Milwaukee gets some jobs back
Gifted orator and tireless fighter for workers’
Members of UAW Local 469 were devastated four years ago when Master Lock announced it was moving 400 jobs overseas from its home base in Milwaukee.
Outsourcing still clouds the future for American manufacturing workers but at Master Lock, Local 469 members are seeing a bit of sunlight. The company is bringing some work back to Milwaukee because of quality problems in China, and more work is coming from a nonunion plant it recently purchased in Illinois.
The company’s outsourcing decision was driven by the tilted playing field of globalization. Workers producing lock bodies cost only 70 cents an hour in China. Workers assembling locks in Mexico cost only $2.10 an hour. The highly skilled work on lock cylinders remained in Milwaukee.
“In May I was thrilled to have conducted our first new member orientations since 1996,” said Local 469 President Brad Schwanda.
Local 469 has 35 new members and Schwanda hopes to conduct another round of union training this year when the company is expected to hire 15 more new workers.
“Even with our higher wages, we’ve shown we can compete with low-wage labor overseas,” said Schwanda, a 15-year seniority tool and die maker. “What we need is some government help. Our health care costs increased by 53 percent last year. A single-payer health insurance system in this country would go a long way toward leveling the global playing field.”
