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The Erie Strike

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Workers at a former GE plant that is now owned by a Westinghouse subsidiary are on strike, fighting against the latest round of corporate attacks on a dignified working class.

At a sprawling locomotive manufacturing complex a mile long and a mile wide in Erie, Pennsylvania, 1,700 workers walked off the job early Tuesday morning to fend off their new employer’s efforts to impose a raft of concessions, including two-tier wages.

Temperatures are below freezing, so at the dozen picket lines ringing the plant, burn barrels are fired up. Pickup trucks periodically drop off wood. Hundreds of members of the Electrical Workers (UE) are on the line, making life difficult for any non-union employees who try to drive through the gates.

Many of the picketers are dressed in camo. Some are wearing stickers that say “102 days,” a reference to 1969, the last time workers at this plant walked out.

On Monday, the former GE Transportation plant formally became a part of Wabtec (Westinghouse Airbrake Technologies), which bought the $4 billion-a-year division from the industrial conglomerate last year.

Since Wabtec kept the same workforce, the union remains the collective bargaining representative at the plant, and the company must bargain over a new agreement, though it can implement new terms and conditions to start.

UE proposed keeping the terms of the existing collective bargaining agreement in place while negotiating a new contract, but Wabtec rejected that proposal. Instead it said it would impose a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires and recalled employees up to 38 percent less in wages, institute mandatory overtime, reorganize job classifications, and hire temporary workers for up to 20 percent of the plant’s jobs.

Workers voted on Saturday to authorize the strike.

Almost all the strikers are members of UE Local 506, one of the biggest locals in the 35,000-member union. A handful of clerical workers belong to Local 618.

That’s a pretty harsh position from the company. Of course, Westinghouse is the company that created what today is seen as the Rosie the Riveter post as anti-union propaganda, so it’s not like it doesn’t have a history.

Now, whether we can connect this up to the larger strike movement among teachers is somewhat questionable. There are big differences between the public and private sector and between teachers and UE workers. But they all add up to 2019 likely seeing more strikers than 2018, which had already been the largest strike year since the 1980s. The reality is that the more you see strikes, the more likely you are to believe in the strike as a tool that can help you. Strikes are contagious and this is a syndrome you definitely want to catch. What UE workers are facing is the same set of destructive policies that have decimated the working class for decades. To some extent, they’ve been lucky to hold out this long. They still don’t have a two-tier system, they still have a union, and they still have the power to strike. Lots of other workers don’t. Let’s hope they can catch the strike wave and hold out longer against this corporate despoliation of their lives.

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