Author: Kevin N.
Teamsters workers at the Airgas plant in Valley View, Ohio, are on strike as of June 25th. After voting 13 to 5 in favor of forming a union a little more than a year ago, the location’s 23 workers still don’t have a contract. Large corporations, like Airgas, are known to stall negotiations with newly formed unions for as long as financially possible. What is surprising is the Valley View location is not negotiating the first contract between Airgas and Teamsters, and another Airgas facility less than ten miles away got their contract months ago. However, another Ohio Airgas location just a few miles from the Valley View plant already negotiated their union contract months ago.
“In a nutshell, our sister plant in Oakwood is about 5 or 6 miles down the road. They just got a contract last year,” explains Joe Most, one of the Valley View union’s chief organizers. “That’s a good, fair contract, which that’s all we want. We’re not asking for anything more than them.” Among other benefits and stipulations sought by the Valley View union, the Oakwood contract includes a modest raise of an additional $2 per hour for each of the plant’s 23 employees.
Regardless of the Oakwood plant’s within-walking-distance precedent, Airgas is still refusing to negotiate. According to Most, the legal team that negotiated and signed the Oakwood contract was fired by Airgas after doing so, and the new legal team has been far from cooperative with the union at Valley View plant.
Among the conditions that Airgas was trying to include in the contract was a provision that would allow Airgas to make medical determinations in the case of emergencies. “If you got hurt on the job, [the company would decide] whether you go to the hospital and whether to provide transport.” Most says that this controversial provision, among others, caused negotiations to unravel, so the Teamsters declared on June 25th that they will strike until the Valley View Airgas workers are given fair treatment.
Joe Most says that he was initially skeptical when his coworker approached him about asking the Teamsters to help their small plant unionize. At a previous job, Most was a member of a UAW union, and he was disappointed by the lack of support his plant received. “Because we were only 150 [workers at that location], they [UAW] practically ignored us because we were so small.” Most recalls that when they approached UAW about supporting them during a strike, the union’s leaders declined to do so, claiming that the plant’s small size made it “not worth it.” (Most also notes that his experience with UAW was more than 20 years ago, and suggests that their practices may have changed since then.)
In contrast, the Teamsters have agreed to support the far smaller Valley View Airgas location, despite having a staff less than one sixth the size of Most’s previous job where the union was UAW. Most said he’s been “shocked” by the level of support they’ve received. When the plant was initially fighting for the contract, Juan Campos, the Vice President of the Teamsters, came to the Valley View plant to personally oversee the negotiations. “When they told me the vice president was coming in from Chicago, I thought, ‘I mean, he’s going to ‘big-time’ us, right? There’s no way he’s going to talk to these peons,’ you know?” laughs Most. “But no, he went to each person, shook their hand, asked them, ‘Do you have any questions?’ and gave them his card.”
What’s more, when it became clear during the contract negotiations that the Airgas representatives were refusing to match the Oakwood plant’s contract, it was Campos himself who walked out of negotiations and declared that the tiny plant of 23 workers would strike with the full support of the Teamsters. That is what working class solidarity looks like.
The Teamsters are coordinating an escalating strike strategy across the country, which Most estimates could continue for a month. Airgas has tentatively agreed to return to the bargaining table on July 22nd. So far, Airgas plants in Boston, Erie, Pittsburgh, and others have gone on strike, with Teamsters drivers refusing to deliver any goods to those facilities. Further locations are slated to strike next week. “About 20 to 25 [locations] across the Midwest are setting up picket lines,” Most explains, mentioning locations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, among others. “And it’s not just going to be our guys from my place. If you noticed, we have some retirees and some of the trustees from the Teamsters here [on the picket line] with us.”
When asked about his personal reason for striking, Most explains, “I’m single. I’m basically fighting for the other people with wives and kids. Plus, I think our warehouse workers are underpaid big time for what they do. It’s hot, it’s laborious, I feel bad for them every day when I see them everyday. And I know how much they make.”
Most is confident that the strike will pay off. “If you think you can’t afford the strike, I would say the opposite. You can’t afford not to strike,” he declares. “This is your only way to nail the company. Especially an insanely profitable one like that one. It’s not like they’re filing for Chapter 11 [bankruptcy]. They’re a publicly traded company, so we can see their books.”
Joe Most is no stranger to the union fight. Despite his disappointment with his UAW experience twenty years ago, he acknowledges that it was far better than having no union at all. Most says after joining the UAW union, “I [had been] written up only one time in nine years, and all of a sudden I get fired six times in two years? It was obvious they were retaliating against me,” he recalls.
“But the union was there and I got reinstated with back pay and everything. Every single time.”