On Sunday, November 16, at 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and the Socialist Equality Party (US) are holding an online public meeting to organize the fight against layoffs and hunger. Register here to attend.
The United Steelworkers (USW) bureaucracy is moving aggressively to impose a concessionary contract on more than 650 striking workers at Libbey Glass in Toledo, Ohio, as their walkout approaches the three-month mark. Workers have told the World Socialist Web Site that USW International officials are forcing a vote next Wednesday on a pro-company agreement that the local union bargaining committee has opposed and refused to bring to a vote.
“It was secretly negotiated without our local leadership’s knowledge and was brought to the local leaders last week,” a veteran worker told the WSWS. “They were told it will be voted on. The international brass insists the vote will be held at a neutral site and proctored by people of their own choosing.
“There were minuscule financial changes in the back-channel negotiations but none of the management rights issues were addressed,” he said. This refers to management’s demands for sharp increases in out-of-pocket healthcare costs, the cutting of overtime pay, mandatory 12-hour shifts, the arbitrary cancellation of lunch breaks and subcontracting to non-union employees.
“The total lack of transparency and insistence on demanding a vote without the entire bargaining committee’s endorsement is outrageous,” he said, adding that workers were so infuriated by the stab in the back that “the membership is talking about possibly exiting the union at this point.”
Another veteran worker said the company and the USW International are counting on exhaustion and financial desperation to ram through a deal that strips away decades of protections. “I keep getting letters from the company to come back to work and work under the old contract. The company went to the USW International, met them without the local bargaining committee. They come back and they want us to accept the contract. They didn’t change anything. They want to take away 90 percent of the stuff we used to have. I guess they think they have worn us down long enough to get it passed. People got kids and they can’t afford going on much longer.”
Earlier this week, USW local leaders announced they were holding a membership meeting Thursday to discuss why they were continuing to oppose management’s “last, best and final” deal and would not bring it to a membership vote.
Shortly afterwards, the local leaders turned around and sent out a message from USW District 1 Director Donnie Blatt announcing that the union has reached a tentative agreement and listing the times of a vote for each of the three USW locals at the factory.
The USW bureaucracy is attempting to blackmail workers by exploiting the financial pressure on workers—created by the union’s own refusal to provide real strike pay. USW District 1 Director Donnie Blatt, who has not lost a penny during the nearly three-month strike, collected $207,000 in salary and compensation last year, according to the union’s filing with the US Labor Department.
His boss, USW International President David McCall, pocketed $276,455, and presides over a bureaucracy that controls $2.2 billion in assets. These are the forces now lecturing Libbey workers about “sacrifice” and demanding they accept a deal that guts their rights, accelerates speed-up and further undermines living standards.
On November 7, the International Association of Machinists held a non-binding membership vote on a proposal the IAM leadership drafted itself, which it said addressed members’ concerns about mandatory overtime and increased healthcare costs and would “reinstate stability to its Toledo operations.”
It then presented the proposal to management along with an offer to send its members back to work. “The Company flat-out rejected the proposal with no counterproposal or offer to return to the table,” IAM officials said. The union bureaucracy has used the same “pre-ratification vote” stunt during the four-month Boeing strike in St. Louis.
From the beginning the USW and IAM bureaucracies never had a strategy to win the strike. They had a strategy to defeat it by starving workers into submission. The courageous workers have had to defy the company’s strikebreaking operation on their own as the USW apparatus, along with the International Association of Machinists, United Auto Workers and the Toledo AFL-CIO isolated the strike. The USW rushed to sign contracts to prevent strikes at other glassmakers and has kept 2,800 workers at O-I Glass on the job without a contract since March.
This company-union conspiracy poses point-blank the question of who controls the strike and whose interests will prevail. Workers cannot allow the same bureaucratic machine that has isolated their struggle for nearly three months to dictate its outcome. To defeat the USW’s blackmail and ensure workers, not the bureaucracy, decide the future of the strike, it is necessary to take immediate action.
Libbey workers must build a rank-and-file committee to demand the full disclosure of the entire contract and all memos of understanding and side letters, adequate time to study it and a vote conducted under the control of the rank and file—not the International.
The defeat of this sellout would send a message to workers throughout Toledo, the US and internationally, who have also been betrayed by the trade union bureaucracies. Libbey workers can and must win the support of autoworkers at the Toledo Jeep Complex and Dana Driveline who are facing job cuts, long hours of mandatory overtime and deadly conditions, enforced by the UAW; oil refinery workers who have lost their own brothers in workplace fatalities and face exhausting work conditions overseen by the USW; along with Cleveland Cliffs workers, and healthcare workers at ProMedica and Mercy St. Vincent.
The experience of the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike—where mass action, rank-and-file leadership, and unified struggle across workplaces defeated company thugs, police, and government injunctions—must be revived to stop Libbey’s importation of scabs and threats to close the factory and carry out mass layoffs.
The need for such action is underscored by the testimony of workers themselves. A veteran workers described the dangerous conditions in the plant, which management has intensified by gutting safety protections and driving out experienced workers. “They’re trying to push out as many of the older guys as possible. I train somebody new every six months because the company can’t keep anybody. They don’t care about experience. When I went to work, I didn’t want to get hurt and I didn’t want to hurt anybody else. So, if it took me a half hour longer to do stuff, I was cautious because the plant’s so old and so many people are going to get hurt. They got rid of the safety reps. They got rid of the nurse. That plant is very dangerous right now, and I just hope everybody gets out of there alive.”
He continued, describing the long-term toll on workers’ bodies and health. “My body has been beat up in there. You’re kneeling on concrete, walking on concrete, climbing the ladders, going up on top of the water tower and the elevators and out in the cold and the rain. I mean, glass isn’t the best thing to breathe. Silicosis is very widespread among the glass workers. You can’t go anywhere in that area without breathing it. You could wipe a table down, like in the break rooms on the furnace floor, and you get this black stuff. You know, people eat food in the locker rooms and it’s there. It’s so funny, you know that they make so much money and then they give you a pizza party when we’re expecting a raise and stuff. It’s just amazing.”
Pointing to the broader political issues confronting the working class. “The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of the country. And then, they want to blame it on the Mexicans, right? It blows my mind. Trump is cutting food stamps and he’s building a ballroom for $300 million. He just bypasses Congress and does what he wants. The Democratic Party is coming in now to reopen the government, and they’re not getting anything they said they wanted. I think the Democrats are like Reagan now. Neither one of these parties is for us. They’re all crooked.”
These sentiments reflect the real division in society—not between workers of different countries or races, but between the working class and the wealthy elite and their political operatives in both big-business parties and the union bureaucracy. Workers throughout Toledo confront the same corporate assault, the same inflation, the same unsafe workplaces and the same union apparatus intent on policing the workforce on behalf of management.
Libbey workers must stand firm and take control of their struggle by forming a rank-and-file committee. The WSWS and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees will assist in building this committee, linking up with workers across Toledo, and developing a strategy to defeat both the company’s concessions and the USW bureaucracy’s sabotage. This strike can be won—but only under the democratic control of the workers themselves.
For more information on forming a rank-and-file committee, fill out the form below.