Workers at NY Silicone Plant Fight Big Wage Cuts

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/2010/04/workers-ny-silicone-plant-fight-big-wage-cuts


Management unilaterally hit production workers with a 25-50 percent pay cut. In a show of “shared sacrifice,” top managers cut their pay 8-10 percent for a little while. CEO John Rich made $1.6 million last year. Photo: Jon Flanders.


Jon Flanders April 30, 2010

When the private equity firm Apollo Management took over GE’s Advanced Materials plant in 2007, local labor activists were apprehensive about what might be in store for the 600-plus workers there.

Headed by Leon Black, a notorious graduate of the infamous ’80s Drexel Burnham Lambert school of leveraged buyouts, Apollo has a background of buying up “distressed” properties and “restructuring” them, which usually means workers take the hit in wages and pensions.

Things under the new boss started out nice enough. The company, whose silicone products are caulks, adhesives, foams, cosmetics and tires, re-branded as Momentive Productive Materials. It negotiated a new three-year contract in 2007 with the chemical, maintenance, and warehouse workers represented by IUE-CWA Local 81359 that locked in gains in pay and pensions and retained key job security provisions.

Workers in the Waterford plant, about a dozen miles north of Albany, New York, inherited the almost $30-an-hour wages and decent working conditions that had been fought for by generations of union families, going back to the great days of the CIO in the 1930s.

Then the hammer fell. With the contract signed and in place, Momentive executives approached the union in early 2008 saying they needed to transform the business. Months before the economy crashed, they sought wage cuts and outsourcing of warehouse work, plant labor, and heavy equipment operation, where many of the veteran workers resided.

Local 81359 offered many ideas to save the positions and prevent outsourcing, including work area flexibility, fewer supervisors, and lower starting wages for new hires.

“We did the math for them, showed them all types of business models,” said Dominick Patrignani, the local’s president. “But they had it all figured out ahead of time.”

FULL story at link.

[RandomThoughts]

1. Because if it is about money, you play their game on their field.

This might sound odd, ok it will, but if you go into the negotiations thinking in terms of money, like wages or even days off, and negotiate with that thought process, they have home field advantage.

If your thoughts are for the financial security of the workers, and what is just and fair, they are on your turf.

If you go to their thought process, then they will have the negotiation. But if you do for reasons of what is right, then you have the advantage.

The only way they can win is to get you to fight on their battle field. Another reason character is so important, and heart and feeling, to keep the battle on the light side where help can come in and make a difference.

[Cassandra]

2. Private equity companies are not there to run the company...

they are there to rape the company.