BY DAVID MARSHALL
PEORIA, Illinois - Returning to work after more than 17 months on strike, some 9,000 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) face tough restrictions on union rights under Caterpillar Inc.'s "temporary moratorium" limiting expressions of union solidarity and any mention of the bitter strike.
Since beginning to recall workers in mid-December, the company has disciplined 128 former strikers, discharging 14 and suspending others for periods ranging from a few days to "indefinitely," according to the Fox Valley Labor News in Aurora, Illinois. The paper also reports the union has asked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to seek an injunction against Caterpillar's restrictions.
Under the "temporary special moratoria," as Caterpillar calls its new rules, workers are prohibited from using the word "scab," as well as wearing T-shirts or displaying other materials that refer in any way to the strike. While Caterpillar spokesman Keith Butterfield has called the rules "common-sense basic guidelines everybody can be comfortable with," union members see the restrictions as harassment and intimidation at a time when they need to be discussing how to fight for a contract.
Terry Orndorff, bargaining committee chairman for Local 786 at the York, Pennsylvania, plant, was given a two-week suspension for wearing a "Families in Solidarity: UAW" T- shirt to the orientation meeting where company officials explained the new rules to returning union members.
"It's like going to prison when you go in there," Barry Koichuba, president of Local 786, told the Wall Street Journal. York union steward Joe Doubles was suspended on his second day back for an "intentional slowdown," when a foreman charged he had not made enough progress towards the production rate established during the strike. Steward Jim Gross was suspended for "wasting company time." The company later elevated both suspensions to discharges.
While UAW officials declined to comment on the suspensions and discharges, it is clear that the company has taken such actions in plants throughout the system. The union has filed 26 new "unfair labor practice" charges with the NLRB since the strike ended in December.
Caterpillar suspended one union member at its Mossville facility, just outside of Peoria, for having a sticker on his tool box that said "Fighting for Justice - Not Just Us." According to a union member at the Mossville plant, the suspended worker tried to remove the sticker, and was permitted by his supervisor to soak the area with oil to aid in this during the holiday shutdown. Upon returning, he was suspended. A week or two later he was called back to his job.
A union committeeman in Local 751 at the Decatur plant, who asked that his name be withheld, said his plant has seen 14 disciplinary cases, including five discharges, since workers have returned. "There may be some targeting of the activists," the committeeman said, "but basically they're just cracking down in an attempt to intimidate everybody."
The Decatur committeeman as well as union members at Peoria-area plants report that the atmosphere of intimidation the company imposed in the first weeks after the strike has eased up in the past couple of weeks. "They laid the law down pretty hard," he said. "You weren't supposed to mention the strike, you couldn't talk to a scab in any way that the company thought might be `intimidating.' It's loosened up a bit now that the biggest part of the scabs Cat brought in as temporaries are gone."
A number of strikers reported that thugs from Vance Security, a strikebreaking firm that the company hired to harass union members during the strike, were patrolling the shop floor in the first days after their return to work. Union members also reported that the company had brought in a number of additional "administrative assistants" who acted as "spotters" to observe and intimidate workers as they resumed the jobs they had been away from for almost 18 months.
"It was pretty intimidating," one Mossville worker told the Militant. "I was one of the first called back, and for a couple of weeks Vance was posted at the gate, you had to show a special pass just to get in the parking lot, and they had a rough-looking Vance guard posted at the door with that `Where's the fight?' look. But it's eased up quite a bit," he said. "In fact," he reports, "people are talking a lot about the strike and what to do next, and you're beginning to see more union caps and insignias in the plant.
"I've even begun talking more to some of the union members who crossed the picket line," he commented. "We have to look to the future, and it's self-defeating for us to ignore them forever. We're going to have to think about how to get everybody to stick together as things develop."
"Sure they're a lot of hard feelings towards the guys who crossed the line," says Bill Hiatt, a member of Local 974 who has returned to work in East Peoria. "But I'm finding that a lot of them want to talk about all the things the company was doing that they couldn't talk about during the strike," he said. "We have to see this experience as an opportunity to begin building the union from the bottom up."
"I've come to it in my mind that this will be a long struggle," said Duane Burlingame, a Local 974 member and one of the "illegally terminated."
While Caterpillar restructures the work rules in its plants and continues to restrict union activity, an NLRB judge in Peoria ruled on January 29 that the company had illegally discharged four union members, and illegally suspended two others in the months leading up to the strike. It was in response to these attacks and the firings of over 50 other workers that the union began its "unfair labor practices" strike in June 1994.
NLRB administrative law judge James L. Rose also ruled that Caterpillar unlawfully interfered with the internal election of union officials at one plant when company supervisors stated their preferences among candidates and removed posted material of candidates they didn't favor.
Rose ordered Caterpillar to reinstate with back pay Mossville employees Richard Stolz, fired after participating in a UAW rally in 1994, and Larry Recar, fired for refusing overtime in protest of other discharges. The judge also ordered back pay for Local 974 grievance committee chairman Ron Logue, whom the company suspended in 1992 for hanging union T-shirts in his car in a company parking lot, and Pontiac Local 2096 vice president John Hammil, who was suspended for verbal exchanges. Two other workers were unlawfully dismissed for prounion activities at a bar.
Rose ordered the company to "cease and desist" from further discrimination against union members. In dismissing two workers, the company disciplined them more severely than it would have if they hadn't been active in the union, the judge said. The judge also dismissed eight complaints against the company including one about the in-plant surveillance of and restrictions on union committeemen.
Caterpillar lost an effort to block laid-off workers from collecting unemployment benefits in Illinois. The Illinois Department of Employment Security has ruled that those workers not recalled as of December 10 are eligible for jobless benefits. In Pennsylvania, UAW members at the York facility have been denied unemployment compensation by the state.
David Marshall is a member of the International Association of Machinists Local 1156 in Lincoln, Illinois. John Staggs, a UAW member in Philadelphia, contributed to this article.