UAW Local 1250 members in Cleveland want to know why Ford does business with a supplier that is a unionbuster and has a bad environmental record. Left to right outside the union hall are Local 1250 bargaining committee members: Oscar Williams, Randy Payne, Dan Wade, Tim Levandusky, President Willie Hubbard, Tom Zmrazek, Mark Payne, and Jim Stone.

Brian Gillette is simply tired of being mistreated by his bosses.

"We have mediocre jobs and they treat us like crap," says Gillette, a production machinist at Eagle Picher’s Jonesville, Mich., plant the past 17 years. "You can go anywhere and get a mediocre job and be treated like crap."

So, Gillette figures a union will make a difference--even though he knows from experience that being pro-union at Eagle Picher means getting more crap from the bosses.

"It’s been such a long, hard haul that it doesn’t make any difference," Gillette says of the tension and harassment he faces every day at work, just for being pro-union. "I hate to see what it has come to, but something has got to be done."

Gillette and hundreds of other workers who build auto parts for Ford, Caterpillar, DaimlerChrysler and other unionized companies are determined to win UAW representation at Eagle Picher’s Jonesville and nearby Hillsdale Tool plants.

"There is no backing down," says Dave Johnston, who has worked in five union campaigns over 22 years at the Hillsdale plant. "We have the same drive we had when we first started, and we will get a union at this company. We will not allow the company to intimidate us."

Intimidation and other forms of corporate terrorism have been the traditional responses of Eagle Picher managers to past union organizing campaigns. In fact, the National Labor Relations Board overturned a December 1998 union representation election--which the UAW lost by a 323-310 vote--because the employer broke so many labor laws. A new election is scheduled August 17.

Workers were routinely threatened with plant closings if they unionized, illegally disciplined, physically abused, cursed, threatened with dismissal, interrogated, spied on, threatened with loss of pensions, forced to attend captive audience meetings where they weren’t allowed to ask questions, prohibited from posting legitimate union literature, and generally mistreated if they so much as wore a UAW cap to work.

In 1990 the company distributed $1,000 vouchers that were redeemable after the election even though it had refused to raise pay earlier that year. The UAW narrowly lost that vote, too.

Johnston, a former UAW member, knows that a union can genuinely improve conditions inside the workplace, as well as wages and benefits. A union victory August 17 will give Eagle Picher workers the right to bargain a contract that can include basic protections against harassment, mistreatment, and discrimination; a grievance procedure to handle worker complaints; improvements in workplace health and safety; adequate health insurance, pensions, and other benefits, along with improved wages.

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