Maine Worker Brings Stories Of Laid-Off Colleagues To Senator

Steve Husson is one of the fortunate few in the changed, ailing economy of Eastern Maine: He still is a Teamster and he still has a well-paying job -- and the slow-moving labor election process of the National Labor Relations Board eventually worked for him.

But he’s the exception, and even then the job he won back after being illegally fired for supporting the union, at DHL Express in Brewster, disappeared. The firm fought back by closing the Brewster terminal, throwing all the unionized workers out of jobs, and opening a new terminal in a town across the river -- forcing the workers to re-apply for their old jobs and deliberately not hiring the union’s supporters.

Husson brought his story, and those of other workers in a survey he conducted for the Maine organization Food and Medicine, to Congress on April 22. His mission: To convince his state’s two senators, Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, to reverse their opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act -- not as a matter of labor law, but as a matter of helping their own out-of-work constituents.

Husson and other workers and their advocates, marshaled by Jobs With Justice, spread out over Capitol Hill on April 22 to talk with key senators from seven states -- including Colorado, Maine, Arkansas and Pennsylvania -- whose votes are considered vital to halting a planned GOP filibuster against the law, labor’s top legislative priority.

Their economic story is particularly poignant in Maine, which has lost 23,000 of its 81,000 factory jobs from 2000 to 2008, a pattern repeated elsewhere nationally. That 28% job loss was replaced, partially, by much lower-paying service sector jobs.

Husson’s survey, entitled Where Are They Now? interviewed 107 of those former factory workers. All were unionists. Now only 23% are. All had company-paid health insurance. Now just over half do, “and they have to pay premiums of up to $600 a month” for coverage that’s less comprehensive, he says. “And 28% have none at all.”

“But the statistics don’t tell you what really happened to those workers,” Husson told a Washington press conference before heading out to lobby Collins and Snowe. “One fellow had eight years of trying to find a job, and having to deal with the bureaucracy” for benefits “while dealing with higher bills and fewer dollars.”

Other stories in the report were similar, and could be repeated by laid-off workers nationwide:

* Wayne Tinkham, a member of Steel Workers Local 403 in Brewer, made $16 hourly at the Eastern Fine Paper Mill before it closed due to subsidized foreign imports four years ago. “I must have put in a couple of hundred applications” for jobs in the time since, he told Husson. “Sometimes (I applied) several times in the same place. Sometimes you hear from them. Most of the time, they don’t even let you know they received your application.”

Tinkham said he had three short-term jobs since. One, at a cleaning company, paid $8.50 hourly. The smell of the cleaning chemicals overpowered him. Another was unloading trucks at Wal-Mart, where his arthritic left knee couldn’t take the pounding of the plant’s cement floor. Husson’s report noted the average unionized pulp-and-paper worker -- such as Tinkham -- in Maine mills earned slightly more than $58,000 yearly in 2004, the most recent data available. Wal-Mart’s own website said its workers earned an average of $11.99 hourly in 2007, for scheduled 34-hour weeks, or $21,198 yearly.

* Jim England, current president of Steel Workers Local 80 in Old Towne, Maine, described how workers have been jerked back and forth between employment and joblessness as the paper plant there went through owners and closures and re-openings, first with Georgia-Pacific, then with a smaller firm, Red Shield, and now with a third owner. G-P closed the plant in Oct. 2006 even though it turned a $24 million profit, because the firm could make double that at larger plants.

“When Jim worked at the G-P mill, he earned $19.68 an hour with plenty of overtime,” Husson’s report says. “The company paid 75% of his medical insurance coverage and he had a pension. When Red Shield bought the mill, the fortunate few who went back to work had to take an 8% cut and a cut in employer medical insurance contributions.” There was no pension.

Red Shield’s managers “didn’t pay the bills and it caught up with them. The mill was shut down again,” he told Husson. A third owner has re-opened it.

What does all this have to do with the Employee Free Choice Act? Husson explained the link at the press conference, before heading out to lobby the senators.

“Our average pay is 31% lower than it was before, and that’s including the 23% (of the 107 workers) who still have unionized jobs,” he said. One of them is him: A year and a half after he was illegally fired for helping the Teamsters organize the DHL terminal in Brewster, the National Labor Relations Board ruling forced the firm to take him back, but only with net back pay.

“The main problem the workers face” in raising their incomes “is the inability to organize the service sector,” Husson says. “It’s not that they don’t want to be union, but it’s much harder to go through -- because the field is tilted against them.”