Thanks to decades of plant closures, corporate reconfigurations, and outsourcing both overseas and to nonunion plants in the United States, the shop, whose product is sold to domestic and international railroad companies, was the last remaining facility covered by the national agreement. UE has represented the plant’s workers since 1937, the year before the union negotiated its first national agreement with GE. The first contract was negotiated when General Electric (GE) sold the $4-billion-a-year division to Pittsburgh-based Wabtec in 2019, ending more than a century of the company’s operations in Lawrence Park township on Erie’s east side. “Meanwhile the Company has done everything to raise the temperature in the plant.” A flyer distributed by UE Local 506 and 618 describing Wabtec’s union busting tactics.Īs the clock ticked down to midnight, the two sides were far apart on a range of issues in their negotiations for a second contract. “Over the past 4 weeks UE Locals 506 and 618 have attempted to patiently bargain and convey the needs of our members in good faith, with the goal to get a fair contract,” read one flyer distributed on Friday. Updates during this week, printed on flyers disseminated throughout the plant, suggested that they would do so. The week prior, union members voted overwhelmingly to authorize local leadership to call a strike should negotiations with Wabtec (an abbreviation of Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation) fail to produce a tentative agreement. It was the afternoon of Friday, June 9, and roughly 1,400 workers at the four-million-square-foot plant were preparing for the possibility that when their four-year contract expired at midnight, they would be on strike. “Fuck you!” responded members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), their voices echoing off the walls of the buildings around them.Ī few blocks down Main Street inside Irish Cousins, the bar across from the union hall of Local 506, which represents the plant’s workers - save for the handful of clerical employees, members of Local 618 whose jobs have not been eliminated through automation - one patron’s “How are you doing?” was answered by another customer with “Waiting on the word.”

ERIE, PA - “What do you think of the company’s contract proposals?” asked a man at the head of a contingent of workers marching down the avenue that cuts through the mile-long, mile-wide Wabtec locomotive manufacturing complex.

Lawrence park township