Q-C labor, management find common ground

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By Jennifer DeWitt | Monday, September 4, 2006 12:42 AM CDT | () comments

For Denny Marion, a silent telephone at the Quad-City Area Labor and Management Council is a symbol of the progress that the Quad-Cities has made in the area of labor and management relations.

It also is a testament to the work that organizations such as the council — known as QCALM, but pronounced “calm” — have done to create forums for bringing union and management together.

“I should thank God the phone’s not ringing off the hook; we must be doing things right,” said Marion, who took over as QCALM’s chief executive officer in 2004.

The organization, which is marking its 20th anniversary, grew out of a period in Quad-City history when strikes and plant shutdowns were commonplace, and the relationship between labor and management was seriously strained.

“The ’80s was something we had to go through to understand why we needed to do something different,” said Marion, who worked both sides of the fence — as a United Auto Workers member and in management — during his 30-year career with Deere & Co.

Today, QCALM continues to provide labor and management with training and consulting that helps them to create collaborative relationships. “Our role has changed from being an intermediator to that of a facilitator,” he said.

But some high-profile contract negotiations in the Quad-Cities — particularly Alcoa’s down-to-the-wire talks with the United Steelworkers in June — seemed to unleash underlying tension between the two sides.

“We’ve had some real labor struggles in the Quad-Cities this year,” said Jerry Messer, president of the Quad-City Federation of Labor, a unit of the AFL-CIO. In addition to Alcoa, Kraft/Oscar Mayer in Davenport ratified a new contract covering 1,625 employees earlier this summer.

“We could have easily had 4,000 employees on strike. But I knew they were in good hands … if they would have struck it would have been the right thing to do,” Messer said. “Members take very seriously striking.”

Though both Alcoa’s steelworkers and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 431 at Kraft eventually ratified new contracts without work stoppages, the real threat of a strike loomed at Alcoa. Workers at Kraft turned down the first contract brought to them.

Alcoa: Down to the wire

Alcoa’s negotiations, in particular, revealed a sentiment of blue collar vs. white collar as the company’s salaried staff trained alongside union workers in the event that the steelworkers went on strike. But union and company officials say the divisiveness does not appear to have been lasting.

“We’re always going to have differences. When we leave negotiations, it probably went right when neither party is completely happy,” said Skip McGill, the president of the United Steelworkers Local 105, who was part of the negotiation team in St. Louis. “Hopefully we ended up somewhere in the middle.”

What did differentiate these negotiations though, he said was “we had never seen that much preparation for a strike” on the company’s part. “But we’d never seen that much preparation by us either.”

As negotiations continued in St. Louis, both sides in the Quad-Cities kept a wary eye on their progress.

In addition to training salaried workers, the company made plans to bring in Alcoa workers from other plants to keep the rolling mill in operation if union members went on strike. Preparations included housing arrangements for the incoming replacement workers and “private property” signage across the front of the Riverdale, Iowa, plant.

Less than a mile away at the union hall, members prepared temporary “On Strike” signs for picket duty that never materialized when a tentative agreement was reached just before the existing contract expired. McGill said the union had a pending order in place at a print shop for permanent signs but never had the order filled.

“Some of it was posturing,” he said of the activities by both sides.

But even before negotiations began, both sides were discussing the potential for a strike — something Alcoa’s Davenport Works hadn’t seen since 1986.

“This was the first time we were coming to the end of a contract (without an early settlement) … it had been a decade since we’d been to this point,” said John Riches, company spokesman in the Quad-Cities. The previous two contracts had settled a year ahead of expiration. But in this round, the union and company had two early, failed attempts at a settlement.

“Nobody on either side was looking forward to the possibility,” Riches said, adding that it would have been irresponsible for the company not to be prepared. “If there were to be one, there was a real need to protect the customers … ”

Even in 1986, the salaried workers kept the plant operational. “Our intent was the same — to be sure the employees had a job to come back to,” Riches said.

