December 18, 2011
Are 1,203,053 people counting down to a tire plant closing?
By: Bob Ulrich
There are a lot of people who are very upset with Cooper Tire & Rubber Co.'s recent lock out of 1,051 workers at its Findlay, Ohio, consumer tire plant. And executives of the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union (USW) are only too happy to let you know who they are.
Of course, the 1,051 members of United Steelworkers Local 207L are not pleased.
I am guessing that the 1.2 million members, including retirees, of the USW apparently are standing together (not literally) against the "unfair lockout," to quote the union. So that is 1,201,051 against.
Wait, there are more. According to USW Secretary Treasurer Stan Johnson on Saturday, Dec. 17, 2011, the unions "which represent Cooper Tire facilities around the world are standing with us today."
Johnson singled out unions in Serbia (Nezavisnost) and the United Kingdom (Unite the Union), both of which represent workers at Cooper plants (earlier this month, Cooper acquired a tire plant in Krusevac, Serbia).
To date, no other Cooper plant workers have been locked out. But in the case of the Melksham, U.K., facility, Unite the Union has been distributing USW-provided literature to its members. (Isn't this what is meant by "preaching to the choir"?)
I checked out the websites for both Nezavisnost and Unite the Union, and could not find specific membership numbers. Cooper says the Serbian plant initially will employ 400 people.
In the USW's Dec. 17 release, the implication was that the overseas unions made up "thousands" of workers.
I'll go conservative and say the two represent 2,000 workers (which, on average, would closely match the size of the Findlay union). That ups the "against" total to 1,203,051.
Finally, a report in the "The Findlay Courier" revealed that two California residents claiming to be descendants of Cooper Tire's founders expressed support for the locked-out members.
Cooper says the company's origins started when brothers-in-law John Schaefer and Claude Hart purchased M and M Manufacturing Co. in 1914 and the Giant Tire & Rubber Co. in 1915. They moved their Akron, Ohio-based business to Findlay in 1917.
In a letter to Cooper Tire Chairman, CEO and President Roy Armes, Lingel Hart Winters, an attorney in San Francisco, and Janet Clinger, a retiree in Grass Valley, wrote they were "deeply disturbed" by Cooper's "callous" decision to lock out the workers.
This reminds me a little of former General Tire & Rubber Co. owner Jerry O'Neil's complaints about how new owner Continental AG was running the company after he sold the tire operations in 1987. He took the money and ran, well, retired; who cared what he thought afterward?
That's how I feel about what Winters and Clinger think. Regardless, that's two more against the lockout, bringing the total to 1,203,053.
There is no way Cooper is trying to close the plant, which has the capacity to produce 23,000 passenger and light truck tires per day, or 8.3 million a year, according to the 2011 Modern Tire Dealer Facts Issue. How do you replace that many tires, at least in a short period of time?.
When it gets up to speed, the Serbian plant will produce 3 million tires a year, but that would still leave Cooper more than 5 million tires short. Still... if the union and Cooper can't agree on a new contract, it could happen.
Then 1,203,053 people could be wrong. And 1,051 people would be out of a job.
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