IT TAKES A FIGHT TO WIN…inside the Republic Windows & Doors sitdown strike

[Omaha Steve]

http://gangbox.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/it-takes-a-fight-to-wininside-the-republic-windows-doors-sitdown-strike/

Posted in Uncategorized by gangbox on the December 14, 2008

from the NEW YORK TIMES:

Even Workers Surprised by Success of Factory Sit-In


E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press

Workers celebrated Wednesday after their six-day sit-in at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago ended with their getting everything they had asked for.



By MICHAEL LUO and KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
Published: December 12, 2008
CHICAGO — The word came just after lunch on Dec. 2 in the cafeteria of Republic Windows and Doors. A company official told assembled workers that their plant on this city’s North Side, which had operated for more than four decades, would be closed in just three days.
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Beth Rooney for The New York Times



Civil rights activists praised the sit-in, but the 240 workers insisted that they just wanted what they were entitled to by law: 60 days’ severance and earned vacation.
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Beth Rooney for The New York Times

Sit-in at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago.

There was a murmur of shock, then anger, in the drab room lined with snack machines. Some women cried. But a few of the factory’s union leaders had been anticipating this moment. Several weeks before, they had noticed that equipment had disappeared from the plant, and they began tracing it to a nearby rail yard.

And so, in secret, they had been discussing a bold but potentially dangerous plan: occupying the factory if it closed.

By the time their six-day sit-in ended on Wednesday night, the 240 laid-off workers at this previously anonymous 125,000-square-foot plant had become national symbols of worker discontent amid the layoffs sweeping the country. Civil rights workers compared them to Rosa Parks. But all the workers wanted, they said, was what they deserved under the law: 60 days of severance pay and earned vacation time.

And to their surprise, their drastic action worked. Late Wednesday, two major banks agreed to lend the company enough money to give the workers what they asked for.

“In the environment of this economic crisis, we felt we were obligated to fight for our money,” Armando Robles, a maintenance worker and president of Local 1110 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which represented the workers, said in Spanish.

The reverberations of the workers’ victory are likely to be felt for months as plants continue to close. Bob Bruno, director of the labor studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, predicted organized labor would be emboldened by the workers’ success. “If you combine some palpable street anger with organizational resources in a changing political mood,” he said, “you can begin to see more of these sort of riskier, militant adventures, and they’re more likely to succeed.”

FULL story at link.