Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 2, 1994 TAG: 9409020063
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Friend was calling Richard Switzer, vice president of manufacturing at the 26-year-old tire plant. The message: Union workers were solidly opposed to what the company termed its final offer in contract negotiations and are ready to stay on the picket line in what has already become the longest strike in the plant's history.
The plant's managers had no immediate response. Company officials were meeting Thursday afternoon to discuss it, said John Lambert, a company spokesman.
The concessions the company said it has made in its latest offer simply restore some of the things management took away when contract talks began in June, several workers said after the meeting.
Roughly 800 workers, including about 760 members of Local 1023 of the United Rubber Workers, struck the plant when the union's last three-year contract expired at midnight on July 23.
The strike is nearing the end of its sixth week, making it the longest walkout by the union against the company since 1977, when the plant was first unionized. In 1988, workers struck for about four weeks.
The main issue preventing a settlement is the company's continued demand that the pool of employees eligible for weekend work be expanded to cover all those hired since 1984. That would affect about 150 workers. Another 150, hired since the 1991 contract was signed, already are required to work weekends.
"The people don't want this ... are not interested in it," Friend said of Yokohama's offer following the meeting.
Although Yokohama termed the offer as final, Friend said the company used the same term to describe its offer before the strike started. During the course of negotiations since then, the company has agreed to modify that proposal, among other things giving up on a demand that cost-of-living wage increases be tied to productivity.
No one knows if the company was serious about the latest offer being its final offer, said William Smith of Christiansburg, who was the first union president at the plant in 1977 and served again during a 1988 strike. "It's all a guessing game," he said.
Smith's son is a union worker and his son-in-law is in management at Yokohama. The union has fought hard over the years to gain its seniority rights and doesn't want to give them up over the issue of weekend work, Smith said.
The union workers don't seem worried about the possibility of the company trying to replace them with non-union workers.
"No matter who they bring in they can't run the plant like we run it," said Mike Anderson of Roanoke. "I think it's a bluff," he said of the company's most recent offer. "As long as we stay together we're all right."
Anderson said the workers are more united now than during the 1988 strike, which he said ended without any gains for the union. The workers are united, he said, and aren't going back until the company makes them an offer they can accept. Wages have not been an issue in this strike, the workers said, even though the only raises they've gotten since 1985 have been cost-of-living adjustments.
Under the old contract, Yokohama union workers had an average hourly wage and benefit package of $26.63.
That is one of the highest manufacturing wages in the Roanoke Valley, but near the bottom of the tire industry in total compensation, Friend said.
by CNB