TORONTO, Oct. 8 - The Terra Footwear Company is dropping a national billboard advertising campaign that features scantily clad women in suggestive poses after the ads prompted an angry response from CAW members and a growing public backlash.

In response to the billboards, Julie White, the CAW's national director of women's programs, had urged union members to stop buying Terra work boots.

"Let's give them a kick with a steel-toed boot where it hurts -- in the profits," White wrote in an e-mail to union leadership and activists. She also urged CAW members to contact their MPs because the company had a federal contract to provide boots to the Canadian military.

The CAW asked all its locals to put pressure on the company to drop the ads. Although the company initially refused to take action defending the campaign as a "light hearted" approach to selling work boots, it recently changed its position and is putting an end to the ads.

White credited the grass roots opposition to the billboards including the quick response from women at CAW Local 444 in Windsor and Local 444 Women's Committee Chairperson Sandra Dominato for initially driving the campaign to force the company to withdraw the ads.