Drawing the line for health care

NOBODY WAS ever going to get rich working on the production line at SK Hand Tools. Average pay for production workers at the company--which makes Sears' Craftsman brand--is a little more than $12 per hour.

But with overtime, you could pay the rent or a mortgage, and get your family health insurance. And with the help scholarships and loans, you could even put a kid through college.

That's what Emilio Lunar was looking to do when he stepped up to become a shop steward and member of the negotiating committee for Teamsters Local 743 last October. Although he's worked in the plant for 12 years, the 38-year-old Lunar is one of the younger people there, and had been advised to wait before running for a union position.

But with a new reform leadership at the head of the local, and aggressive new owners at SK, everyone saw a fight coming--and Lunar was elected. "In the middle of the last contract, [CEO Claude Fuger] asked for a 50 percent pay cut, and we denied it," Lunar said.

Now the fight is on--and it's tougher than anyone expected. The union's contact expired February 28, but the two sides kept negotiating after the Teamsters refused to accept management demands for a 20 percent permanent wage cut and a $4 per hour temporary reduction in pay. Then, in May, Fuger unilaterally cut off workers' health insurance.

"It's a very stressful situation for the workers here," Lunar said. "They don't know the next thing he's going to be cutting. He's been saying if he doesn't get the concessions he wants, he'll be closing. But we've been operating like this for six or seven months."

Workers have been stuck with the bill for the cutoff of their health insurance--which has meant tens of thousands of dollars for an emergency hernia surgery for one, and medications for a kidney transplant for another.

In response, the union filed charges of an unfair labor practice with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But with health care bills mounting, union members decided that enough was enough. They walked off the job August 25 to try to force Fuger to reinstate health care coverage while the NLRB considers the case.

Ever since, Lunar's been a fixture on the picket lines at the plant on Chicago's Southwest Side and at the distribution center in McCook, a nearby suburb, catching four or five hours of sleep a night.

Lunar also has been busy preparing for NLRB hearings, and he used a September 3 luncheon of labor leaders with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis as an opportunity to build support among Chicago union officials. And, like many SK Hand Tools workers, Lunar is an immigrant--he's originally from Guanajuato, Mexico--so he sought and received assistance from the local immigrant rights movement.

Many other SK workers have been busy as well. Strikers have appeared at an LGBT organizing meeting for the National Equality March in Washington with organizer Cleve Jones--and, on Labor Day, participated in an immigrant rights march and the official Chicago Federation of Labor rally.

Back on the picket line, workers regularly receive visitors--union members, sympathizers and community activists--who show up with food, money and donations. Politicians are taking note: Hilda Solis personally told Lunar that her office would "look into" the issue, and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn was scheduled to walk the picket line September 4.

IT'S A big profile for a small strike. With 75 workers, the walkout at SK Hand Tools will never show up in government statistics, which only include work stoppages involving 1,000 or more employees.

Of course, the timeliness of the health care debate has given this struggle a wider resonance, as has the fact that the workers make a well-known consumer product.

But the real reason that SK Hand Tools workers have captured such attention and won widespread support is the fact that they had the courage to draw the line at a time when unions are being battered into making huge givebacks to employers.

In manufacturing, workers in every industry are feeling the downdraft from the unprecedented union concessions to the Detroit Three automakers--givebacks that have cut the pay of most new hires in half, slashed benefits, and eliminated tens of thousands of jobs, all with the direct involvement of the Obama administration.

The impact of that defeat continues to ripple through the industrial Midwest. In Terra Haute, Ind., some 700 workers at a Bemis packaging plant voted August 30 to settle a tough 40-day strike that turned back employers' efforts to expand the use of temporary workers. But the union, members of Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, gave some ground on company demands to conduct a "health assessment risk" of employees to determine benefits.

Meanwhile, at Mercury Marine, a boat manufacturer in Wausau, Wis., members of International Association of Machinists Local 1947 voted to accept a 30 percent pay cut for new hires and workers recalled from layoff, a seven-year wage freeze for everyone else, and an increase in workers' health care costs.

For U.S. factory workers, even the good news often comes with a sour aftertaste. In a much-hyped announcement, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt declared that his company would invest $100 million in a plant to manufacture batteries in New York state--but only after the workers' union, the International Union of Electrical Workers-Communications Workers of America, voted to accept a two-year wage freeze and a lower-wage tier for new employees of $17 per hour, some $10 less than current workers.

So with the auto industry and GE leading the race to the bottom, it's no surprise that SK's CEO Fuger would seek big cutbacks. After all, if autoworkers' pay can be cut from around $28 to $14 an hour, why not demand that a worker getting $12 per hour be reduced to $8?

To try to sell the cutbacks, Fuger called workers into small meetings, said striker Norma Trinidad. He appealed for cooperation on the basis of Christian generosity--and then showed workers a chart that listed wages according to department, she said. "He said workers in France"--Fuger's country of origin--"make $8 to $10 per hour for this work, and if we're outside that, we're making too much," Trinidad said.

