In unemployment hotbed, no sympathy for workers in 3-year-old walkout

By Mike Stuckeymsnbc.com

updated 8:16 a.m. ET, Fri., April 10, 2009

Mike Stuckey

Senior news editor

ELKHART, Ind. - In a town with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, being on strike is not going to get you much sympathy. And staying on strike for three years is going to earn you even less.

“People don’t respect us. They look at us like, ‘You are stupid because you’re on strike when you could have a good job,’” said David Kish, 62, who spent 40 years making trumpets, trombones and other musical instruments at Elkhart’s Vincent Bach plant before he and 230 fellow union members walked off their jobs April 1, 2006. About 130 workers remain on strike.

The strike has never officially ended, although production at the plant was disrupted only briefly before the company hired replacement workers. It later lured a number of strikers to cross the picket lines.

“Scabs,” said John Fruchey, vice president of United Auto Workers Local No. 364, to which the striking workers belong.

Kish, Fruchey, Local President Robert Allen and other union members meet up once a week at Elkhart’s Disabled American Veterans hall to collect their strike pay and share coffee and doughnuts. There they chat bitterly about Conn-Selmer, the Bach instrument line’s parent company, and the 70 or so replacement workers and strike-breakers they say are now working for far less than the average $20 an hour that was paid in the plant’s heyday.

Union officials said the strikers walked out when contract talks broke down over wages and benefits, with the company demanding 40 percent pay cuts and substantial reductions in vacation, retirement and health insurance.

'Corporate terrorism'

“We would have extended the current contract, we asked for nothing,” said Kish, who believes the company wanted to force a strike to destroy the union. “I call it corporate terrorism.”

Steinway Musical Instruments, the New York Stock Exchange-listed company that owns Conn-Selmer, declined to comment. The company has been trying since 2007 to get the union decertified, but the results of a disputed vote on the issue won’t be decided until President Obama fills vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.

In the meantime, the striking Conn-Selmer workers pull shifts on the picket line outside the plant, gathering every now and then for larger reunions, such as a three-year anniversary potluck at a park in Elkhart that featured labor singer Anne Feeney.

If the union is decertified at Conn-Selmer, local leaders say the strike would finally end and they’d lose their $200 week strike benefits and union-paid medical insurance. But many of their members would be free to pursue retirement benefits.

If the union is not decertified, they are less certain about what will happen. The company and the union have continued to negotiate since the strike. In September, they appeared to be moving closer to an agreement over severance packages that could help conclude the dispute.

Regardless, many of the older strikers said they think their working days are over, a conclusion hard to argue with in a town where unemployment hovers around 19 percent.

“You don’t find jobs when you’re 60-plus,” said Fruchey, 62.

“We don’t want to go to McDonald’s and flip burgers,” agreed Kish.

JonR

kind of like putting a gun to your own head and threatening to commit suicide if you don't do what I want...

Did you hear me? if you don't do this I am going to pull the trigger!!! Ok, go ahead....

What did union management know and when?!

Three years later and they still get union benefits for being on strike?

Trying to fire someone in a union can difficult at best.

A bit of background on this company, with which I am very familiar:

Several years ago, a couple of Michael Milken's old Drexel buddies decided to get off Wall Street and go into the "Music Industry." They had played guitars in high school, and thought it would be a fun industry to work in. So they put together a takeover of Steinway, the famed piano manufacturer. Within only a handful of years, they had taken over every major domestic manufacturer of band instruments, consolidated production, downsized work forces--including most of those with the industry knowledge base, and sent a great deal of their manufacturing production overseas.

Their product quality--once the envy of the world--is now a joke, as much of their products are made in China, India, and Mexico. Instruments they made in the 1930s-80s routinely sell for 5 to 10 times the MSRP of current production, and are still the desired tools of the trade.

So in summary--you have a couple assclowns that bought a business they know nothing about, acquired every competitor, destroyed the company's brand equity and product quality, decimated the company's expertise base, shipped jobs overseas, obliterated consumer choices, laid waste to a "company town" (which now has the highest unemployment rate in the US) and will probably retire as very wealthy men.

