Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 12, 1991 TAG: 9103120237
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
Many of the 1,000 strikers held aloft "UAW On Strike" signs as the 6:30 a.m. shift started at the Pulaski County heavy-truck manufacturer.
"Nobody went through the picket lines at all," said Joe Parah, president of Local 2069. Only four of the 15 non-union members employed by Volvo went to work, he said.
He expected a similar show of union solidarity in the 3-day-old strike again today.
Union members received a letter Monday from Volvo's president and chief executive officer, Thage Berggren, outlining the company's proposal.
UAW negotiators had rejected the offer shortly before midnight Friday, when the three-year contract expired.
The proposal includes a 3 percent pay raise, starting September, another 3 percent raise in March 1992 and a lump-sum payment of 3 percent effective a year later.
Workers at Volvo earn an average of $13.50 an hour, one of the highest-paying jobs in the New River Valley.
The company's offer says it also includes "no reductions" in health insurance programs, an increase in the basic pension in 1993 and a larger fund to compensate employees for "any scheduled shutdown weeks during April and May of 1991."
"That's just the headlines," said Parah. "That letter is misleading."
He said the union objects to details in the original proposal that are not in the letter, but declined to elaborate.
UAW spokesman Karl Mantyla in Detroit could not be reached for comment.
One worker on the picket line, Sammy Saunders, said the company proposed that employees use specific doctors and hospitals - not named in the proposal - or else pay 20 percent of the cost for medical care.
Local 2069 represents about 670 Volvo workers and 380 union members who have been laid off over the past five months.
The two sides are communicating between their headquarters - Volvo in Greensboro, N.C., and the union in Detroit, Parah said.
Bill Brubaker, production manager at the Dublin plant, said the company had not hired replacement workers.
"We feel that our work force is a good one. They've performed well, until this point," he said. "We have no intention of hiring replacement workers."
Brubaker said the plant's production line was shut down Monday, and some of 350 salaried employees were reassigned to support work at Volvo's other two plants in Ohio and Utah.
Neither of those plants is affected by the strike, he said. The Utah plant is not unionized, and the Ohio plant has a contract with a union other than the UAW, he said.
Berggren, in his letter to employees, encouraged an end to the labor dispute. It ended by saying: "A widely publicized work stoppage can only hurt everyone, endangering the reputation we together have carefully built for the people, the plant and the product."
by CNB