Memo to Labor: Follow UE’s Lead and Fight Corporate Outsourcing (moving PROFITABLE plants)

[Hannah Bell]

This Saturday's “One Nation” rally in Washington, D.C.— organized initially by the AFL-CIO and NAACP—has been badly needed... But... will labor’s leaders also recognize the need for ongoing mass protests at the local level...?

Specifically, there is a badly-missing and vital component to the AFL-CIO strategy: forcefully and visibly taking on the forces that are destroying jobs and foreclosing working families’ homes... That’s why battles like the United Electrical workers Local 204 is waging against the Haskon plant closing in Taunton, Mass., is so crucial.

Haskon’s parent company, Esterline Technologies, is moving to shut down a profitable plant and relocating the jobs to lower-wage facilities in Tijuana, Mexico (where wages in border-area plants are about 10% of manufacturing jobs in the United States) and Brea, Calif...

The company has been a major defense contractor and the beneficiary of at least $66.9 million in taxpayer dollars from 2000 to 2009. This stream of tax dollars... also helped Esterline CEO Robert W. Cremin to cream off $6,731,506 in total compensation in 2009...

CFO magazine recently reported, “the company's defense contracts assure it a solid base of revenue for years to come...."

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6485/entry/6424/ue_fights_defense_firms_plan_to_scrap_machines--_and_mass._workers/


UE is the Union that won the Republic Doors & Windows fight. They're a smallish union but pretty active. They're trying to put together a deal for the workers to buy the plant & run it.


UE Fights Defense Firm’s Plan to Scrap Machines and Mass. Workers

At a moment when the United States is struggling to revive the feeble economic recovery and maintain its eroding productive base, many prominent corporations are continuing to needlessly shut down highly profitable and productive plants.

Most gallingly for workers, some of these firms are spurning prospective buyers eager to keep the plants operating and preserve high-paying manufacturing jobs... the corporate owners are busily auctioning off valuable equipment and breaking up teams of skilled, dedicated workers. The latest instance: Bellevue, Wash.-based aerospace firm Esterline Technologies...

"Esterline would prefer to just scrap the equipment and scrap the workers rather than allow the workers or another company to buy the machinery and keep the doors open," says Peter Knowlton, northeastern district president of UE. "They've rebuffed everything we proposed to save the jobs."

"Initially, Esterline gave us the right of first refusal on buying the equipment, but then they reneged on that," reports the UE's Knowlton. "They also promised a list of all the equipment, but they reneged on that, too..."

http://www.wickedlocal.com/taunton/features/x241582031/Haskon-Aerospace-workers-host-vigil-on-the-Taunton-Green-to-rally-for-their-jobs

[ConsAreLiars]

1. A worker owned and operated print shop collective I once was a part of joined UE

as an indication of "which side we are on" and as an additional protection from being turned away from our "not-for-profit" status and our initial goals. There was a period when UE joined with UAW and the label/affiliation is now UAW. But UE was the one we thought would welcome a worker owned plant, and it did.

After a while the AFL affiliated printing trade union sent a delegation to gripe, but no action followed. A rather mild confrontation -- the very decent lead guy on the other side sorta accused "commie" and I told him I considered myself a communist (communalist or communitarian would have been more precise and less generic) and it was the first time I ever saw someone recoil in shock and fear at a word. Many here still do.

Today that collective is bigger, better, more diverse, more capable and more inter-linked with community and progressive and humanistic workers than ever. Proud father of three, and this is the first chronologically although I admire my kids even more.

[Hannah Bell]

2. Nice result. I've heard good things about UE.

[pnorman]

3. UE

The post-war era and expulsion from the CIO
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After the 1948 election, the CIO took the fight one step further in 1950, expelling the ILWU, the Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Union, the Farm Equipment Union, the Food and Tobacco Workers, and the Fur and Leather Workers, while creating a new union, the International Union of Electrical Workers, to replace the UE, which left the CIO rather than purge its leadership. The CP, which once held positions of influence at every level within the CIO and many of its affiliates, was now driven out of the CIO.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communists_in_the_United_States_Labor_Movement_%281937%E2%80%931950%29

That purge did great damage to the post-war labor movement; not just to the CIO, but also to the AFL. Of all those purged unions, only two remain, all the others were raided or disappeared altogether. Those two are the ILWU, and the UE. ILWU reentered the merged AFL-CIO without any apology, while UE remains`independent. Both are exemplars of militant unionism, as well as rank & file union democracy.

[Hannah Bell]

4. thanks, i knew there was something about commies in their background. :>)

[pnorman]

5. Association Of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), led by Father Owen Rice ("the labor priest")

One of the fiercest opponents (other than the feds) of the UE's CP leadership, was the ACTU. It never destroyed the UE, but it did it serious damage. Even before UE withdrew from the CIO, other unions (including CIO unions) began raiding it. And afterward, the CIO issued a new charter to UE's "successor", IUE. James Carey, the Rice-backed leader of the anti-CP faction within UE, then became IUE's first president. Whether or not he was personally corrupt he was colossally inept, while rank & file democracy and trade union militancy took mayor hits. IUE became increasingly irrelevant, and was eventually absorbed into the CWA.

Not many years after his "victory", Rice (by then Msgr.) began expressing deep regrets at the result of his labors. He voiced high praise for the dedication and high personal character of those "commies", while holding Carey in some contempt. And by the Sixties, he became an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam war.

[Hannah Bell]

6. sppreciate the labor history; i'd never heard of that group, or the priest

[pnorman]

7. Father Charles Owen Rice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Owen_Rice

I'm having difficulty finding much useful information so far on the web about ACTU, and I no longer have the relevant books close at hand. I'll try later. But the (belated!) "lessons of history" should discourage blanket praise or condemnation of the American Communist Party or its opponents.

[pnorman]

8. International Solidarity

http://www.ueinternational.org/

I've been on the UE email list for quite some time, and I just got notice of the above website. Like ILWU and perhaps even more so, UE maintains the principles of International Unionism. Accordingly, warm fraternal relations are maintained with like-minded labor groups in other nations. Mexico is highlighted in the above, but UE also has an official link with Zenroren, the left-wing labor federation of Japan,