By Leo W. Gerard
International President
Nobody’s second class citizens
In Las Vegas, a town infamous for carelessly bankrupting the naïve, members of the United Steelworkers voted Tuesday to pay a little more forward out of each paycheck to ensure they won’t be duped, overpowered or taken for anybody’s second class citizens.
All of the additional pennies-per-hour steelworkers decided to invest into our strike and defense fund will provide added protection. From 850,000 steelworkers, that will build the account into a formidable force, one to stand up to the kind of power that comes from the boundless capital multinational corporations command, the very multinationals that unions now must reckon with.
It was not lost on these steelworkers that a major tire producer recently went to Wall Street and raised a billion dollars in a failed attempt to bust a strike by their union brothers and sisters.
The size of this fund will enable the USW to aggressively pursue the negotiation doctrine that has served us – and the industries we have organized — well. That is, as President Teddy Roosevelt advised when confronted with a global problem: “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
A big stick
The USW’s growing strike and defense fund is that stick.
It works like this. Frankly, we prefer to speak softly. We don’t like strikes. They hurt our members, damage their communities, and drain money out of the strike and defense fund which pays emergency medical and strike benefits to workers walking picket lines. In fact, 98 percent of our contracts are settled without a work stoppage.
The United Steelworkers union is good at talking. Just ask officers of the paper company SCA, with which we have a close, cooperative relationship.
At SCA paper plants, union-management teams discuss business operations and resolve problems. This could be just a sham. But in the case of SCA, it actually works. Here’s what SCA director of employee relations Chuck Gintz said about the relationship recently, “Overall productivity has improved as a result of the joint partnership and labor-management work system redesign process and programs.”
SCA North America President Joe Raccuia came to Pittsburgh, Pa., home of the USW international headquarters, last fall for a conference between union and management. Addressing the issue of the union-management teams, he said, “This is not an expense. It is an investment.” He explained, “I view our cooperation as a competitive advantage right now.”
The USW prefers to talk
The USW prefers to talk. It works well for us and for the industries willing to talk with us.
For those unwilling to talk, for those who insist on picking fights despite all evidence that it’s counterproductive and unnecessary, we’ve got a stick.
We don’t want to use it, but, frankly, we’ve used it in the past, and we’ll use it again if we have to.
Now it’s going to be bigger.
So woe to the obstreperous CEO.
Let me name some historical obstreperous CEO names and tell their USW tales: Phil Casey and R. Emmet Boyle, twice.
Boyle refused to be reasonable at Ravenswood, locking us out of the West Virginia aluminum refinery in November, 1990. This was definitely a case that suffered from no talks. Boyle just refused to negotiate. A month after the Ravenswood board of directors fired Boyle as CEO, we had a new labor agreement in May of 1992.
Then, Boyle went to Ormet, but resigned as CEO there in October, 2004, when the bankrupt Ohio aluminum company failed to get new labor agreements with the USW. He declined our offer to discuss reorganization.
Just like Boyle, Casey locked out our members. CEO at Gerdau Ameristeel, Casey locked out 300 steelworkers in Beaumont, Texas, rather than negotiate a contract. Eleven months into the strike, when Gerdau bought Sheffield Steel Corp., we pointed out to the Gerdau family that the USW had helped Sheffield out of bankruptcy in 2001 by agreeing to renegotiate labor agreements and would be willing to negotiate similarly with Gerdau.
A long confrontation
A long confrontation with organized protests ranging from a Gerdau board meeting in Toronto to the Gerdau hometown in Porto Alegre, Brazil ended like this: we have fair contracts with Gerdau and Casey no longer has a CEO job with Gerdau.
It’s not just entanglements with uncommunicative corporate CEOs that unions must worry about, however. We must use that strike and defense fund – that big stick – to fend off political attempts to destroy labor unions.
We have endured the past eight years in the United States under a presidential administration that connived with corporations and business organizations to extinguish historical labor rights.
Here’s some examples:
In President Bush’s proposed Fiscal Year 2009 budget, he would spend 100 times more to regulate unions than to make sure employers comply with federal law, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
Anti-worker decisions
The Bush administration’s National Labor Relations Board issued a sweeping set of anti-worker decisions last September, some of which reversed long-standing precedents. One ruling made it tougher to organize workers and another more difficult for illegally fired workers to collect their back wages.
During Bush’s reign, the Labor Department has imposed costly and confusing new reporting requirements on unions, attempted to dramatically increase the number of criminal prosecutions of union members, then disclosed information about those prosecutions in ways that multiplied the numbers.
In such a hostile political environment unions must be prepared with strong strike and defense funds. When corporate leaders know they can use politicians who are philosophically allied with them to call out the police or National Guard against law-abiding strikers, labor organizations are in trouble.
So it wasn’t just the possibility of being confronted by a balky Boyle or a cantankerous Casey as their CEO, that prompted steelworkers to choose to pay more. It was also the possibility of being led for the next four years by a Bush look alike, such as Sen. John McCain, who opposes the Employee Free Choice Act.
Steelworkers knew they needed a bigger stick.
