Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Yokohama Tire, union reach deal for new contract
The United Steelworkers Local still has to vote on the tentative four-year deal.
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Eight minutes before the labor contract's expiration, negotiators from Yokohama Tire Corp. and United Steelworkers Local 1023 reached a tentative agreement for a new four-year pact.
The former three-year contract expired at midnight Sunday. The Yokohama plant in Salem has about 670 employees who are active members of the union, according to Steve Jones, president of USW Local 1023. The plant employs about 800 people total, according to corporate spokesman Bill Groak.
Jones said Tuesday that union members will review the agreement and probably vote next week or weekend to approve or reject the contract. He would not talk about contract specifics in advance of briefing members about its terms but said the union's negotiating committee "thought it was a fair contract and we want to bring it back to the members to take a look at it."
He said adding a year to the contract should be a plus.
Eddie Lowery, USW International's subdistrict director for Virginia, was chief negotiator during the contract talks, which began in late March.
Lowery said he believes the contract should meet the needs of union members at Yokohama and their families but, like Jones, said it will be up to the workers to decide whether they agree.
"They'll have plenty of time to have copies in their hands [before the ratification vote]," Lowery said.
Union negotiations in the tire industry follow "pattern bargaining," by which contracts secured first with larger tiremakers can serve as templates of sorts for subsequent negotiations with smaller companies.
Wayne Ranick, a spokesman for USW International, said Monday that Michelin's BFGoodrich tire unit, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. and Bridgestone/Firestone all reached contract agreements in 2009.
Throughout those negotiations, Ranick said, "job security was the big issue, along with health care for both active [union members] and retirees." For job security, unions have asked companies to commit to making capital investments in U.S. plants.
Yokohama officials declined to comment on the agreement. The Salem plant manufactures passenger, high-performance and light-truck tires. California-based Yokohama Tire Corp. is a subsidiary of Yokohama Rubber Co., based in Japan. Yokohama Rubber has numerous subsidiaries in sectors other than tiremaking.
On May 12, Yokohama Rubber reported that sales for its Yokohama Tire Group declined 8.1 percent during the fiscal year ended March 31 when compared with fiscal 2009. But it said there was renewed growth in tire sales in both Japan and overseas in the fourth quarter, along with drops in raw material costs.
The last strike at the Salem facility occurred in 1994 and lasted about 12 weeks.
