yes-from the original closing:
“We’re scared, and we’re frustrated,” said Larry Lorshbaugh, president of the United Steelworkers Local 9386, the last steelworkers outpost left in Hagerstown.
Lorshbaugh has worked at the plant since its beginnings in 1983, when it was owned by Gold Bond Ice Cream. He is a pasteurizer. His hands are gnarled and battered, and so, too, is his psyche — from defending his union against Unilever, against city officials he says haven’t been supportive to the union and even against the international union his workers belong to.
He and other workers say United Steelworkers officials didn’t fight Unilever hard enough and consider the local a lost cause. Union officials deny such accusations but have placed Lorshbaugh’s local under administratorship, suspending its bank account — a standard procedure in plant closings, they say. Lorshbaugh insists those actions aren’t standard.
Sitting in his union office — the United Steelworkers charter hangs on one wall, the U.S. flag on the other — Lorshbaugh recalls a simpler time in Hagerstown-
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“Where else are they going to make ice cream better than we can make it here?” Lorshbaugh said. “They can’t. They will never make it better than they can make it here.”
True or not, the company thinks it can make ice cream cheaper elsewhere. In interviews, company officials wouldn’t put a figure on how much money they expect to save, but Lorshbaugh said he was told his plant’s ice cream bars cost 14 cents more a dozen to produce compared with those of the company’s other plants.
Ken Wells, the plant manager, said energy and labor costs were key factors in the “ice cream network restructuring.”
Economists and trade group representatives say the high cost of manufacturing in Maryland, particularly in areas close to big cities, helps explain why the state has shed manufacturing jobs while other parts of the country are winning them back.”
Sounds like a business opportunity, Larry.
Thanks...didn’t read all the way down. Sorry to use your brains...
Figures. Unions are like rapacious locusts, going through productive companies, gutting them, making them unprofitable, then moving on.
The union workers losing their jobs migrate to other non-union places, organize and repeat with same results.
I swear, unions are one of the most injurious factors in the health and welfare of a business alongside bad management.
And when you get bad management AND unions, you might as well start digging the grave. The end might not come tomorrow. It might not come next week.
But it will come.
If Maryland were a right to work state, that 50-year-old would probably still have his job, were he willing to leave the union.
Corporations and government, working hand-in-hand to impoverish everyone. (At least, that’s the way it seems, sometimes.)