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Policy

Union Blues

Chemical worker unions struggle with plant shutdowns, layoffs, and antiunion climate

by JEFF JOHNSON, C&EN WASHINGTON
July 25, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 30

These are tough times for chemical workers and unions. Jobs and union membership are in decline, reduced by a combination of automation, job outsourcing, plant shutdowns, corporate mergers, and offshore relocations. U.S. workers and unions face a national climate that encourages capital flight to the less developed world and discourages union organizing.

Roger Bradley, organizing director for the United Steelworkers (USW), estimates there are about 48,000 chemical union members in his union. And Jack Graczyk, director of research, communications, and education for the International Chemical Workers Union Council (ICWUC), says his union has another 23,000 chemical union workers.

These 71,000 chemical workers make up the bulk of the industry's union members.

The history of the chemical sector is one of mergers, declining jobs, and falling union membership. Unions of chemical workers go back to before the Second World War and reached a high in the late 1960s and early 1970s of about 180,000 members, says Les Leopold, director of the Labor Institute in New York City. Union membership was flat during the '70s and then began a slow retreat, which continues today. However, unions have played a leadership role in improving working conditions and pay in this key industrial sector, Leopold adds.

The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) characterizes the sector as one of higher pay and longer working hours than other manufacturing industries. Larger chemical companies, it says, have the hallmark of continuous production, rotating shifts, and large capital expenditures.

Most chemical industry jobs, except in pharmaceuticals, are in larger companies, BLS says. The largest 20% of factories that employed more than 50 workers in 2002 had more than 80% of the industry's jobs. The plants are mostly clean, but loud and hot, and dangerous working conditions pervade the industry, BLS continues.

Looking at the period to 2012, BLS predicts that U.S. chemical industry output will grow, but employment in the chemical sector, excluding pharmaceuticals, will decline by 16%. It cites the causes as automation, production efficiency, mergers, foreign production and competition, and relocating U.S. production to other countries, particularly Asia and Latin America, to lower production costs and place plants nearer to expanding overseas markets.

The numbers are far from exact, however, and understanding the chemical sector is difficult. Questions loom as to who is a chemical worker today and who is a production worker.

It is unclear, exactly, how many workers are in the broad swath of chemically related jobs. USW, for instance, says it represents another 70,000 workers at plastics and rubber plants, as well as some 26,000 who work in refineries and petrochemical production.

The chemical sector appears more unionized than manufacturing overall, in which about 8% of the workforce is unionized. Several government and private labor economists estimate that about 14% of the basic chemical workforce is unionized and about 22% of refinery workers are in unions.

Nationally, USW represents about 850,000 union manufacturing workers in a wide range of industrial jobs. Until last April, it had about 20,000 chemical worker members, drawn into USW through past mergers of small chemically related unions. In April, USW formally merged again, this time with the Paper, Allied Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union (PACE).

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Credit: USW PHOTO
Union chemical workers demonstrate at DuPont's Deepwater, N.J., plant.
Credit: USW PHOTO
Union chemical workers demonstrate at DuPont's Deepwater, N.J., plant.

PACE had a few more chemical workers than did USW, but they were only a small component of its 300,000 total members. For its part, PACE had gained its chemical membership in 1999 when the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union merged with the paper workers.

Looking at ICWUC, Graczyk explains that it was an independent union from the 1940s until 1996 when it merged with the 1.4 million-member United Food & Commercial Workers Union. He says there were some 100,000 chemical workers in his union in the 1960s.

The unions have members at many chemically related manufacturers, both large and small, including hundreds of plants and many, many companies. Historically, USW has represented workers at Dow facilities, and PACE, even before it merged with USW, had begun an organizing campaign at DuPont. The DuPont campaign has grown as the union began a national organizing effort aimed at a half-dozen plants and DuPont fought back. The effort is being closely watched by many in labor.

Both Graczyk and Bradley want to see their numbers grow, and Bradley holds up the model of refining. He says USW represents workers in 76% of petroleum industry output, giving USW power in the sector.

At refineries, USW uses "pattern bargaining" in which the union focuses its resources in contract negotiations with a single company--Shell for the last two four-year negotiating cycles--and that contract becomes the template for the rest of the industry. It saves the union time and money, and it produces an industrywide contract.

Although basic chemical production has its share of large companies and plants, the union has never had the density in members or power to bargain as it does at refineries, Bradley notes.

Bradley and Graczyk both hope that the most recent mergers will give them more strength. "The only way to fight is big," Graczyk puts it. USW announced it will devote some $30 million to organizing, which will include the chemical sector (C&EN, Jan. 17, page 13).

Neither Bradley nor Graczyk are willing to share organizing plans. As Bradley states: "Why should I lay my cards on the table?"

One former PACE official, however, notes that the union must develop a new and better organizing strategy for the sector in the wake of the new power, resources, and hope that came with the merger. How to increase membership is not just the chemical sector's problem, the official noted. The leadership of the AFL-CIO is deeply embroiled in a divisive debate over organizing resources and membership disappointment over the failure of top leaders to expand the federation.

