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Birmingham Foundry: Women Workers On Strike

By VVAW

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (LNS) On November 30, workers at Stove and Range went out on strike rather than accept the new contract that their International -- the United Steelworkers of America -- had pressured them to take.

Virtually the entire plant -- except the foremen and supervisors -- is black. And surprisingly, a majority of Stove and Range workers -- about 60% -- are women, who perform the heavy, industrial work almost always associated with men including the handling of hot molten iron.

The foundry makes cast iron cookware, barbeque grills, cast iron furniture and most importantly, cast iron coal, wood and gas heaters. The threatened lack of heating fuel this winter has greatly increased orders for these heaters and the strikers see that as added pressure on the company to give in to their demands.

The company did do all that it could to intimidate union members into not striking. "They said ?We ain't gonna give you all the money we got. And we ain't talking to you all til February. Christmas is coming up and you ain't gonna have any toys.' The supervisors told us this and of course they know just who to go to to plant the seed,' explained one woman. Many union members were intimidated into voting against the strike for fear that they would lose.

Furthermore only about half and Stove and Range is unionized to begin with, making organizing for the strike even more difficult. (Alabama's "right to work" law states that a closed union shop is illegal -- that is a person does not have to join the union in order to work at a plant where a union is present.)

But nevertheless, the union members did vote to go out and since that time the strike has been 100 percent effective in stopping production.

When asked what led up to the strike, one woman said:

"Well, number one was the wages. Number two the benefits. Well, small benefits, but they're not equal to the cost of living. Women aren't able to support their families -- and basically at Stove and Range women are the head of the household.

Then you have language in your contract that's utterly ridiculous, slavery -- the company has the sole right to work you any seven days a week, 24 hours a day and we have no say so as to our working conditions."

First on the list of clauses in the old contract the strikers would like to get rid of is the "Merit Increase" system. As the contract reads: "The Company may in its sole discretion grant increases to individual employees based upon merit, experience and ability."

"It's just like when we was picking cotton; well that's the merit increase," said one woman. "You know they say ?well we know the wages is small (starting rate is $2.10 an hour. No women, no matter how long they've worked, make more than $2.30), but if you go in and work you'll get a merit increase and your pay will get bigger.' Well, I been there four years and it hasn't gotten bigger."

The strikers are demanding an immediate $1.00/hour raise in 1974, a 20% increase in 1975, and another 20% in 1976.

"You know, they even went along with a lot of our proposals," said one woman. "Then they stuck conditions on them. Like we asked for a cost of living increase. ?Good idea. We believe in the cost of living,' they said, but only if you work 95% of the time. If you don't work 95% of the time you don't get a dime. And the company wants to use its own cost of living scale in the calculations.

"And if you're gonna get a paid holiday they want you to work 30 days before the holiday and one after or else you don't get paid.

"If you refuse to do what they tell you to do, that's grounds for firing." Said one woman about health and safety in the plant -- another issue that the strikers feel strongly about. "One time I came in, the machine wasn't right. I said I'm not going to run this. The supervisor said they've been running all night; but still I wouldn't do it. I've been there a while and I'm not going to run that machine so that a skillet is gonna fly off and smash my head open. You could get killed."

Many strikers aren't too happy about the role the Steelworkers International has played. Prior to the strike the International representative tried very hard to convince the rank and file that the new contract was a good one. And since the strike began many workers have complained that the union has not helped them -- in fact has impeded their efforts to get food stamps.

Strike benefits -- $10 a week -- have been slow in getting to the strikers and some people were told that they had to sign up for the benefits before a certain deadline so it's up in the air as to whether they will even get the $10 a week.

"The union's been out there -- how many years? Some 40 years but this is like the beginning. It's always been a company thing, you know, the company writes the contract; they write the proposals and just send ?em out.

"This was our chance. Our contract was about to expire so we banded together. We all got together and drew up a proposal we wanted brought to the contract meeting. We said, this is what we're going to have or we won't have anything."

One woman at Stove and Range summed up her reasons for striking like this: "It's just that, all the people working here, you know, after all these years, don't want anybody else to have to come in these gates and have to keep on fighting the same structure over and over again."