“As we transition to green manufacturing, we have a major opportunity to reinvest in good jobs in this country,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. “But corporate America isn’t going to let that happen without a fight. Just like they’ve done for generations, UE is leading the way, on and off the job, on the picket line, and in our communities. To our UE family: we’ve got your back.”
Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor Austin Davis visited UE Local 506 members at the picket lines Monday evening, showing his and Governor Shapiro’s support of union workers.
Lt. Gov. Davis agreed with union members on strike that they deserve fair wages and signed a letter of support for UE Local 506 and 618, sending it to Wabtec executives.
He said he did so to let those executives know where the Commonwealth’s leadership stands on the situation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no mention by the company of the costs of Wabtec executives as a burden. According to the AFL-CIO, Wabtec CEO Rafael Santana received over $11 million in compensation in 2021 alone. Explained in another way, $11 million is equivalent to nearly 150 employees earning $75,000 each. For additional context, as described by the Economic Policy Institute, the CEO-to-worker compensation disparity has increased significantly over the decades: 15-to-1 in 1965, 44-to-1 in 1989, to now hundreds of times more today (between 200 to 300).
Workers at the Wabtec locomotive manufacturing plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, have walked off the job. Their demands get to the heart of bigger questions about the nature of work and the role workers can play in fights like climate change.
Workers at the Erie, Pennsylvania, train manufacturing complex Wabtec are poised to walk off the job should they decide the company’s contract offer is insufficient. One of their main priorities is a rarity for US unions: the right to strike over grievances.
According to chief steward Leo Grzegorzewski, 95 percent of grievances that reach the final step are rejected by Wabtec, forcing the union to go to arbitration at a cost of $9,000 each time. Since 2019, around 68 grievances have reached arbitration.
The Erie workers rarely struck over grievances when the plant was owned by GE—only four times from 2005 to 2019, for a total of 13 hours—but the possibility of a strike forced management to treat them with respect. Without it, workers say contract violations are rampant and management does as it pleases.
Time is running short and the distance separating Wabtec Corp. and its union workforce in Erie seems to be substantial.
The divide is big enough that members of locals 506 and 618, which represent more than 1,400 workers at Erie's Wabtec plants, have gone so far as to authorize a strike if negotiations fail.
Some union leaders say the fight to stop Cop City has significant stakes for the labor movement as a whole. “Working people always have to be wary of any repression against protesters, because there is a history in our country that once it’s used against anyone protesting government policies, it can be turned against workers in their union,” Carl Rosen, the general president of UE, says over the phone from Erie, Pennsylvania, where 1,400 UE members who work for Wabtec Corp. could soon go out on strike.
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said in the 18th century. Likewise, the right to strike is the fundamental source of a union’s power, and everywhere they have signed that right away. “No strike clauses,” which ban workers from striking during the course of a union contract, have been ubiquitous for decades — the price, companies argue, of having a contract at all. Breaking out of this power-sucking bargain is a vital task for the labor movement, if it ever wants to be able to stand up to corporate America in a meaningful way.
The good news is that at least one union is actively trying.
But Slawson, whose union agreed to forgo a cost-of-living increase in its last four-year contract, said the union’s proposal is designed in part to make up for earning power that has been lost due to historic inflation.
“Inflation has compounded exponentially since 2019 to the point where we have lost about 19 cents on every dollar,” Slawson said.
“When you haven’t had a pay raise in four years and no cost-of-living (increase), your buying power goes down. The whole community suffers from that,” Slawson said.