Graczyk predicts the union will increasingly broaden its view of membership and expand into chemical service sectors such as chemical cleanup activities. He notes that health and safety are key to the industry, and more organizing campaigns will relate to safer working conditions.

He stresses, however, that organizing is getting much harder, management more aggressive, and government less helpful to unions.

"For instance, in the past, we used to be able to get more than 50% of workers in an unorganized plant to sign up with the union, and the company would recognize their right to bargain without an election. But no more," he says.

Now the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that the employer can challenge the signatures and force an election.

Graczyk charges that management, in opposition to the union, has increased efforts to intimidate workers and to present more thinly veiled threats to shut down plants if workers vote the union in. He also complains of union resources being spent in right-to-work states to aid workers represented by the union who do not pay union dues.

"This is a tough industry," says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University's School of Industrial & Labor Relations. "It is mobile with some of the biggest multinational companies in the world."

Between 1999 and 2001, she estimates, 144,000 chemical and petrochemical workers lost jobs in the U.S., and 28,000 of them were union workers. "When management threatens to shut down a plant," she adds, "it has to be seen as real by chemical workers who have watched plants close and jobs go."

DuPont is frequently cited by unions as a key to organizing chemical workers. Over the past half-dozen years, DuPont has announced new plant consolidations, layoffs, and a global shift of production to mostly Asian markets (C&EN, Dec. 8, 2003, page 7).

USW's Rick Massengill and Shawn Gilchrist are responsible for organizing at DuPont. Gilchrist, who focuses solely on DuPont, says he was first approached by a DuPont worker who wanted to join PACE in 1998.

DuPont has several independent unions that are not part of the AFL-CIO and were organized by the company a half-century ago. So far, USW has won bargaining rights at five DuPont plants--it was six plants, until DuPont shut one down.

Massengill runs the USW organizing program for "affiliates," defined as nonunion plant organizations. He estimates some 200,000 potential USW members are in affiliate organizations throughout manufacturing.

HOWEVER, Massengill says, "people are afraid, especially now with plants shutting down and jobs being scarce." He says plant officials at several DuPont sites have warned that if the union comes in, they will have to shut down the plant.

"Now, that is illegal," he says. "So we took our charges to the National Labor Relations Board, and they finally ruled and required DuPont to post a sign saying they won't do it again. But they still do it, and the appeal process wound up just stalling the election."

"We are not nonunion," DuPont corporate spokeswoman Leslie Beckhoff counters. "We already have unions."

Workers at the plants are paid well, she says, making $20 or more an hour and sometimes more than $100,000 a year with overtime. The union is pushing for pattern bargaining throughout the corporation, she says, and DuPont strongly opposes this.

"Each DuPont site bargains separately, and that's the way we want to keep it," says Beckhoff. "Each site has specific problems that must be addressed there."

Of the five DuPont sites where USW has won the right to bargain, only two have negotiated a contract, she says. The union represents about 1,900 DuPont workers, she says, and about 70% of DuPont's 35,000 U.S. workers are not in any union.

Repeatedly, U.S. union officials warn of the impact of outsourcing of U.S. jobs, and Bradley and others worry that for chemical companies the tempo is likely to increase sharply.

But Beckhoff counters, "We are a global company, and we have to be competitive and operate in a global environment, locating our plants near where our customers are."

She adds that expanding global production is an industry initiative. "We aren't just talking about our company."

It is difficult for unions to do much to curb plant relocations, says Dick Blin, communications officer for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine & General Workers Union. ICEM is a global federation of 400 national unions, which includes USW and ICWUC.

While ICEM is beginning an international program to protect union jobs from being outsourced to nonunion contract workers at the same plant, no such global union campaign is likely when an entire plant is moved to a new country.

"We don't do plant shutdowns," he says. "When a plant closes in one country, it hurts our affiliate there; but when it opens in another country, it means jobs for our affiliate there."

Unions fear a race to the bottom, however, where jobs in poorer countries mean big savings for companies in labor and other costs but fewer high-paying manufacturing jobs in the country that loses. Labor scholars and economists say unchecked global competition will pit workers in union and nonunion environments against one another, harkening back to the industrial battlegrounds of a century ago. They see implications in this global shift that go beyond jobs.

"We all talk about unions raising wages and benefits, and that's true," says Michael Merrill, dean of the Empire State College Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies. "But what they have also done historically is to take working conditions and labor costs out of competition among unionized companies. I believe this is a significant contribution, not just for these workers, but for the public good.

"Unions have increased productivity and have made managers manage better. They have raised the cost of corporate failure and have made it harder for bad management to externalize their mistakes by blaming someone else."

Still, Merrill says global outsourcing of lower level U.S. jobs is inevitable and even "natural," but he worries about how the benefits are distributed.

"I see no evidence that the U.S. is getting poorer as jobs leave the country, but I see lots of evidence that the working class in the U.S. is getting poorer as they lose their jobs. We have to figure out how to ensure that the victims of globalization don't pay the costs."

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Both labor and management predict chemical jobs will continue to bleed from the U.S. But the questions remain as to how fast and how many, and what they will be replaced with as a global economy matures.

 

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