Cohen: 'Goodyear Fight Is Our Fight'

The battle for health care and good jobs at Goodyear, whose manufacturing workers have been on strike for more than two months, is a call to arms for all union members, CWA President Larry Cohen said.

Cohen has asked CWA staff, and is urging members across the country, to take part with the United Steelworkers and other AFL-CIO unions in leafleting Goodyear tire centers on Saturday, Dec. 16. He said Goodyear's attempt to cut health care benefits for retirees should be of enormous concern to everyone.

Go to http://ga.cwa-union.org/action/goodyear/ for details on locations where labor is leafleting on Dec. 16.

"This is a fight for all of us in the labor movement," he said. "The time to stand up to this corporate attack is now. This fight is our fight. Saving retiree health care at Goodyear is the first step to saving health care for our members too. At key times like this, we can make a real difference."

About 15,000 employees at more than a dozen Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plants in the United States and Canada began the walkout Oct. 5 to in a fight to save their jobs and protect health care coverage for current workers and retirees.

In 2003, Goodyear closed its Huntsville, Ala., plant leaving 1,200 workers unemployed and now another 1,100 face job losses as the company prepares to shut down another plant in Tyler, Texas.

Meanwhile, Goodyear has invested more than $150 million since 2004 in overseas production, including China and Colombia. "Despite its flag-waving rhetoric, Goodyear's performance reveals a company that is turning its back on its country and on communities all across North America," Steelworkers President Leo Gerard wrote in a recent column. "Goodyear's attitude is especially galling after workers agreed to sacrifices in 2003 that pulled the company back from the brink of bankruptcy."

Those sacrifices included agreeing to the Huntsville closure and taking wage, pension and benefit cuts. But rather than let workers share in last year's $228 million in after-tax profits, Gerard said Goodyear is demanding more concessions.

Gerard said Goodyear is taking not just an anti-worker position but an anti-American one "by financing manufacturing in countries where health care is subsidized but workers' rights are brutally repressed. Instead of demanding cuts to employee and retiree health care benefits, Goodyear should be working with the USW and the newly elected Congress to secure universal health care, which would lower costs for employers and employees while improving the health of all Americans."

The AFL-CIO, which is calling for the Dec. 16 "Day of Action," is urging America's working families to boycott Goodyear products and services during the strike. Unions will also encourage employers who use Goodyear tires and equipment for their fleets to stop "until such a time as Goodyear relents in its unconscionable demands and shameless hypocrisy and reaches a reasonable and equitable agreement with the United Steelworkers."

More details about the Goodyear strike are available from the Steelworkers at www.usw.org.