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December 14th, 2015 
Awake Goy 
Print FriendlyAbove Photo: Allegheny Technologies, Inc (ATI) cut the contract negotiations short and locked out 180 men and women working at what had once been a family-owned business. (A lock out is not a strike but the employer withholding jobs.) Stephanie Hampton.
It was a Friday morning like any other in the 36 years that Bud Pool had worked at the specialty metals plant. Following their Dad who had worked there for twenty years before them, Bud worked alongside his brother, Gary, who had been there for 26 years. Families working for a family-owned business was the foundation of the success of this company.
On this particular August 15, these men and 178 of their fellow workers had been working without a contract for six weeks which was not unusual for the boom-and-bust titanium industry which experiences seven year cycles. Bud remembered a particularly lean time during the 1980s when the workers had taken deep concessions over a few years in order to save the company, returning to their status quo of shared benefits of production once the lean times were over. This social contract between the owners and the workers depended upon mutual interest, resulting in production they were proud of, and a living for everyone which, in turn, supported the larger community.
The one disquieting note about the contract negotiations this time was that the company negotiation team was entirely new since Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Technologies, Inc. (ATI) had bought the plant. ATI lacked the history of shared sacrifice and success between the workers and the company.
It came as a cruel surprise when the supervisor called them together on the floor that morning and announced that they were through. They were told to gather their personal belongings and vacate the premises because the company was locking the gates against them. Those who happened to be off-duty that day were called to come get their things before 6pm.
According to NWLaborPress.org, ATI had been preparing for the lock out since January when they hired outside consultants to hire scabs which they had in place shadowing ATI employees as early as June.
This is how the social contract, upon which the Middle Class was built, is broken. No longer do families, who have built up businesses, manage them as a proud heritage which includes the workers who invest their lives to make them successful. When large corporations buy them out—as Allegheny Technologies, Inc. (ATI) did–these plants are no longer a cherished family tradition but a generator of quarterly earning reports with the valued employees becoming simply labor costs to be cut to the bone. The Money Men make a mockery of American manufacturing and Middle Class jobs which were the envy of the world.
Allegheny Technologies, Inc. has locked out around 2,200 employees in six plants across the nation, contracting nationally with companies which provide scabs who, as contracted employees, do not contribute to the United Way nor do they register on the plant accident list. Meanwhile, these workers have been out of a paycheck since August 15, yet they have continued to do good in their blue collar community by painting the family home of a paralyzed girl and holding a benefit event for a child with leukemia.
At this benefit, I met a man whose experience in a similar local plant shed light on just exactly how the corporate greed-heads steal the fruits of labor of the middle class. His coworkers had voted against unionizing and accepted the company offered profit-sharing plan instead which looked great at the time because these workers are invested in their work and highly productive. After this was a done deal, the administrators added to their staff (Predators travel in packs) including swollen bonuses and expense accounts, devouring the small piece of the economic pie which had been promised to the men and women who actually produced the profit. Without a union, no one watches your back.
After four months without a paycheck, these men and women who once worked in the plant and supported their communities now find themselves facing a bleak Christmas and the uncertainties of slow legal action which may or may not return them to useful employment which provided a middle class living for themselves and their families. You may contribute to these 180 locked out workers by sending a letter of support to their union or by sending a check made out to USW 7150, writing in the memo line either “Strike Fund” or “Christmas Toys” to:
These locked-out men and women of steel have attracted considerable support in their own community and beyond. A delegation of Oregon legislators (Representative Peter Buckley (D) Ashland, Rep. Dan Rayfield (D) Corvallis, and House Speaker Tina Kotek (D)) have pledged to introduce legislation to extend their unemployment benefits this February. The Oregon Shakespearean Festival folks also gifted mileage, free tickets, a “dinner fit for a king”, and hotel accommodations in Ashland for the locked out workers to see the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s play “Sweat”, a play based on a true story of a plant in Reading Pennsylvania that locked out workers, described in a NYT review:
Behind America’s decades of corporate buyouts, union busting and outsourcing industrial jobs overseas are thousands of human stories. There are stories of longtime employees replaced by newcomers so desperate for a job they will work for less than a living wage. There are stories of factory workers arriving at the plant to discover that half the machinery has been shipped to plants overseas. There are stories of friendships and families ripped apart when the remaining jobs are at stake.
So, these men and women pull shifts Camp Ore-Met outside the gates of the plant where they once worked and expected to retire from. As they stand there in solidarity with their signs, almost every truck and car passing gives them a honk and a thumbs up. When asked if they expect to return to work, their eyes slide to the side and up to the clouds where they find no answers at all.
Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/this-is-what-union-busting-looks-like-update-usw-petition/
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