If you want to muse over a 3 year long strike, fine. But will you knee-jerk anti-union guys PLEASE tell me why you so begrudge middle class, highly skilled workers, near retirement age, who just want their $20/hr jobs back? And why blame the little guy, who just showed up to work every day for decades-- just like your father did-- without even questioning the competence and ethics of the company's management?

I was pointing out that after 3 years of striking, the odds of getting their jobs back is nil. It would seem their job wasn't a requirement in their life or they would have found another by now. I've been a scab - I've crossed the line. Taking care of my family care was more important than not getting paid. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere.

I think these guys probably won't be getting their job back at this point. . . .

At least they're bleeding the union for some of their dues back.

In a global economy, sometimes $20/hr jobs simply no longer are $20/hour jobs anymore. People struggle with this concept until it is too late.

No disrespect to workers rights,

But I think my post number 3 at this point says it all...

I had one of my office workers walk into my office a few months ago, (the day after my office manager quit) told me if I didn't give her a 30% raise she was leaving, she mentioned that since the office manager had already left I had no choice or none of the office work would get done if she left.. (she was right)

Now 60 days later she sat in my office crying as to why I had fired her? I just sat their and shook my head..

They went on strike only because the company mandated 40% pay cuts and benefit cuts. They did not go on strike demanding a raise. This was brought on by the company.

If anyone in this story had intent to kill, it is the management. ("Kill" used here metaphorically, as by the Hockey Dad.)

And I agree, their jobs are never coming back. But there isn't a whole hell of a lot of work available in Elkdorf. Management is seeing to that-- there will be even more job losses once the company goes under.

I have absolutely no problem with skilled workers earning as much as they can per hour, even well above $20 per hour.

On the other hand, nothing guarantees skilled workers anything at all, and this is an example where they may have been better off in the long-run by realizing earlier on that their local market value was apparently way bellow what they believed it to be.

I feel bad for them, but that is the way it goes. Their loss is now someone else's job...

When the company is looking for a 40% pay cut and the union demands that pay remain unchanged, there is a wee bit of an impasse. Going on strike is designed to bleed the company to death to the point that they give in to demands. Of course the goal is to not totally kill the company, just wound it really severely and render it weak for years. The plan failed.

The management had no intent to kill the company. They simply replaced the workers with cheaper workers and got what they wanted/needed.

There is still a strong belief that a $20/hr job or any job for that matter, can only increase in value. In a free market, it can just as easily decrease in value and no union will ever agree to that concept until the factory closes and it is too late.

Unions play a dangerous game of "chicken" sometimes and unfortunately the little people are the ones always hurt.

I did not mean management had intent to "kill" the company. I meant management had intent to "kill" the workforce. "Kill" is of course a rather strong word, but it's your word, and I understand the metaphor, as I believe you understand my continuing it.

I do not argue that global economics have eviscerated the American workforce. There are larger forces at work; we all know that.

I simply questioned how anyone can, as a first instinct, use anti-union rhetoric to paint these unfortunate people as bad guys.

I had several friends who worked for EAL, I remember how adamant they were to fight management, and how they cried when they lost there jobs.... what a cluster f**k

Management didn't intend to kill the workforce because they still needed a workforce. They did, hovever, intend to de-ball the work force to stay competitive as a company. It worked.

I don't necessarily think any of these strikers are bad people but it is rather clear that all of them that are still striking did the math and figured out that they could still survive on $200/week off their union dues. They've been out of work for three years, the company has moved on with new staff, and these remaining strikers are welfare babies of the UAW. This strike will go on until they are decertified or die of old age. Sucks for UAW.

A common falsehood I see regularly is that business can expand, but not contract; that wages can increase, but not decrease; that benefits can be enhanced, but not reduced.

If something other than that happens, management/administration is blamed in a kneejerk manner. Even though, just possibly or mebbe, the company might be having problems financially.

I got no problems with the union concept--I paid dues to (AFL-CIO) UBC for 15-16 years, even held elected position within local--but what I saw was inflexible, 1920's era union attitude, and those days are long, long gone.

Look what the State Employees Association has done to California...they now wield such political power that they shape policy--fiscal and social--statewide.