; Meatpacking strike, 1948; Peter Pocklington; Speed-ups; Standard checker; Swift.
Transcript: Download PDF
See also: Meatpacking Workers in Alberta; Summer of ’86 in Alberta; United Food and Commercial Workers