
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, September 23, 1994                   TAG: 9409230120
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TENTATIVE CONTRACT AT YOKOHAMA

The end of a nearly nine-week strike at Yokohama Tire Corp.'s Salem plant may be near as company and union leaders announced Thursday they had reached an agreement on a new contract after three days of intense bargaining.

The agreement still is subject to approval by members of Local Union 1023 of the United Rubber Workers union.

The contract will be explained to union members at a meeting scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday at the Salem Civic Center. Members will have 48 hours to consider the contract's terms and will vote on it Wednesday between 2 and 6 p.m.

Both sides declined Thursday to discuss terms of the proposed contract until it has been described in detail to union members. About 760 union members have been on strike since midnight July 23.

Wayne Friend, president of the local, said he would recommend approval of the agreement "as the best possible thing I think we can acquire at this time."

A federal mediator played a role in getting the union and company back to the bargaining table Monday. They had not met since Sept. 1 when the company made what it characterized as its final offer. The union membership turned down that offer without even taking a vote.

"We're all very tired," Stephen L. Kessing, Yokohama's vice president of human resources, said Thursday morning when the company and union announced the agreement at the Roanoke Airport Marriott hotel. The settlement came hours earlier, between 2 and 3 a.m. Thursday, he said.

The major issue keeping Yokohama and the union from reaching a new agreement had been the company's demand that more workers be made eligible to work weekends so the plant could be brought up to full production on a seven-day basis.

The union had rejected the company's proposal to make 175 more employees, who had been hired since Jan. 1, 1984, eligible to work Saturdays and Sundays.

About 150 union members who were hired after 1991 already were working weekends.

Picket lines will stay at the Indiana Avenue plant until a new contract is ratified, Friend said.

The Rubber Workers have struck four foreign-owned tire companies in the United States this summer.

Tentative contract agreement also has been reached between the union and the Japanese-owned Dunlop plant in Huntsville, Ala., and a ratification vote is scheduled there today.

Settlements have not been reached at U.S. plants of Italian-owned Pirelli/Armstrong and Japanese-owned Bridgestone/Firestone.

Yokohama Tire is owned by Yokohama Rubber Co. Ltd. of Japan.

by CNB