Thousands Tell Whirlpool: Keep It Made in America

by James Parks, Feb 28, 2010

More than 5,000 workers, community and religious activists from at least six states converged in front of the Whirlpool plant in Evansville, Ind., to say with a unified and loud voice: “Keep It Made in America.” The massive crowd stretched nearly a mile along the road leading to the plant.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka along with 40 people, including children and grandchildren of workers, clergy and retirees, used a Whirlpool refrigerator to wheel petitions with 70,000 signatures to the plant’s locked front gate. At the same time, more than 40,000 signatures on petitions were delivered to the Whirlpool headquarters in Michigan. The petitions urged Whirlpool executives to reconsider their decision to shutter the Evansville plant, laying off 1,100 people and moving jobs to Mexico. Union members also made more than 1,700 phone calls today alone to Whirlpool headquarters in Benton Harbor, Mich., and the Evansville offices with the same message.

As the petitions were delivered, marchers chanted in unison “USA,” “USA.” The crowd extended down Evansville’s Hiway 41 five-to-deep as far as the eye could see. With tears in his eyes, a local business owner told of the hardship his company would experience with the plant closing.

IUE-CWA Local 808, which represents 900 of the Evansville workers, yesterday filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Whirlpool, alleging the company interfered with workers’ rights by threatening employees if they participated in today’s march and rally.

Speaking at the rally, Trumka said:

What’s happening here in Evansville is a head-on collision between corporate greed and failed economic policies-and it’s happening all across our country.

Trumka pointed out that even though we need to create new jobs by helping out small businesses, rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in manufacturing wind turbines and solar cells, we also need a plan that keeps good jobs here at home.

American workers should be reduced to stocking shelves down at Wal-Mart with stuff made in Mexico and China. We don’t have to accept second class status for America. We can lead the world economy again if the leaders we elect step up and insist that we invest in America again.

Among those in the crowd were hundreds of workers from southern Illinois who have already have experienced the fallout from a Whirlpool plant shutdown. In 2006, Whirlpool closed the Herrin, Ill. Maytag plant. More than 1,200 workers lost their jobs and production was moved to Mexico.

In his call for workers to go to Evansville, Illinois AFL-CIO President Michael Carrigan said:

Where once workers earned decent wages and could provide for their children and pay their taxes, now many can’t find jobs or work for much less.

These closures have to stop or our economy will never recover. It’s time to put people above corporate greed.

At the AFL-CIO’s Good Jobs Now site, Whirlpool workers write they worry about their futures and the country. Tom Wright, who is two years into Whirlpool’s four-year electrical apprenticeship program, now finds himself “halfway to nowhere.” He issues this a warning to workers everywhere:

The Whirlpool plant’s closure in Evansville should be a wake-up to the rest of the country. This is not just happening to us-you may be next.

Joanne Wallace, a 19-year worker at Whirlpool, wonder what U.S. jobs will remain for her grandchildren:

Will they be able to stay in Evansville and find work? Where is our community headed? I am sad to see Whirlpool go and extremely apprehensive about the future.

Trumka said the Whirlpool workers are heroes and their fight is the same as that of workers across the nation: to create good jobs here and now “to rebuild the foundations of our society and restore our middle class.”

There’s no shortage of solutions in our country, just a shortage of leaders who are willing to try them.  There’s no shortage of work ethic in our country, just a shortage of jobs.

When we put people back to work, we put America back to work. That’s what we’re fighting for in Evansville.

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