Electro-Motive Closure: London Mark's Work Wearhouse Stores Clothing Pulls Caterpillar Boots In Protest

I watched the UAW be nearly obliterated in the 90s in Illinois during a strike. The company had just endured a strike in 91 and they kept the plant in Central Illinois going with management people who were trained too work in the shop. June of 94 they went out on strike again and this time the company said NO WAY and they brought in a group of temp workers who had been on standby, alot of whom were already in town and in place living at local hotels ready to work the morning of the first day of the strike. http://the-spark.net/csart115.html When the union finally came back after 17 months they did so with a lesser contract then what they walked out for. Difference in this strike and all others before was that the union figured out rather fast that the company didn't need them anymore. For the first time I can recall during a strike even some union members close to retirement crossed and worked.

What really killed me during this whole ordeal was that I know for a fact and I knew personally men and women who would stand the picket line on the weekends then come Monday morning get on a large bus to transport them to their jobs in Indiana for the week. There were even some that went less then 2 miles to a non union shop to work. So, tell me this? Who were the real scabs? Myself as a management person who worked the shop floor or the die hard union members going to work for a non union shop? This was also at the same time that two other major companies (Firestone and AE Staley) were on strike or locked out. The town of Decatur died in the mid 90's. I had alot of friends and was engaged to one at the time that worked for union welding shops not related to Cat but because the union workers were working for the non union shops they were then able to outbid the union shops for two years. The union welding shop guys all were forced to take jobs out of state for nearly a year. Then of course the Media all played it out to be the companies fault. None of the truth of what the UAW members themselves were doing like working for non union places was ever brought to light. I am so glad I don't live in that town anymore.

Still parroting media misinformation, eh? Consider doing some research instead of believing the cherry picked info the 'news' chooses to tell you.
http://www.emcupdate.ca/wp-content/uploads/Employee-Letter-and-Summary-Dec-27-2011.pdf

I am sure that anyone that wants the boots can go online and get them. And like the other person pointed out you are feeding into media misinformation. A 50 percent cut of wages? You are totally misinformed on that one.

We can all be unemployed and uneducated. The Dream! I surprised you have a computer!

According to your logic, the majority of manufacturing plants in Canada should close down because the same work can be done much cheaper offshore. Engineering and computer programming can also be seen as unsustainable because the work can be done much cheaper in India and China - shut those guys down too.

If we follow your advice even the low paid foreign workers will eventually be without jobs too because there wont be any working Canadians and Americans left who can afford to buy even the foreign made products.

By the way - Electro Motive was making a profit. It just wasn't making as much as other plants with lower costs. Hence the race to the bottom for workers wages.

I have heard it said that the plant was not profitable, since Cat was only allowed to buy it a few years ago, is their management so incompetent that they took a profitable company and made it unprofitable in only a few years? Or are they so incompetent that they were fooled into buying an unprofitable company? Or were they cleverly buying up what would have been competition to the new plant they were building in Indiana, a State which, coincidentally, just passed Right to Work legislation? But that would mean that the incompetent party was the CONservative Harper Government for not seeing what was written on the wall, and stopping the sale. If you can get past your hatred of the skilled working man perhaps you should ponder some of questions I have raised.