18 October, 2010
Negotiations between the United Steelworkers Local 7-669 and Honeywell Inc. failed 11-12 October to resolve a company-imposed lockout on 228 union members at a uranium conversion plant in the US. The failure to resolve the 17-week lockout in Metropolis, Illinois, means scab workers will continue to mix dangerous chemicals in a process that mills yellow-cake uranium into uranium hexafluoride (UF6), and then is sold to nuclear enrichment facilities.
The talks last week were the third set of bi-lateral negotiations since the lockout began on 28 June. Progress was made on the first day on one of the major issues – health coverage and retiree medical insurance – but talks broke down on 12 October over retirement benefits and Honeywell’s demand to create a two-tier pension scheme. Talks could re-start within the next few weeks.
Other issues separating USW and Honeywell are the transnational’s insistence on gaining broad contracting-out rights, a weakening of workers’ seniority rights, and hours of work. The company is offering a 3% wage increase, but its other demands are so detrimental to workers’ interests that the union has countered with a wage freeze and continuance of the current entitlement terms.
Metropolis, the fictional home of Superman, is now a US nuclear safety risk
Honeywell, together with subcontracting agent the Shaw Group, has used US political leverage to gain certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), allowing the use of 200 replacement workers to perform dangerous tasks inside the nuclear supply chain.
After initially signaling to USW Local 7-669 that it would not operate the plant during the lockout, Honeywell in July began staffing the conversion plant with scabs provided by the Shaw Group, and moved Honeywell supervisors from other areas to Metropolis. On 3 September, the NRC granted approval to Honeywell to re-start the final two steps of a four-step converting process.
On 5 September, the town of Metropolis in southern Illinois along the Ohio River was shook by a loud boom that could be heard two kilometers away. Inside the plant, accumulated hydrogen reacted with fluorine gas during a venting process, causing the boom. NRC inspectors were on site at the time, and local police came to the scene. A NRC spokesman said the accident occurred in a non-regulated area of operation, meaning away from the handling of yellow cake uranium. Honeywell and the NRC jointly stated no damage to assets occurred and no one was injured.
The Honeywell plant in Metropolis is the only such uranium conversion plant in the US and takes yellow cake uranium from Canada, Russia, and Australia and transforms it into UF6 through the four-stage process. That process includes ore preparation, through green salt preparation, to fluorination and distillation, before frozen and shipped to nuclear enrichment sites in US sites of Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky, as well as to plants in Russia and some Asian countries.
A previous ICEM report on this US lockout is here.