Labor & Employment Law

Union, Community Rallies for Whirlpool Workers Punching Clock for the Last Time

By Mike Hall

Doris Nevill, a Whirlpool worker, says she cried all day about losing her job at the Evansville plant.

Braving a chilly and dreary rain yesterday, several dozen union and community activists rallied outside the gates of Whirlpool’s Evansville, Ind., plant. They were there to show their support for the nearly 500 second shift workers on their way to clock in for their last shift on the line.

Whirlpool is closing the refrigerator plant, laying off 1,100 people and moving jobs to Mexico. Eliminating the second shift is the first blow, the other jobs end in June.

IUE-CWA Local 808 member Lori Houchin says that yesterday’s rally and the massive February march to the plant gates helps spotlight the damage to workers and their communities when corportions like Whirlpool shutter their U.S. plants and ship jobs overseas. She told the Evansville Courier & Press:

It’s happening across America?factories are picking up and moving somewhere the labor’s cheaper…all the factories are moving jobs outside the U.S.

Even as Whirlpool is forcing workers to the unemployment line and the plant’s closing is sending economic shockwaves through the Evansville community, CEO and Chairman Jeff Fettig won’t have to worry about covering his rent.

Earlier this month, the Dow Jones News Wire reported that his 2009 compensation rose 77 percent.

Fettig’s salary, incentive-based pay, executive perks, and stock and options awards amounted to $10.81 million, up from $6.11 million in 2008, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchanges Commission….The company’s net income fell 21.5 percent from 2008, while sales slipped 9.56 percent. But Fettig received $3.5 million in nonequity incentive pay, up from $420,000 the year before.

Whirlpool also received $19 million as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to build more energy efficient and green appliances. But it is spending $110 million to build a new plant in Mexico. At last month’s rally that drew more than 5,000 people, IUE-CWA President Jim Clark said:

Whirlpool is a bad corporate citizen who is twisting this country’s desire to reduce energy usage and using it to export jobs. We are pushing hard to ensure that good intentions on going green don’t help fund loss of good manufacturing jobs.

Yesterday’s demonstration, organized in conjunction with Jobs with Justice, won’t be the last, says Local 808 President Darrell Collins.

We’re going to agitate them every day we can until the end.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).