All’s well at Honeywell thanks to global solidarity
By Tony Burke, Unite assistant general
secretary
After a bitter 13-month lock out, the United Steelworkers union
in the USA has scored an important victory in the global union
fight against multi-national corporations.
The United Steelworkers (USW) this week announced a new
three-year agreement with the company. This ended the 13-month
lockout by Honeywell International at its uranium processing plant
in Metropolis, Illinois, the largest conversion plant in the world
to produce nuclear fuel for commercial reactors.
Honeywell had locked out 230 USW members – and was demanding
major changes to working agreements.
However, the new agreement retains all the major provisions that
Honeywell sought to end - including seniority rights, the company
pension and healthcare schemes for current workers and retirees,
plus overtime pay practices.
US unions have long suffered at the hands of multi-national
companies seeking to end healthcare and pension schemes as well as
replacing long serving staff with 'low cost' or temporary
workers.
Honeywell hired hundreds of scabs to keep the plant running but
the company did not count on a global union response, from European
unions and Unite in the UK.
Darrell Lillie, the president of the USW Local 7-669 said his
members had fought one-day longer on all the core issues and won
them to our satisfaction: “All of us who were locked out by
Honeywell in June of last year who want to go back to work are
doing so with union pride, a union contract and union
solidarity."
The USW said the company had been consistently negative during
negotiations until European unions began to pile pressure on the
company.
Unite, the USW’s sister union in the global union Workers
Uniting, was instrumental in getting the German based European
works council to intervene and Unite officials attended the
Honeywell stockholders annual meeting and sought face to face
meeting with stockholders to end the lock-out and negotiate a deal
with the USW.
“Once these things happened,” said Lillie “the company threw a
fit.”
One of the issues that held up the return to work was the
question of the replacement workers that took over union jobs.
Under the terms of the back to work agreement the replacement
workers will leave. USW union members will return to work under a
transition procedure required by the US National Regulatory
Commission (NRC) for safety retraining and re-certification.
For the hard hit US labour movement this is a significant
victory and shows that the power of well co-ordinated and
determined global union solidarity works.
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