“In every negotiations, people take sides reaching an agreement when the two sides come together.”

In fact, he said 10 years later, it was out of the 1996 contract negotiations that Alcoa and its unions first created a formal labor-management team that continues to meet today. Every other Friday, a team of management and labor representatives come to the table to discuss issues facing the plant and the company. The room bears a nameplate “Partnership Room.”

McGill admits that even with a contract in place, the work is far from over. “There’s a lot of things to do to implement all those new things (reached in the contract),” he said.

Some of those issues — including forced overtime and contracting out — continue to stress the relationship between management and the union.

“It’s certainly not a honeymoon,” McGill said of the plant’s current climate. “It’s more like getting instantly to that seventh year (itch) in marriage.”

But the management-union team is “working on what we should be working on now,” he added. “But we need to start to do something. We need to do something where we can build more trust in each other.”

Benefits cause worries

Unions across the country have real concerns as health-care costs continue to spiral out of control and companies search for ways to hold down costs.

Messer said while Quad-City labor-management relations continue on a mostly even keel, he sees the relationship being strained by concerns over benefits.

“People are very concerned about where health benefits are going in the future,” he said. “You’d think employers would be jumping on the wagon to form some kind of national health care ... but I don’t see no march in D.C., to have national health care.”

John Honeycutt, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 431, which includes the workers at Kraft/Oscar Mayer, agrees that “health care is the No. 1 issue in all the negotiations that I see. But they’re all tough (negotiations) anymore. It doesn’t matter if they are for 1,600 or for 16.”

While a divide between labor and management does open at times, he said, “you have to work together for the members and you have to work together to keep the company operating. There is some bitterness sometimes. But you have to move on,” he said.

Honeycutt said as union members everywhere see their companies report record earnings and their CEOs pulling down huge salaries, it makes them want more. “We just want a bigger piece of the pie for our members, and it is very difficult to get sometimes,” he added.

“Fortunately, we were able to maintain our health care with Oscar Mayer. We just had some other issues that were tough,” he said.

Divisiveness not the norm

For Quad-Citians with long memories, the labor negotiations earlier this year may have been reminiscent of the turbulent 1980s. But leaders with connections to labor and management say relations are strong now, and the divisiveness seen is not the norm.

Rory Washburn, the executive director of the Tri-City Building Trades Council, said among the building trades “we’ve been fortunate in this area to have good labor-management relationships. But when dollars and cents are involved, there are always issues. Without the labor management council, some of those issues get blown out of proportion.”

Made up of equal representation by labor and management, the Illowa Construction Labor and Management Council represents about 9,000 building trades members as well as 320 area contractors. The union members and owners come from trades ranging from painters to electrical workers, bricklayers, sheet metal workers, glazers and others.

Washburn said the founders “had the vision many years ago to understand that the entire construction industry is connected.” Through the labor management council, contractors and workers are brought to the table to discuss issues impacting their industry.

The poor reputation the Quad-Cities had for its labor relations in the 1980s has disappeared, said Marion of QCALM. In the past, labor relations was one of the top questions asked by companies looking at bringing operations to the Quad-Cities. The question still is asked, he said but it is much lower on the list now that the area’s stigma is gone.

Thom Hart, the president of Quad-City Development Group, recalls how labor-management relations was the No. 1 issue in 1986, when he was Davenport’s mayor. “I think it has improved significantly. The barometer I use is in the Business Connections Survey we do with the chambers and communities.”

The survey asks Quad-City companies about 30 different aspects of business, including their labor relations, their attitude of working with the city and state, labor costs, ease of zoning, access to rail and more.

“In 1986, labor-management relations scored the highest as far as problems in the community,” he said. “In the last five years, it has not hit the top tier. It would be somewhere in the middle. That says something.”

Jennifer DeWitt can be contacted at (563) 383-2318 or jdewitt@qctimes.com.