USW@Work - National College Players Association - United ...

GOODYEAR CONTRACTAP Photo/Tyler Morning Telegraph, Brad Smith.including a plant in China, a joint venture tire factory that paysits employees 42 cents an hour.That initial stance flew in the face of our primary objectivesof securing jobs by obtaining major capital investment in ourplants and protecting more than 30,000 retirees and survivingspouses from major increases in health care costs.Initial proposals from the company called for closing up tofour USW-represented plants, eroding retiree health care andgutting wages and medical benefits. It also sought to eliminateCOLA and impose a two-tier wage and benefit package.Under the company's demands for wage restructuring,almost 70 percent of the work force would have been forced totake big cuts. Many of us would have been required to workside by side with new employees earning a lot less and receivingzero benefits and vacation time."We said no," said John Rutherford, president of USW Local843 at Goodyear's engineered products plant in Marysville,Ohio. "This was one of those struggles we didn't ask for. But itwas a struggle we couldn't walk away from. It was a struggleAmerica couldn't afford for us to lose."Negotiations began in June and there were many months ofintensive bargaining. By the time the company forced us out onstrike Oct. 5, we were still facing demands for multiple plantclosings and short-changing of retiree benefits.Goodyear borrows $1 billionGoodyear management wanted to push its retiree health careobligations off the company's books and onto a trust fund. Butit wanted to finance the fund only at an irresponsibly low level.Adding insult to injury, Goodyear hired replacement workersnot long into the strike and announced the closing of its Tyler,Texas, plant. It borrowed $1 billion to fight the strike and issuedanother $1 billion in unsecured notes that were gobbled-up byWall Street speculators.The tentative dealreached Dec. 22 andratified shortlyafterwardsoffered a range of protections to Goodyear employees that wereentirely absent from the original proposals that drove us out onstrike."Goodyear borrowed a billion dollars to try and break ourstrike and we took it away from them," said USW VicePresident Tom Conway, who headed the union’s Goodyear bargainingteam.Significantly, the contract protects retiree medical coverageby securing initial funding of more than $1 billion for a benefittrust. That's an 80 percent increase from the company's prestrikeproposal of $560 million.We also enhanced the ability of USW-represented plants tomeet the challenges of global competition by requiringGoodyear to invest $550 million in them, triple its previouscapital investments.Globally competitive"To secure jobs, we had to obtain enough money to keep ourplants globally competitive,'' said Conway.In addition, the agreement required Goodyear to rescind itsdemand for immediate closure of the Tyler plant and insteadprovide a one-year transition during which workers can takeadvantage of retirement buyouts.Despite efforts by the international and local leaders andstrong support from the community in Tyler, Texas, plant securitycould not be won there beyond the end of 2007.Although we're not happy with the outcome at Tyler, theunion was able to ensure that the tires now built there willhave to be produced at other USW-represented facilitiesas long as Goodyear stays in that market.USW@Work • winter 2007 13