In October 2014, Sherwin Alumina decided to lock out 450 hard-working union members at their plant in Gregory, Texas. This came after the workers overwhelmingly rejected the company’s demands for major cuts in pension and health care benefits for members and retirees, as well as reductions in overtime pay.
The company then hired replacement workers to stay afloat and kept their non-union employees on payroll. Then in January of this year, they filed for bankruptcy.
Bought by one of their own damn subsidiaries, Corpus Christie Alumina (CCA), Sherwin recently found another ugly way to stick it to their former union employees.
Just this month, the company received approval from bankruptcy court for a total of more than $1.1 million in payments to 142 non-union salaried workers as part of what the company calls its “valued employee” program.
So many things are wrong with this.
In 2014, Sherwin showed they couldn’t care less about their union employees and insisted on them accepting a lower quality of life by demanding drastic cuts. And why not? They themselves are barely getting by.
The company is owned by Glencore, a highly-profitable Swiss commodities giant that is the 10th largest corporation in the world with a net income of $2.3 billion in 2014.
I mean, come on. Who can afford to provide their workers a living wage and health care on a paltry income like that?!
Of course, like many other commodity companies, Sherwin has been affected by unfair trade. Aluminum prices are down, making it harder to stay competitive. And it’s totally legal to file for bankruptcy and pay your employees bonuses.
But just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
In their court filing this month, CCA stated that the bonus payouts are necessary in order to “ensure that the Critical Employees remain with the company.”
They also stated that “their skills, knowledge, and understanding of the Debtors’ operations and infrastructure, including the skills necessary to manage and maintain the Debtors’ alumina production facility, are essential to the Debtors’ business enterprise.”
Yet those same concerns sure as hell didn’t keep Sherwin from locking out 450 of their skilled and knowledgeable workers for a year and a half while driving the company into bankruptcy. Was it not important to maintain the alumina production facility then??
At the time of the filing earlier this year, Sherwin CEO Thomas Russell stated regarding the move:
“Over the last 62 years, Sherwin's hard-working, talented employees have established Sherwin as an economic pillar of the Corpus Christi region and one of the world's leading alumina production businesses.”
Let me get this straight: your talented employees, who your public relations team once referred to as “family,” got you to where you are, so you punish them by locking them out and refusing to bargain. Then you file for bankruptcy for your own benefit, on top of giving treats to your non-union workers to keep them happy.
This is hypocrisy and corporate greed at its finest.
Apparently Thomas and the rest of his Glencore cronies are basing their business decisions off of the 1987 film Wall Street. To them, and to Gordon Gekko:
Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works.
But works for who? It works for fat cats who don’t give a damn about the lives they’re destroying, but it definitely doesn’t work for the majority of American workers.
Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised.
This is the America we live in—an America that gives Wall Street a light slap on the wrist when they single-handedly wreck the economy and screw over millions of homeowners and students. It’s an America whose bankruptcy system allows for shady companies like Sherwin to take advantage of the very workers who made them profitable.
So when multi-million dollar corporations, along with the entire top 1 percent, start bitching about working-class anger and wondering why everyone has their panties in a twist, we need to remind them that they are the ones who created the rage.
The Sherwin showdown may have started as a somewhat small, local labor battle, but it now truly symbolizes the war that all workers have to face.
It’s time we all sign up for the draft and get on board to stand up and fight back for democracy.