BY JANICE LYNN AND MARY MARTIN
NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia - Striking shipyard workers here
continue their resolve to secure a just contract. "We are
determined to stay out one day longer," said 50th Street gate
captain Edward Artis during May 13 picketing. Artis has worked
35 years in the yard as a welder. He said if he retired right
now his pension would be around $175 month. "The pension rate
hasn't been raised since the '60s," he said.
United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 8888 has been on strike since April 5, representing some 9,000 workers. They're fighting for $3.95 an hour in raises over three years, pensions of $30 a month for each year of service, and no cuts in the company contribution to health insurance.
On May 11 the company announced it would be implementing its March 30 "final wage offer" in an attempt to lure workers across the picket lines with an immediate pay raise. On May 14 USWA Local 8888 announced it had filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board protesting this move, explaining the company can only do this if negotiations have reached an impasse. A headline in the May 18 Newport News Daily Press noted, "Yard offer has little impact. Most Steelworkers stand united, refuse to cross picket lines." It quoted rigger Richard Murphy Jr., who said, "We ain't going in for that dollar. We want our whole package."
At a May 13 briefing, 82-year-old James Hamlin, Sr., who worked as a supply worker at the yard for 56 years, said he receives a pension check of $289 a month. Under the union's proposal a 65-year-old employee retiring with 30 years of service would receive a monthly check of $900. "I would just like for the company to give the retirees more money. We deserve it," Hamlin said.
Shipfitter Frank Matthews said he did not participate in the 1979 organizing drive and strike for union recognition. "In 1979, I didn't see the need to strike. I can see now I was wrong then. Today we are striking for survival - retirement, health benefits, wages, and we are willing to fight for it. All we want is a decent living. The strike outcome will set a trend for the future in the shipyard."
Wendall Clark, a nuclear reactor chemical cleaner in the yard and a veteran of the 1979 strike, remarked that this time the white and Black workers are a lot more united. "If we weren't together this time around, we'd be in trouble," he said.
On the line were also younger workers, including a 21-year- old apprentice electrician - one of a number of apprentice workers who decided to join the strike. She had been in the yard one year.
The shipyard has announced it is resuming defueling the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Newport News is the only private shipyard in the country equipped to perform carrier refueling. All of the yard's 250 nuclear-qualified workers who underwent a year's worth of training have been solidly on strike, however, raising safety questions.
Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, refused to cross picket lines set up by the Machinists union May 17. Eleven of the 13 unions representing 8,000 Ingalls workers rejected the shipyard's contract proposal, which would have offset pay raises by hiking monthly insurance premiums.
Janice Lynn and Mary Martin are members of the International Association of Machinists in Washington, DC. Olympia Newton contributed to this article.