Christopher Peak Photo
Union VP Luis Rodriguez, at center, on Wednesday’s picket line.
Factory workers in Fair Haven Heights saved their pensions. Now they’re fighting for their jobs.
Nearly 100 unionized employees at the Lenox Street plant, which produces coated fabrics, are attempting to negotiate their first contract with a new boss. Trelleborg AB, a global engineering company headquartered in Sweden that employs 23,000 workers, acquired the factory from Uretek in November 2014. (The New Haven plant also has 40 non-unionized employees.)
The new owners continued to operate under the three-year contract members of UNITE HERE Local 151 union had signed with Uretek. That agreement is set to expire next Friday, June 30. The parties have yet to come to an agreement about a key provision in what would be a new contract: when the company can initiate layoffs.
Adjustment to any new boss is tough, noted Frances Boyes, the director of representation from the New England Joint Board UNITE HERE, which is assisting Local 151. He said the talks on a new contract have been stuck on two major points.
The company wanted to switch all employees off a traditional employer-funded pension to a 401(k) retirement plan, she said. The union protested that the change would endanger workers’ savings. Pensions come with a set monthly check that’s guaranteed by the federal government; employees manage their own 401(k) accounts after retirement and could lose big on the stock market. After hearing their concerns, Trelleborg relented on Tuesday, according to the union.
Maurice Scott leads the chants.
But there’s still the outstanding issue of outsourcing. The current union contract includes language saying that management may not initiate layoffs for work traditionally done in New Haven by switching the work to another location. (One exception: If the government issues a stop-work order.)
The new owner wants to delete that provision.
Local 151 members want to keep it. They argue that the language change would give Trelleborg the leeway to restructure, moving any production to North Carolina, where the company has centralized its American operations, or elsewhere overseas, so long as other production replaces it in New Haven.
If it’s removed, union members believe they’ll suffer the same fate as Archer Rubber in Milford, Mass., a sister company that Trelleborg purchased in the same deal as Uretek. That factory was shuttered in April 2016 and demolished this January.
“We’re a union facility making textiles in New England. We know that story, right. We know what’s happened over the last four or five decades just like this,” Boyes said. “We do not want to see it happen here.”
Neither side seems willing to capitulate, she added.
A Trelleborg employee at the New Haven offices said she was not authorized to speak on the company’s behalf. The company did not provide further comment on the negotiations by the time this story was published.
Milton Mira, the union president: 140 families need this contact.
Around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, union members participated in an “informational picket.”
“When you’re at the negotiating table, you’re not able to bring the voices or frustrations or the experiences of the rank and file. What we’re trying to do is give them the opportunity to be actively participating in these negotiations,” Boyes said. “The company also needs to see it’s not just the six workers and two union reps at the table that we’re dealing with. We represent an entire factory, and this decision is monumental.”
In red shirts, they marched in a circle outside the factory, joined by supporters from Unidad Latina en Accion, the Connecticut Federation of Young Workers, Industrial Workers of the World and Yale grad students from UNITE HERE Local 33.
“What do we want?” Maurice Scott, the union’s shop steward, shouted through a megaphone. “Contract!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
In another chant, Scott yelled, “Trelleborg, you can’t hide! We can see your greedy side!”
Factory employees produce fabric coated in urethane or rubber that can be used for personal flotation devices, airplane evacuation slides, inflatable mattresses and hospital beds.
They first unionized in 1987 to protest dangerous conditions at the plant. At the time, hazardous conditions led to an outbreak of hepatitis; at least 10 workers at the time contracted the disease.
In more recent times, workers have experienced crushed limbs, burns, hair caught in machinery and asthma from chemical exposure, said William Wilkes, a 12-year employee in the hazardous waste department who said the fumes give him vertigo.
The federal government settled several cases with Uretek, most recently for $14,900 in May 2013. Trelleborg hasn’t had any enforcement actions from the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration since the acquisition.
William Wilkes, at right, says he’s willing to walk out if negotiations falter.
Despite the hazards, workers say the factory has given them stable manufacturing jobs that they don’t want to see leave New Haven. One noted that the plant was able to weather even the economic turndown in 2008. Several employees once believed Trelleborg’s purchase (and the new owner’s $49.1 billion market capitalization) would power improvements at the factory, but now they wonder if their jobs will be shipped down south.
More negotiations are scheduled next week. If they fall through, Local 151 members will decide whether they want to escalate with a strike.