Category Archives: Steelworkers

labor, Organizing, Solidarity, Steelworkers, trade unions

300 Union Members Rally outside ATI’s Midland Plant after Lockout Begins

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By Jared Stonesifer
Beaver County Times

Aug 17, 2015 – MIDLAND — More than 300 United Steelworkers union members locked out from the Allegheny Technologies plant rallied Monday morning not just for a fair contract, but for the chance to get back to the negotiating table.

ATI, which has 12 plants and employs more than 2,200 USW workers across the country, locked out the union members Saturday night as a result of a failure by the two sides to reach a contract agreement.

Union workers since July 1 had been working on a day-to-day basis after the last contract expired at the end of June, and negotiations had been progressing but hit a wall when union leadership failed to bring to a vote ATI’s “last, best and final” contract offer in early August.

Tony Tepsic, president of the Midland contingent of USW workers Local 1212, said more than 300 people marched through Midland on Monday morning demanding a new contract.

“We are on an official lockout as of now, and we’re spending our time picketing,” he said.

He called the rally “very productive” and said USW leadership attended, as did Beaver County Commissioner Joe Spanik.

Spanik, who worked in the union for many years, said it’s imperative to get local workers back on the job and railed against the fact that ATI plans on bringing in nonunion workers during the lockout.

“We want to see this resolved so the folks who live here in Beaver County can get back to work as quickly as possible,” he said. “We need to get them back to the negotiating table to try to settle a fair contract.”

Spanik said the march went through Midland down to the union hall and back up to the work site.

The commissioner said he also plans to contact Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald to work on a solution to get workers back on the job.

Spanik said other union rallies are planned for the ATI plant in Brackenridge, Allegheny County.

A representative from ATI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

Steelworkers, trade unions, unemployment

Ohio: Lorain Workers Rally to Save Our Steel Jobs

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USW News

Yesterday, in Lorain Ohio, hundreds of workers and supporters joined U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur to tell America that we need to Save Our Steel jobs.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) is bringing the issue of a surge of illegally dumped oil tubular goods (OCTG) imports, primarily from South Korea, is flooding the U.S. market. These foreign steel pipes are priced below fair value and in deceptive ways are designed to circumvent international trade laws.

U.S. workers and their communities deserve a fair shot. The United States has trade remedy laws that serve as the last line of defense for American firms and workers in the face of illegal trade. But when the rules are not effectively enforced, U.S. producers lose sales and profits, workers lose their jobs and communities lose homeowners and a sustainable tax base.

Watch for future planned rallies and join us in Granite City, IL; McKeesport, PA; Longview, TX; Fairfield, AL and in the iron range in Minnesota.

Pittsburgh, Steelworkers, trade unions

Busy Week for Pittsburgh Area…

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Calling all activists! We have a busy day ahead of us on Thursday, April 24,  starting with a noon rally in Market Square for fair wages for women and low wage workers, then to support postal workers at Staples on McKnight Road, the to the Pump House for the first film of the season: Sacco and Vancetti! Top it off on Saturday afternoon at the Pump House for a discussion on the fight for meaningful immigration reform. Join us!

Thursday, April 24 from 12:00 to 1:00 pm The Equal Pay Rally is on at Market Square. The rally will focus on the minimum wage, the impact of the gender wage gap on Pittsburgh families, and economic justice for all. The students of the Women and Girls Foundation (WGF) GirlGov program will have an Equal Pay Bake Sale at the rally to help illustrate the wage gap. Men will be charged $1 per item, and women will be charged 75 cents to exemplify the impact economic discrimination has on every aspect of our daily lives. We also are going to have "Will Work for Equality" t-shirts.

Thursday April 24, 2:30 PM – 6:30 PM, Rally in support of postal workers! At STAPLES, 4801 McKnight Road, Pittsburgh, PA. 15237. Demonstrations will occur at Staples stores across the country on April 24 to protest the deal between Staples and the U.S. Postal Service that jeopardizes mail service and thousands of good jobs. The deal takes living-wage USPS jobs and full service U.S. Post offices and replaces them with knock-off post offices at Staples staffed with low wage employees. This is privatization and a race to the bottom for customers, workers and our communities.  The Staples deal is bad for the consumers who will pay the same for less service. The public has a right to post offices and services that are staffed by uniformed employees that are accountable and sworn to safeguard your mail.

Continue reading Busy Week for Pittsburgh Area… →

health care, Steelworkers, trade unions

AFL-CIO’s Trumka Praises Pittsburgh Labor Movements

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By Ann Belser

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

April 10, 2014 – Pittsburgh, the cradle of the American union movement, is now nurturing a new generation of union workplaces.

“There’s more organizing drives going on in Pittsburgh than in any other city of the country,” said Richard Trumka, the national president of the AFL-CIO, in Washington, D.C., who came home to Pittsburgh Thursday to address the 41st Constitutional Convention of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.

