March 17, 2014

KANSAS CITY PLANT PRODUCTION WORKERS GO ON STRIKE

By ExchangeMonitor

Nearly 900 machinists and production workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City Plant went on strike yesterday, rejecting a contract offer from plant contractor Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies and arguing that the Honeywell had negotiated in “bad faith.” IAM Local 778, a branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, voted late Sunday night to reject the contract offer. The union’s labor contract with Honeywell expired at midnight Oct. 9, and Honeywell FM&T spokeswoman Linda Cook said workers did not report for their morning shifts yesterday. Claude Harris, the Directing Business Representative for Local 778, said the union planned to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board this week, but he also said that both the union and Honeywell officials planned to meet with a federal mediator to try to iron out their differences. Harris said 79 percent of the union’s members voted to reject Honeywell’s offer, and 85 percent voted to strike.

Harris said the union’s issues center around lower-quality medical benefits offered by the contractor, diminished union representation and “significantly” lower wages for new employees. Wages for current employees do not appear to be an issue, and Harris said raises for current employees offered in the new contract are commensurate to the 9 percent raises the union received during its last contract negotiation in 2008. “Someone coming in making less than half or right at half of what current employees are making would be very, very detrimental to our organization only because you have two people working side-by-side doing the same work,” Harris said. “It would definitely impact the morale in a negative fashion.”

The 860 workers that are on strike represent approximately one-third of the plant’s 2,600-member workforce and nearly all of its workers directly related to the production of non-nuclear parts of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Cook said Honeywell had begun implementing a contingency plan to keep the plant running in the event of a strike that utilizes qualified “non-union represented employees” to assume the production jobs in “strategic areas.” She did not say how many production jobs are being replaced by non-union employees. “Some of them are engineers but they’re employees from the plant,” Cook said. “The people that work here understand the work here, and have the types of clearances necessary to do the work. … We can’t go into any more detail than this but our plan is to keep protecting the customer and supplying them with the parts they need.” Cook said there hadn’t been a strike at the plant since workers walked off the job for 39 days in 1975.

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