General Electric: Local Members’ Actions Key to National Contract Settlement
Editor’s Note: At the end of June, workers at General Electric (GE) ratified a new four-year contract. Despite a determined push by the company for deep concessions on retirement benefits of future hires, a rollback of early retirement opportunities, and drastically increased medical cost shifting, the unions made gains on wages, health care coverage, paid time off, and pensions—including an increase in current retirees’ pensions.
A major factor in winning these gains was the contract campaign launched by the United Electrical Workers (UE) and other unions in the 13-union joint Coordinated Bargaining Committee (CBC) in the months preceding the June 17 contract expiration. The following article describes how the UE conducted its contract campaign.]
In the face of terrible company bargaining proposals, the actions and determination of union members at GE were key to achieving an acceptable settlement.
The campaign started months ago, with member participation in local meetings to assemble the union’s contract demands. Meeting at the UE national office in Pittsburgh on April 2, delegates from UE GE locals reviewed and finalized those proposals from the rank and file. Locals had compiled member proposals through printed surveys as well as discussions at membership meetings. Locals also distributed a series of leaflets starting early in the year that made the union’s case for its economic goals.
RETIREES LEAD THE CHARGE
Retirees from the Erie, Pennsylvania plant, organized as RAGE (Retirees Association of General Electric), kicked things up a notch when on April 20 they demonstrated outside the plant gate, demanding an increase in their pensions. They were joined by first-shift stewards from UE Local 506—the union of Erie GE’s production and maintenance workers—who marched out of the plant as a group to the cheers of the pensioners.
At that rally Local 506 President Frank Fusco sounded the theme of the contract fight—bargaining for three generations. Responding to GE’s belittling its obligations to retired workers by calling them “legacy costs,” Fusco expressed a very different conception of “legacy,” one that was repeated in the following weeks by GE workers. “Your legacy is us,” Fusco said to the retirees, “the people working in the plant today. Our legacy is the future employees.”
Five days later, 45 of the Erie retirees took a long bus ride to Greenville, South Carolina, to take their pension fight to GE’s annual shareholders meeting. They were joined by groups of other GE union retirees from around the country, over 200 in all, and after mass picketing in front of the meeting site, they took the fight inside.
Ron Flowers of RAGE—as well as Kevin Mahar from the Lynn, Massachusetts GE retiree group and Helen Quirini representing retirees in Schenectady, New York—publicly challenged GE CEO Jeff Immelt over his highly-profitable company denying its retirees increased monthly pension payments since 2000. Some of the shareholders present urged GE bosses to meet the retirees’ demands.
On May 11, UE Local 751 members in Niles, Ohio took their demands to the plant gate, rallying in front of GE’s twin Niles/Mahoning lighting plants. A week later, UE Local 332 members in Fort Edward, New York rallied outside their GE capacitor plant, demanding improved pensions, COLA for retirees, improvements in sick and personal time, and renewed early retirement opportunities under SERO—the special early retirement option—that GE had targeted for elimination.
News of these local actions was reported to members around the country on a GE section of UE’s website, along with detailed daily reports from the bargaining table in New York. Stewards and local officers printed out negotiation updates for in-shop distribution, enabling members to back up the union’s arguments at the national bargaining table with action in their workplaces.
CROSS-UNION UNITY
Eleven days after the May 22 start of bargaining, Locals 506 and 618 hosted a giant national rally in Erie. Thousands of enthusiastic GE workers from several CBC unions all over the East Coast and Midwest filled the downtown Civic Center arena in a strong show of support for the contract campaign. Particularly impressive were the big delegation from IUE-CWA Local 201 in Lynn, Massachusetts and the three busloads of IUE-CWA Local 761 members who came from Louisville, Kentucky.
Speakers at the rally reminded members that what they did in their plants to drive their message home to GE—wearing stickers, T-shirts, and buttons, holding rallies—would have more effect on the outcome of negotiations than what was said at the bargaining table. Ten days later, members of UE Local 731 in Conneaut, Ohio delivered their message to GE with an impromptu rally and picket at the end of the first shift.
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“We have a lot of issues that we’re concerned about in negotiations,” said Local 731 Vice President Joe Leavery, who listed the company’s attack on benefits for new hires and pensions as two of the most important issues.
A NEW GENERATION
Local 506 executive board member Matt McCracken said it was heartening to see hundreds of younger members of his local, the result of several recent waves of mass hiring, get involved in this contract struggle, “In Building 18 where I work,” he said, “for 90 percent of the workers this was their first GE contract negotiations.”
A volunteer force of mostly low-seniority workers got together over several days to paint the signs that decorated a June 2 rally site. The newer workers quickly learned a Local 506 tradition of loud on-the-job mass protest known as “band practice” that drives Erie GE bosses crazy—or at least into their offices to try to escape the noise.
“People were very creative,” said McCracken, “and they were adamant about SERO, healthcare, and the new hire issue, since they’re not far away from the time when they were new hires themselves.” McCracken noted that Local 506’s new members “learned a lot” during 2007 negotiations, and that the experience will likely solidify UE’s tradition of militant rank-and-file unionism for a new generation.
Gains in the new contract that specifically benefit less senior workers should solidify the role of these newer members, including doubling of the amount of vacation workers get at one year, and improvements in pay progression and night-shift bonuses for workers with under five years.
During negotiations, Local 506 and Local 751 conducted short-term strikes over unresolved grievances. This is a right UE members at GE have under the national contract.
Younger members, the result of several recent waves of hiring, got involved in the contract struggle.
While neither of these strikes was directly related to contract negotiations, they were both indications that members were in no mood to be pushed around by GE. On May 30, the 3,800 members of UE Local 506 struck to protest the company’s failure to resolve a grievance over subcontracting of union work. Workers on each of the three shifts at the Erie plant stayed off the job for four hours.
More than 130 workers at the Mahoning glass plant in Niles struck June 7-9 over the company’s unfair and inconsistent layoff and vacation policies. “We were out for 48 hours because the members voted to do so.”
Local 751 members also let the company know how serious they were about contract negotiations. On June 15, two days before the contract would expire, Dennis Hayda and Rich Tarnaski, chief stewards at the adjacent Mahoning and Niles glass plants, requested a meeting with the company to agree on an “orderly procedure” for shutting down the plants’ glass furnaces if no contract agreement was reached.
That shutdown proved unnecessary when the tentative agreement was reached on the afternoon of June 17.
Al Hart is the managing editor of UE News.