Mr. Trumka, a former mine worker who grew up in Nemacolin, Greene County, said in his speech that there are 45,000 people who are in the midst of organizing campaigns at their workplaces in Western Pennsylvania.

In addition to the SEIU campaign targeting health care provider UPMC, there are high-profile campaigns at Duquesne, Robert Morris and Point Park universities. An effort to organize workers at the Rivers Casino is under way, as well.

Part of the change in unionization efforts has been that instead of various unions organizing businesses on their own, unions have come together to help each other.

Continue reading AFL-CIO’s Trumka Praises Pittsburgh Labor Movements →

Cooperatives, Economy, Green Jobs, Steelworkers

‘Clean and Green’ Industrial Laundry Comes to Pittsburgh as a Worker Cooperative

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By CUNY CED

Pittsburgh, PA is the home of a new worker cooperative, the ‘Clean and Green Laundry.’  The industrial-scale cleaning firm was brought into being by a joint effort of the United Steel Workers and the City University of New York School of Law’s Community Economic Development (CED) Clinic, both of whom are in a new partnership with the Mondragon Cooperatives, the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, located in Spain.

Under the new partnership, the CED Clinic, in collaboration with Pennsylvania-based Regional Housing Legal Services, will help launch the job-creating effort, an eco-friendly laundry based on Mondragon’s cooperative model.

Pittsburgh Clean & Green aims to re-employ 100 primarily minority laundry workers, who were laid off when their Sodexho Corporation laundry closed. They will work in a new state-of-the-art facility in Pittsburgh’s Central District.

 

Photo: Industrial laundry similar to ‘Clean & Green’

CUNY’s CED Clinic will provide legal support for a new model of unionized worker cooperatives—called “union coops”—recently launched by Mondragon, the United Steelworkers union (USW), and the Ohio Employment Ownership Center (OEOC).

“Union coops can create well-paying, democratically run workplaces in communities hard hit by the economic recession,” explains Carmen Huertas-Noble, associate professor and director of the CED Clinic. “The union component of the model provides front line worker-owners with the security of a collective bargaining agreement and leverages the organizational expertise and economic power of the labor movement.”

Continue reading ‘Clean and Green’ Industrial Laundry Comes to Pittsburgh as a Worker Cooperative →

Steelworkers, trade unions, Youth and students

The Abuse and Exploitation of the ‘New Working Class’

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Colleges are hiring more ‘adjunct’ professors

By Bill Schackner

Beaver County Blue via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

April 5, 2013 – Adam Davis calls it his “corner office.”

Actually, it’s the corner of a hallway at the Community College of Allegheny County, where Mr. Davis, an adjunct science professor, teaches without the benefit of an office.

Students can get extra help outside class if they don’t mind finding him and standing in an out-of-the-way section of a corridor that is quieter than meeting in the cafeteria but hard to find. “It doesn’t go anywhere,” Mr. Davis said of the corridor.

He acknowledges that the same could be said for his career. After all, the 34-year-old professor ekes out a living teaching eight classes this semester on three different campuses with no long-term prospects for health insurance or a retirement plan. “The metaphor doesn’t escape me,” he said.

The struggles of adjuncts such as Mr. Davis usually play out largely unnoticed on campuses. But starting today, their stories take center stage at a three-day conference organized by the United Steelworkers aimed at drawing attention to what has been dubbed the new campus majority: temporary instructors.

They are hired at low pay without hope of tenure or the academic freedom protections that go with it. Continue reading The Abuse and Exploitation of the ‘New Working Class’ →

health care, Manufacturing, Steelworkers, trade unions

Aliquippa’s 1937 J&L Workers Come Up In Supreme Court Wrangling Once Again—This Time Over Health Care

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Ten Steelworkers, Five Justices, and the Commerce Clause

By Amy Davidson
The New Yorker

If there had been Twitter, instead of news tickers, in February, 1937, reporters and other observers would have been using it to follow the arguments before the Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.

It was the central case of five, argued in one extraordinary round, which challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act.

The J. & L. dispute involved ten steelworkers who had been fired from the company’s Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, mills for trying to organize a union. As with this week’s hearings on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, those deliberations were being watched with an anxiety that extended well beyond any concern for the protagonists in the suit, or even the law in question, to an entire vision of government.

Jones & Laughlin and its companion cases involved the Commerce Clause, the constitutional conductor for a whole orchestra of New Deal programs and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s more urgent efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression. (It gives Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”) The post-1937 conception of the Commerce clause has, as Jeffrey Toobin noted yesterday, become an assumed part of any number of government efforts today; it is the defense for challenges to the individual mandate but also to other aspects of the A.C.A., like provisions protecting people with preëxisting conditions.

