Three years
after losing a
ten-week strike over
the right to collect dues, about 200 union members at Manitowoc Cranes in
northeast Wisconsin face continuing efforts to decimate their treasury—an
experience other unions may soon also face under the state’s new so-called “right to work” law.
“A lot of
workers feel pressure,” said Bill Brault. A 40-year member of International
Association of Machinists (IAM) Local Lodge 516, he abhors the company
ultimatum that ended the strike: make dues voluntary and get a raise; or resist
and lose jobs to replacement workers, otherwise known as “scabs.”
Brault
won’t say the “S” word or give an opinion about workers who don’t pay dues.
According to the company’s post-strike harassment policy, “I would lose my
job,” he said.
IAM Cranes
unit chair Scott Rosinsky said that, since the strike, the company has been in
“full court press” to defund the union. “Our first day back, they called us in
individually and gave us forms to opt out. That went over like a fart in
church.”
The
collective bargaining agreement includes an annual period during which workers
can opt out of the union. As that period approaches, management exhorts workers
in person and in letters to discontinue dues and get union wages, benefits, and
representation for free.
Right to
work does not yet apply to the Manitowoc workers, outside of this opt-out
period, since they signed their contract before the law was passed. But once
the contract expires in 2016, right to work will prevail—and the company can
make a non-stop push for workers to opt out.
Few union
members have caved in so far, Rosinksy said, but new hires under probation—who
have the option not to join the union—are more vulnerable. The company “rams it
down their throats. It got so bad, one wanted to file a harassment claim.”
Human
Resources hit up new hire Joe Moore twice in two days. His first day on the
job, “they laid out all the benefits I’d get without having to pay for it,” he
said. “It kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I said, ‘No. I am not going to not
join the union’.”
Called in
the second day for the same spiel, he “made it abundantly clear” he wasn’t
buying it. “They are nothing if not persistent.”
Moore, who
had worked at Cranes six years before, now sees a workplace rife with tension.
Workers are “on edge. They know who didn’t join the union and who walked the
picket line. They don’t gather and talk like they used to,” especially when the
subject is union. “They do it in secrecy.”
IAM members
at another unit, Manitowoc Food Services, ratified a fourth one-year contract
just days after right to work became law and as their jobs are being offshored
to Mexico. They got a small signing bonus instead of a raise and elimination of
rules requiring workers to pay dues.
Local
president Steve Garber said the company’s “whole attitude has gotten worse” in
recent years under a series of “very anti-union” negotiators who don’t stick
around for long.
Both units
are part of Manitowoc Company, headed by CEO Glen Tellock. He’s on the board of
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which championed Governor Scott
Walker’s 2011 Act
10 stripping public sector unions of funding and bargaining rights,
followed in 2015 by right to work for the private sector. The laws are products
of the corporate/billionaire-funded bill mill, the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC).
Right to
work comes with a Class A misdemeanor. Requiring dues payments could mean nine
months in jail and/or a $10,000 fine for each violation.
Enforcement
will supposedly fall to local district attorneys. But Madison DA Ismael Ozanne
said the legislature neither funded nor coordinated right to work with law
enforcement. With staffing levels “just a tick above 1985” in a county that’s
grown 47 percent since, “I’m not sure how long it will take to figure out how
to investigate those violations.”
The
anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, however, stands
ready. The day after Walker signed right to work, the
business-backed Foundation announced “free
legal aid” to Wisconsin workers who don’t want to pay for
representation.
Corporate-government
connections and what they’ve wrought are no surprise to IAM members in both
units who foresaw the Cranes strike as a harbinger of
things to come. Asked if the company had somehow coordinated the strike with WMC , Brault and Rosinksy affirmed
simultaneously: “Absolutely!”
Five
decades of symbiotic labor relations are now history, and the typical IAM
member—well over 40 with about 25 years’ seniority—faces an uncertain future.
Local secretary-treasurer Gary Dworak expressed a sentiment likely shared by
many.
"Loyalty”
he said, “yields nothing.”
> The article above was written
by Kathy Wilkes, and is reprinted from Labor Notes.
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