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Vol. 75/No. 17      May 2, 2011

 
Locked-out workers in
Illinois: ‘We’re not alone’
 
BY ALYSON KENNEDY  
HENRY, Illinois—“The labor rallies in Wisconsin give us reassurance that we are not alone out there,” said Brett Wiedman, lead union steward at Emerald Performance Materials here. Forty members of Teamsters Local 627 have set up an informational picket outside the plant after they were locked out for rejecting a union-busting contract.

Henry is a town of 2,500, 30 miles from Peoria and surrounded by farms. Workers rejected the company’s proposed contract March 20 in a vote of 35 to 5. The next day at 3:30 p.m. the company told everyone they were locked out and walked them to their cars.

“We started negotiating with the company in January and on March 16 they gave us their ‘last, best, and final offer’—a 30 percent wage cut, elimination of all personal and sick days, and taking away two weeks’ vacation for senior employees,” said Wiedman, a chemical operator at the plant for 22 years.

Workers on the picket line explained that about six weeks before the lockout, the company brought in replacement workers from International Crisis Management and Disaster Response, a union-busting outfit in Ohio. Many of these workers are still in the plant along with some temporary workers from the surrounding area.

The workers handle hazardous and deadly chemicals on a daily basis, from acids to caustics to toxic gases. They make chemicals that go into jet engine lubricants, antifreeze, plastics, and rubber used in making tires.

The plant has changed owners a couple of times in the last decade. It is now owned by Sun Capital, a private investment firm out of Boca Raton, Florida.

“Every time they switched owners, the new owners would take things away,” said Wiedman. “They just kept hacking away. They began making threats and one plant manager said we are basically at-will employees. We saw the handwriting on the wall.” The workers started organizing a union in 2006, voted for the Teamsters in 2007, and won a union contract a year later.

Several of the unionists participated in an April 4 labor rally in Ottawa, Illinois. Wiedman said he found out about a fight by locked-out corn processing workers in Keokuk, Iowa, from an officer of the Teamsters union who has visited the picket line in that town.
 
 
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Support locked-out workers  
 
 
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