19 December, 2011
Members of the United Steelworkers Local 207L numbering 1,050 are livid that management of Cooper Tire and Rubber in Findlay, Ohio, broke good-faith negotiations and locked them out on 28 November. They showed their anger on Saturday, 17 December, by manifesting strongly with other state and regional trade unionists in the northern Ohio town.
To be sure, descendants of the founders of the company that gave birth to Cooper Tire are also unhappy with current management over the lockout. In a letter to top executives of America’s fourth largest tyre maker on 9 December, Janet Clinger and Lingel Winters wrote that their grandfather “Claude Hart adhered to the standards … believ(ing) that the company had a responsibility for the well-being of not only the shareholders, but the workers and the community.”
The lockout began after workers rejected a concession-loaded proposal in late November and after the USW requested to continue work and continue bargaining. Cooper’s lockout was sudden, unprovoked, and now damaging both to labour relations and workers’ lives. Within days of the lockout, the company proudly announced it would re-start production with managers and temporary scab workers.
Lockout: War on Families
Cooper’s war on rubber workers at its flagship factory was evident at the 17 December manifestation. USW Local 207L President Rod Nelson lamented misguided managers who weathered the 2008-09 US manufacturing downturn with no small help from workers’ pay-check concessions, and now return for more economic cuts from workers when profits are good and executive bonuses are back.
“Cooper hasn’t been fair with us at the bargaining table,” said Nelson, refuting a management that has lost touch with the company’s founding principles. “We don’t lock people out of their jobs, we work through our problems.”
USW Secretary-Treasurer and ICEM Rubber Sector Chairman Stan Johnson told the rally that the union has responded globally and immediately received support from Serbian union Nezavisnost. That came within days of Cooper’s 8 December announcement that it would buy early next year a tyre factory from Trayal Korporacija AD near Krusevac, Serbia.
The USW also received an assist from its trans-Atlantic partner Unite the Union in bringing the lockout to the attention of workers at Cooper’s Melksham, Wiltshire, UK. Unite has flooded the shop floor of former Avon Tyres Ltd., which Cooper bought in 1997, with leaflets, posters and details of the American lockout.
Stan Johnson
“This lockout is about greed and gluttony,” said Johnson at Saturday’s rally. “It’s about a shiny new jet (Cooper’s new purchase) and it’s about multi-million-dollar bonuses.”
It is also about abandoning the traditions of social responsibility, judging from the letter by descendants of founders Claude Hart and John Schaefer. Expressing disappointment, Clinger and Winters wrote, “Locking out employees who helped the company during hard times and hiring scab workers to replace them subverts the purpose of collective bargaining. “
USW Local 207L and Cooper did return to the table on 13 December in talks supervised by US federal mediator Kevin Moyer. But those negotiations produced no trace of Cooper reconciliation, or rescinding of harsh contract terms.
The stakes will now get higher between the USW and Copper as a contract expires on 20 January 2012 between USW Local 752L in Texarkana, Arkansas, and the Findlay-based company. The 1,500 workers there have voted to give their union committee a mandate to strike if necessary.