A Peek Behind Closed Doors at the USW-AM Contract Talks
September 03, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
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Kevin Nevers | Source: Chesterton Tribune
ArcelorMittal has blinked.
Just before 2 p.m. on Saturday (CST) the presidents of 16 United Steelworkers (USW) locals voted 15-1 to endorse a new tentative four-year agreement with the company and present that contract to the membership for a vote.
On all the major issues—the so-called “bulleted items”—the company has relented and met the union’s terms, Local 6787 President Paul Gipson told the Chesterton Tribune on Saturday.
…Only 24 hours previously there had been nothing between the USW and ArcelorMittal but daylight, the union’s negotiators were tired and angry and grim, and a walkout at 12:01 a.m. on Monday—Labor Day—seemed inevitable. Twenty-four hours later Gipson gave the Burns Harbor plant manager the green light to fire up the coke ovens and the blast furnaces.
To those blast furnaces, in fact—not only the two at the Burns Harbor facility but the company’s seven others in the U.S.—Gipson attributed the victory, to the likelihood of those furnaces being damaged in an outage performed by management alone.
“We made them worry about those furnaces,” he said. “We always had the biggest concern for the safety of the guys running them and for the integrity of the furnaces themselves. They saw our deep concern. We seemed to have more concern about those furnaces than they did. They waited too long to start banking them. They should have started at least 10 days before the expiration of the contract.”
Read the rest of this insightful story at the Chesterton Tribune >>
