Plain Dealer (Cleveland), October 15, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

October 15, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition; All Editions

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. G1

HEADLINE: Foreign competition enters into local labor disputes

BYLINE: Thomas W. Gerdel, Plain Dealer Reporter

BODY:
Globalization and its threat to American jobs hangs over the United Steelworkers strike against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and talks at Alcoa Inc.'s Cleveland Works.
The Goodyear strike, now in its second week, was called partly to keep the Akron company from closing more U.S. plants and further eroding employment in the domestic tire industry. Union members also are fighting demands for health care and other concessions and want Goodyear - an international tire-maker with plants around the world - to make firm commitments for sizable future investments in its U.S. facilities.
"This is a union that's fighting very hard to preserve as much of the industry in the United States as it can," said Paul Clark, a professor who heads the department of labor studies and industrial relations at Pennsylvania State University. "They're kind of drawing a line in the sand."
Goodyear officials said the company needs a contract that's fair to all its stakeholders and enhances its ability to win customers with today's intense global competition.
"We're fighting to preserve the future of the last major American tire manufacturer," Jon Rich, president of Goodyear's North American Tire unit, said in a letter to employees after the strike began.
About 15,000 union workers are striking 16 Goodyear plants - 12 of them in the United States, including the company's Tech Center in Akron, and four in Canada.
Nobody can say how long the strike will go on, but on Friday Goodyear said it had borrowed nearly $1 billion to weather a longer strike. Goodyear is shipping products to customers from inventory, operating plants not affected by the strike, running affected plants with salaried workers and importing from its international operations.
Last year, more than 100 million tires - most of them sold in the replacement market - were imported into the United States, a new high. At the same time, domestic tire production has fallen every year since 2000, as older U.S. tire plants continue to shut down. The biggest recent increase in tire imports is coming from China. In the current strike, Goodyear says it can't accept a contract that creates cost disadvantages compared with its foreign rivals and imports.
The issue of globalization also hangs over contract negotiations between aluminum maker Alcoa and the United Auto Workers Local 1050, which represents about 830 hourly workers at the Cleveland Works. In recent years, the local forged-aluminum operation has lost some work to foreign locations.
And despite recent productivity improvements at the plant here, Alcoa managers say health care concessions and other changes are needed to keep the Cleveland Works globally competitive. Alcoa is one of the world's biggest aluminum producers, with 350 plants worldwide, and is posting record profits this year.
The search
for lower wages
Labor experts say no nation is safe from the impact of outsourcing, which is moving jobs and production from country to country in search of ever-lower wages.
"The larger issue for the United Steelworkers and other unions is what to do about a global economy that's out of control," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University. "We have to start holding companies accountable. This race to the bottom can't go on forever."
From a historian's perspective, the labor movement has not been able to deal effectively with globalization since the 1970s, when companies became more multinational in their operations, said Peter Rachleff, a professor and labor historian at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.
"The only answer is to create unions as transnational as the employers are," said Rachleff. Then labor would be able to speak with one voice around the world, he said.
He said it was only when national unions representing steel, autos and other industries were formed in the 1930s that the United States entered a 40-year era of mounting prosperity and steadily rising living standards that cut across all income levels. Since the 1970s, however, organized labor's power has weakened, and much more of the country's wealth has gone to the upper income brackets.
"Of all the unions, the Steelworkers have been trying in the last five years to build international ties," Rachleff said.
The United Steelworkers is working with the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions in Brussels, Belgium. The organization, which represents some 20 million workers worldwide, plays host to global labor conferences and helps promote global networking among various unions. The group urged its affiliated unions to send messages of support to the Steelworkers in the strike against Goodyear.
Seeking solidarity
around the world
"We also call on trade unions in the rubber industry - and particularly at Goodyear plants in Central and South America - to monitor inventories and production to ensure that they are not undermining the USW's strike action," ICEM General Secretary Fred Higgs said in a statement.
Susan Schurman, president of the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., which has ties to the AFL-CIO, said one answer to globalism is the growth of trade unions and collective bargaining in other countries, raising workers' pay and benefits. One example: In the late 1980s, collective bargaining in the South Korean auto industry helped boost wages and living standards, narrowing the gap between Korean and American wages and preventing drastic price undercutting by the Korean auto industry.
Schurman said unions also can fight against outsourcing by becoming partners with responsible employers to find ways to improve efficiencies and upgrade workers' skills through training programs.
However, some issues such as health care are bigger than collective bargaining can solve, she said. The burden of rising health care costs puts American automakers and other companies at a disadvantage when competing against rivals from countries where health care is provided by government programs.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: tgerdel@plaind.com, 216-999-4114