Union lawsuit hurts everyone involved

The norm for steel companies over the last 50 years has been to flee the Pittsburgh area — not return.

That’s why it came as such a welcome surprise for residents of Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, when Pittsburgh-based special metals producer Allegheny Technologies Incorporated opened the doors to its new $1.2 million plant last May.

But while the company promised an unheard-of economic boost to the formerly industrial town, much of Brackenridge has been left waiting. Residents with jobs in the plant have been locked out for more than half of the factory’s life span. The lockout, which began Aug. 15, was in response to the factory workers balking at accepting the concessions ATI said were essential to help them compete against domestic rivals and Chinese imports.  ATI left laborers without pay and might soon revoke the meager unemployment benefits that supported them through the winter.

The odd circumstances of Brackenridge’s situation don’t seem to fit together without one extra detail — the 2,200 locked-out workers are dues-paying members of the powerful and far-reaching labor union United Steelworkers. And when big, international unions like USW indulge in long-term feuds with management, it’s unlikely that local workers stand to profit.

Ideally, USW should stand for the wages of workers in the Brackenridge plant. But the reality of the union’s reaction to the lockout is that it has not accomplished that. The suit that the USW and others in big labor are now bringing against ATI only exacerbates the standoff, and locked-out employees — not union bosses — are the ones shouldering the conflict’s burden.

Yet this is exactly the strategy with which the labor syndicate has approached the situation over the past six months — making a dispute over new health benefits into a federal case in the care of the National Labor Relations Board.

Early last August, USW rejected a final contract offer from ATI that stipulated, among other things, mild employee contributions to health care premiums and what union leaders referred to as “two-tier wages” — a policy of offering new hires lower wages than current employees. As of December, the NLRB had accepted USW’s request to file a charge of unfair labor practices against the steel company.

USW, whom Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times called the country’s “biggest, most combative industrial union,” has seemed prepared to sacrifice much in the continuing lockout, which at seven months has become the longest in the Pittsburgh region in more than 30 years. But it’s not the union’s leadership Downtown who are taking the brunt of the blow. Instead, factory workers in Brackenridge are taking most of the hits in a battle union leadership is prolonging for its own interests.

“Any way you look at it, the steelworker is going to have a difficult time,” Gary Chaison, Clark University professor of industrial relations, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a Dec. 18, interview.

Functionally jobless members of the Brackenridge community obviously aren’t receiving pay from the plant management. But the alternative sources many have been relying on to cover the lockout interim are beginning to dry up.

Governmental unemployment insurance, which lasts six months, is about to expire. And while the $500 per week from the government was anything but comfortable for workers’ families, the USW’s replacement is even scantier. A union-provided fund assuring $200 per chapter member per week during a lockout is clearly inadequate as a worker’s family’s primary or only source of income.

If the point of the USW’s lawsuit with the NLRB is to defend its Brackenridge members’ livelihoods, the strategy of simply waiting out management until the company meets union demands is woefully misguided.

According to the NLRB, the agency has received and filed nearly 225,000 unfair labor practices charges over the past 10 years. But of the 148,000 charges that were eventually filed in court, a mere 9 percent ever saw complaints issued. What’s more, the legal process frequently took up to a decade.

No one can be sure if the ATI-USW legal feud and the workers’ lockout will last a full 10 years. But if the situation in Brackenridge ends up like the labor impasse at a major Sherwin Alumina plant in Gregory, Texas, then workers need to be prepared for the long haul.

Four-hundred-fifty steelworkers in Gregory have been stuck in a similar lockout for nearly 16 months, despite membership in the USW and legal action pending with the NLRB. In July 2014, management at the Sherwin Alumina plant, which has been running in the small Texas community for over half a century, proposed an increase in employee contribution to employer-provided health care plans from $65 to $175. To this day, the USW has yet to come to an agreement with the company to allow workers back into the factory, and it’s a matter of concern whether it will be able to do so here in western Pennsylvania.

Accusations of greed against the company management may or may not be well placed, but it’s hard to deny that the USW’s tactics in what Chaison called “an old-fashioned Pennsylvania labor war” aren’t based in realistic thinking so much as in wishful thinking.

New Jersey-based steel industry analyst John Tumazos also saw an alarming amount of out-of-date thinking from union leadership. “Leo Gerard, the [USW’s] president, is thinking of the century-old model … the union isn’t making things better,” Tumazos told the New York Times in a Dec. 3, interview.

If Gerard and union leadership fail to comprehend the realities of competition — either domestic or foreign — in today’s steel market, their grasp of ATI’s ability to function with locked-out union workers is even weaker. A contingent of 32 much-hated scabs is still able to temporarily run the Brackenridge plant at a pace that’s just as profitable for the company as hundreds of union laborers. Certainly, this doesn’t bode well for local union workers hoping to return to their jobs in the plant any time soon.

The USW seem to be willing to gamble a lockout of indefinite length, with minimal credible leverage with ATI’s management and with the eventual outcome doubtful in general. Fortunately for Gerard and other higher-ups in the union with power to end the standoff, however, none of the losses will be too personal.

No matter how workers in Brackenridge look at ATI’s modified benefits, it’s not worth the pointless, collective union-led unemployment.

It seems like the USW have forgotten that a union’s purpose is to protect wages, not keep workers from their work.

Henry primarily writes on government and domestic policy for The Pitt News.

Write Henry at hgg7@pitt.edu.