Continue reading Aliquippa’s 1937 J&L Workers Come Up In Supreme Court Wrangling Once Again—This Time Over Health Care →

2012 Election, Blue Dogs, Democrats, Steelworkers, trade unions

United Steelworkers Endorse Critz Over Altmire

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Leo Gerard Greets Mark Critz

GOP-led Redistricting Unsettles Old Patterns

By Timothy McNulty
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jan 23., 2012 – The United Steelworkers union announced its support this morning of U.S. Rep. Mark Critz, D-Johnstown, in the increasingly competitive race for the new 12th congressional district.

Republican mapmakers combined the seats of Mr. Critz and fellow Democratic incumbent Jason Altmire of McCandless, forcing them to face off in the state’s primary April 24th. The endorsement by the union, and its 32,000 active and retired members, should help Mr. Critz introduce himself to voters in Mr. Altmire’s backyard in suburbs north of the city.

"Mark has always been there, not just for the Steelworkers union, but for working families," said union president Leo Gerard at the announcement at union headquarters Downtown.

Every local union president in the new district (which includes parts of Allegheny, Beaver, Cambria, Cambria, Lawrence, Somerset and Westmoreland counties) endorsed Mr. Critz, and the union has committed to do phone banks, mailers and door-knocking on the candidate’s behalf. Steelworker and retiree volunteers will also phone members of other unions to urge support of Mr. Critz, the USW’s political director Tim Waters said.…

[Text of USW Statement at Close of Article]

Continue reading United Steelworkers Endorse Critz Over Altmire →

Steelworkers, trade unions, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

Do They Really Want ‘Specific Demands’ from the Occupiers?

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By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin’ On

I’m getting fed up with pompous pundits lecturing the ‘Occupy!’ movement for not having a set of specific demands.

A case in point: New York Time financial columnist Joe Nocera quoted at length in a story by Phoebe Mitchell in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on Nov 29.  He was speaking at the Amherst Political Union, a debate club at UMass Amherst.

Nocera starts off with the now usual tipping of the hat to the protestors:

“Nocera believes the anger caused by income inequality, a divisive issue across the country in this prolonged economic downturn, is the fuel for both popular uprisings. ‘If we lived in a country that had a growing economy and where the middle class felt that they could make a good living and had a chance for advancement and a decent life, there would be no tea party or Occupy Wall Street,’ he said.”

But we don’t live in such times, and the more interesting story is that OWS and its trade union allies are displacing the Tea Party, and energizing the progressive grassroots. Nocera, however, makes OWS the target.

“He believes that for the Occupy Movement to be successful, it must frame clear demands that outline a plan for creating jobs and refashioning Wall Street to benefit the entire country and not just a select few wealthy investors. Without a solid plan for moving forward, he said, the Occupy protestors will be continued to be viewed by Wall Street supporters as little more than “a gnat that needs to be flicked from its shoulder blades.”

A ‘gnat’ indeed. In due time, a progressive majority may well come to view our dubious ‘Masters of the Universe’ on Wall St as bothersome gnats to be flicked away.

But to get to the main point, Nocero knows perfectly well that there is any number of short, sweet and to the point sets of demands aimed at Wall Street finance capital and the Congress it works to keep under its thumb. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO has been hammering away at his six-point jobs program—one point of which is a financial transaction tax of Wall Street as a source of massive new revenues to fund the other five.

The United Steel Worker’s Leo Gerard has been tireless for years working for a new clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy that could create millions of new jobs and get us out of the crisis in a progressive way.

So what happens when these demands are put forward? With our Wall Street lobbyists working behind the scene, the best politicians money can buy declare them ‘off the table.’ Nocera and others of like mind in punditocracy put the cart before the horse. OWS arose as a result of a long train of abuses, year after year of sensible, rational, progressive demands and programs swept off of Congress’s agenda like so many bread crumbs from a dining table. Not even brought to a vote. OWS and a lot of other people are fed up with being dismissed.

The pundits should watch what they wish for. The demands and packages of structural reforms will be back, much sharper and clearer, and with the ante upped by hundreds of thousands in the streets, as well as millions turning out for the polls. In fact, the solutions have always been there for anyone with ears to hear. We’ll see if our voices are loud enough to crack the ceiling at the top, and let some light shine through.

Infrastructure, Steelworkers, trade unions, Wall Street, Youth and students

Labor & ‘Occupy Pittsburgh’ Join Together in Nationwide ‘Bridge’ Actions

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…Joining hands to demand taxes on Wall Street to create jobs repairing bridges and other infrastructure

The Greenfield Bridge is in such bad repair that it has catch pans under it to capture falling debris. As several hundred protestors surged across the bridge – including construction workers bearing tools and equipment – a large "Good Jobs Now" banner was displayed for drivers on Interstate 376.