1/3/2024 0 Comments Humble pie peoriaSince then, the company has remade itself. How could the company build something as complicated as a 100-ton tractor without them?Ĭaterpillar has long been the world’s largest manufacturer of earthmoving equipment, but in the 1980s, hurt by Japanese competition and an unfavorable dollar-to-yen ratio, it experienced a near-fatal brush with red ink. The bigger the company, the harder that chore.Īt Cat, the UAW was confident to the point of being foolhardy. In recent years, the foremost protection for striking workers has been a company’s difficulty in fielding a full force of replacements. This makes the right to strike a risky one. Supreme Court opinion has left employers with a quirky opening: While strikers cannot be fired, a company does not have to make room for their return by letting go any replacement workers. Oddly enough, the firing of strikers is illegal in America, as it is in most democracies. Before that, pro-union public attitudes made such action taboo. This balance of power served as a solid foundation for labor negotiations until the late 1970s, when employers increasingly began to permanently replace strikers. Both sides hurt each other until one gives in. If talks fail, there is always the prospect of a strike, one side withholding labor and the other pay. In union shops, contracts are negotiated through collective bargaining. Most can be replaced as easily as the tire on a car. And with that, the strikers were also being told a hard-to-swallow truth about experienced workers in a high-tech world. With that, the strikers were told to return to their tool cribs even though they had no contract. “It’s clear that Cat is getting enough quality and quantity, maybe not as much as if we were in there, but the company is saying: ‘So what?’ ” “The only people being hurt by this strike are our good members,” he said. “If I represent management, and the workers want to organize, I can tell them: ‘Look what happened at Caterpillar. “The Caterpillar strike is a big balloon that just went poof,” said Neil Bernstein, a labor law professor at Washington University in St. But they will mean little unless they also contribute to the potency of the strike, once the big gun in labor’s arsenal, and one so prone to backfire these days. Those new approaches may well help restore union membership, which has now dwindled to 11% of the private work force. The walkout was rashly conceived and ineptly executed-and it now serves as a cautionary tale for a labor movement that is trying to rebuild itself through union mergers and a renewed emphasis on organizing. Seventeen months into the UAW’s latest walkout-its second long strike during a four-year dispute-the union finally surrendered Sunday, sending 9,000 workers back into factories that were doing just fine without them. For a generation now, humble pie has been a dietary staple of the American labor movement, but few servings have been harder to swallow than the failed strike of the United Auto Workers against Caterpillar Inc.
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