UE NEWS Updates

On Wabtec’s second-quarter earnings call with investors yesterday, the company was forced to address the ongoing strike by members of UE Locals 506 and 618 at the company’s locomotive plant in Erie, PA. Chief Financial Officer John Olin admitted that “margins were down a little bit more than we expected. The key driver of that … was the inefficiencies we're experiencing at our facility in Erie behind the strike.”

For about two hours on Thursday, July 6, a busload of strikers from Wabtec’s Erie locomotive plant, joined by hundreds of supporters, chanted, sang and rallied outside Wabtec’s corporate headquarters. Fourteen hundred members of UE Locals 506 and 618 have been on strike since Thursday, June 22, when they voted down Wabtec’s last, best and final offer by a wide margin.

Over the past month and a half, UE members from Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California have spoken out in favor of proposed new Environmental Protection Agency rules on locomotive emissions. The new rules would improve air quality for rail yard workers, including hundreds of UE members who work as rail crew drivers, and the working-class communities surrounding rail yards. They would also help create good, union jobs.

On April 27 and 28, UE representatives participated in a Green Worker Organizing conference in New York City. The event, which was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung–New York Office, brought together leaders from unions, worker centers, and climate justice groups to discuss the need to organize unorganized workers as part of addressing climate change.