I got Werner to agree to make payments to the laid-off workers from accounts that had been our pension funds. Werner was going to take the money and leave anyway. Nothing would change unless we were willing to work for nothing. But I told them there was no point in giving stuff back to the corporation. The prospect of trying to find new jobs in rural Mercer County was daunting. Werner was paying the company president half a million in salary and doubling that with bonuses, but they were going to throw to the curb the workers whose labor created the millions in profits from which executives siphoned off those extravagant salaries and perks.Įarly on, Werner bosses told us that if we took concessions, they would reconsider the decision to leave. Just a year before they told us they were closing the Greenville plant, Werner had handed a company officer $1.6 million to get rid of him. Werner was the largest manufacturer of ladders and climbing products in the United States and was making tens of millions of dollars in profits each year – $180 million in 2003. I was 38 and had 15 years in, but others were older and had more time. It was a big deal to all of us who worked there too. This was a big deal to Mercer County because Werner was the second-largest industrial employer there. Werner said it would eliminate 500 family-supporting jobs making aluminum ladders in little Greenville, population 6,400. The company announced in March of 2003 that it would shut down ladder production in the plant located right next to the corporate headquarters. I had seen other factories pull up their American stakes and skip off to Mexico.
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This was just after the turn of the century, not quite a decade after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. I was the United Steelworkers local union president at the factory in Greenville, so I heard the crap from the bosses for a while, stuff like, “Things are going to change around here,” and “We have to be more global.” This was a big deal to me, obviously, because we needed the health insurance. My wife had been sick for a while before my employer, the Werner ladder company, began dropping hints that it would close shop in Greenville, Pa. "Although Werner aban-doned manufacturing in the United States, other companies made a go of it in their old Greenville facilities. District 13 United Steelworkers (USW) District 13 includes the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.District 12 United Steelworkers (USW) District 12 includes the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington.District 11 United Steelworkers (USW) District 11 includes the states of Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.District 10 United Steelworkers (USW) District 10 includes the state of Pennsylvania.
District 9 United Steelworkers (USW) District 9 includes the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina and the Virgin Islands.District 8 United Steelworkers (USW) District 8 includes the states of Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.District 7 United Steelworkers (USW) District 7 includes the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.District 6 New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario.District 4 United Steelworkers (USW) District 4 includes the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and the territory of Puerto Rico.District 3 Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, Yukon.District 1 United Steelworkers (USW) District 1 includes the states of Michigan and Ohio.
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