The workers didn't buy it. One of them, Joe Truschke, did some research on the Internet and concluded that SK Hand Tools workers were underpaid by $5 an hour. "We haven't had a wage increase in six years," he said.

And since last December, workers have been laid off for weeks at a time, then recalled for just a few days' work. Many say that management is violating contract rules requiring that layoffs take place according to seniority in a given department.

IF CONDITIONS at SK Hand Tools are bad, it's in no small part because of the corrupt former leadership of the 12,000-member Local 743.

As the strike entered its third day, former Local 743 President Richard Lopez--who once worked at SK Hand Tools--was sentenced to two years in prison for his role in stealing union elections in 2004 after halting an earlier vote with the opposition New Leadership slate in the lead.

Also heading to prison is the local's former comptroller and dues administrator, who was convicted of diverting ballots to friends, allies and even employers. David Rodriguez, a former union organizer, will go to jail, too, for his role in the scheme.

The U.S. Labor Department ordered and directly supervised a new election in Local 743 in the fall of 2007. The vote was won by the New Leadership slate headed by President Rich Berg, Secretary-Treasurer Eugenia Alvarez and Vice President Larry Davis.

Since taking over on January 1, 2008, New Leadership has had to contend with a union in financial and administrative disarray. As the local gears up for contract talks for 1,500 workers at the University of Chicago Hospital, it must also handle 120 collective bargaining agreements--three of which, on average, expire each month, Teamsters for a Democratic Union pointed out.

Many of those contracts are weak or poorly enforced--and at SK Hand Tools, the problems had been building for decades before Fuger and Cliff Rusnak, the company's vice president and board chairman, bought the company in 2005 from Facom, a French company.

It wasn't always this way. Kenny Sidler hired into the plant in November 1969, not long after Teamsters Local 743 organized the shop. Back then, workers did their jobs on a particular machine in a department, and that was that. Now, Sidler says of Fuger, "He's out to break the union. There's no doubt about that."

Fuger apparently thought he could have his way without serious resistance because the union had never had a strike. "Over the years, the union became weaker and got kicked around a lot," Sidler said. "Later on, [in 1985] Facom took us over. You were put somewhere, and you didn't have much say about it--if you did, you were written up or laid off."

Workers found themselves doing much more work. Sidler, for example, has worked for 32 years in the plant's heat treatment department--first with both a foreman and a helper, but now on his own. The overwork, he said, "cost me my finger 14 years ago. I had my finger ripped up, and I still suffer from depression. In the process of doing the foreman's job, my job and the apprentice's job, I hurt myself from them overworking me."

And since the layoffs began last year, Sidler has been forced to work in the materials handling and receiving departments as well--bringing his total number of jobs to six. "What they pay me is a joke," he said. "I should be doing $30 an hour, easy. Instead, its $17."

Other workers also report higher risk of injury from overwork--injuries that could bring grievous financial harm given the lack of health insurance. Maria Rodriguez, a 23-year veteran of the plant, was lucky. When she got her arm caught in a drill press, Dominick DiVincenzo, a quality control worker who oversees much of the machinery in the factory, heard her screams and quickly cut power to the machine to release the pressure. Rodriguez needed surgery on her arm, but was able to return to work.

"You have 50 to 60 tons of pressure coming down," on a typical a drill press in the plant, DiVincenzo said. "We're using hard steel to punch soft steel. You need very good health care coverage here."

Donna Pustul, who has set up and operated machines in the plant for 11-and-a-half years, can attest to that. She's had two close calls in recent years--her fingernails were ripped out when she caught her hand in a machine, and she had to be taken to a clinic after a spray of tiny metal chips somehow got behind her protective eyewear.

But Pustul, a Polish immigrant, stuck with the job to help support her family--including providing decent benefits.

Now, she's lost not only coverage for herself, but for her husband, who maintains trucks at a nonunion company where health care insurance is too expensive. She's been able to get coverage for her 13-year-old twin sons through Illinois' All Kids health insurance program, but problems are mounting.

"I'm supposed to be under control of my doctor, because I have a problems with my heart and high blood pressure, with my heart rate jumping around. I just bought a prescription because I had a refill, but I haven't gone to visit the doctor in a long time, because I don't have the money."

Despite such pressures, the SK Hand Tools picket lines are anything but downbeat. While no one is under any illusion about this struggle--there are still those contract concession demands to deal with after the health care issue is settled--workers are determined.

"This is a new union here," said Dave Biedrzycki, a shop steward and strike leader and a 25-year veteran of the plant, referring to Richard Berg's New Leadership slate. "I believe they've gotten stronger. That's why I became a union steward. I come from the people--I want to see people get what is right."