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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Milwaukee Steel Workers demonstrate against proposted plan shutdown |
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by Bryan G. Pfeifer
Email: bgp (nospam) uwm.edu (unverified!)
Phone: 414-374-1034 |
13 Feb 2002
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In honor of Dr. King, on Jan. 21 over 300 Steel Workers at the Tower Automotive plant and their allies marched to save their jobs. |
In honor of Dr. King…
Milwaukee steel workers demonstrate
against proposed plant shutdown
By Bryan G. Pfeifer
MILWAUKEE -- On Jan. 21, the federal holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the remaining members of Smith Steel Workers Local 19806 DALU and their allies marched from their labor hall to the Tower Automotive plant where they labor to protest a threatened plant shutdown by Tower bosses.
The Steel Workers combined their current struggle with the onslaught of job losses their working class sisters and brothers have endured in the metropolitan Milwaukee area.
They and their allies emphasized the over 100,000 living-wage jobs in the last decade that are now gone. On paper this figure can never describe the devastation that the working class and oppressed has suffered.
“19806 is not dead…We are going to stand, we are going to fight, we are going to unite.
We can come together to send a message to this city, state and country that people can stand together,” said Earl Ingram, a 19806 member that has worked at Tower for almost 30 years.
Mr Ingram joined over 300 of his fellow workers and allies such as the Milwaukee County Labor Council, labor, civic, community students and religious organizations, and other workers that attended the rally in solidarity.
Tower, which bought out A.O. Smith’s steel automobile frame division in 1997, is but one example of the decline of manufacturing here in what was once an industrial epicenter.
At its peak in the early 1970s, A.O. Smith employed over 6, 000 workers in plants that operated on eight city blocks. Parking lots, lunchrooms, local establishments and the union hall were bustling with activity. Many of these workers were African American men who had migrated from the South in search of better wages and benefits. A significant number were also the sons or grandsons of previous migrants.
Today, about 750 workers remain working in a few buildings. Barren parking lots and abandoned buildings are now the reality. Former Steel Workers, many with decades of seniority, now work at non-union service orientated jobs, often at less than half what they made at Tower and A.O. Smith.
Despite numerous give backs, millions in tax breaks from the city and state, union concessions and countless other worker sacrifices to keep the corporation in the city, the Tower bosses have continued their union-busting tactics, most notably and ironically by using relocation to non-union or low-wage areas in the South and elsewhere. As a result, families and communities have been shattered.
The bosses’ ultimate goal is to close the Tower plant for good. A step in this direction is to cut the current Tower workforce down to 450 in the next few months. The corporation, in violation of the union contract, has already begun moving machinery out of the plant say union leaders and workers.
But as the Jan. 21 rally clearly illustrated, the remaining Steel Workers aren’t going down without a militant fight. Those interested in helping the Tower workers are encouraged to contact the Milwaukee County Labor Council.
The above scenario has played itself out like a broken record at plant after plant here. The list of plant shutdowns, relocations, and massive layoffs is long. Familiar names like Allen Bradley, Briggs and Stratton, Master Lock, and Steel Tech are flanked by hundreds of smaller companies that have been wiped out by the loss of tens of thousands of living-wage union jobs.
On the same day of the Steel Workers rally, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Business Section published the article, “Wisconsin’s unions suffer worst decline in nation.”
According to new data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unionized work force in the state continued its steady decline in 2001.
A few of its findings were:
*16.2 percent of the state’s work force was unionized in 2001, down from 17.6 percent in 2000, the biggest percentage point drop nationwide.
*There were 35,000 fewer union workers in 2001, a 7.8 percent decrease from 2000.
*The state dropped to 15th-largest in percentage of unionized workers, down from 10th in 2000.
*The four-county Milwaukee area had almost 6,000 fewer factory jobs in November than there were last January.
The Milwaukee-based labor and community organization A Job is a Right Campaign issued a solidarity statement for the Steel Workers rally that honored Dr. King’s unshakeable support for working people.
Stressing that he was assassinated while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis on April 4, 1968, the statement expressed the belief that if Dr. King were alive he would be supporting the Steel Workers and all those who have lost their jobs. He would be helping organizing the unorganized like W-2 recipients formerly on public assistance and now forced to work at substandard wages. Dr. King would be opposing the racist war that the U.S. is waging all over the globe-a policy that negatively affects workers’ lives in a number of ways said AJRC.
“It becomes clear in listening and reading Dr. King’s speeches that he lived and died by the famous labor slogan, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’ Today, as we support the Smith Steel Workers let it be known that we, like Dr. King, believe that we are not free until all working and oppressed people are free.”
© 2002 Bryan G. Pfeifer
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See also:
www.aflcio.org
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