Green' Manufacturing: Tales of Job Growth and Job Export

Two IUE-CWA members with very different stories about job security in today's economy were among a dozen people who testified last weekend during a three-hour session of the Democratic Party platform hearing in Cleveland.

Shawn Grimes works for Cobasys, a company making batteries for fuel-efficient hybrid cars that had just three employees when he started 10 years ago. Now 246 workers work in shifts around the clock to make batteries for three hybrid General Motors vehicles.

Rita Bugzavich worked for 39 years as a shipping clerk at General Electric Lighting in Youngstown, Ohio. The plant produced filaments for everyday light bulbs, which many people today are swapping for energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs. GE announced last year it was closing the plant and moving the new technology for energy-saving bulbs – a technology GE invented -- to plants in China where it is opening new facilities.

"After October 31, I'll be pounding the pavement looking for a new job," Bugzavich, of IUE-CWA Local 84734, told the platform committee. "I'll be starting at the bottom of the totem pole at age 57. I don't know what I'll find, given that four other plants recently closed in Youngstown."

A former IUE member who took a buyout in 2006 from General Motors, where she worked on the assembly line at a Moraine, Ohio, plant, also testified. Misti Wells said she used the money to go back to school and earned an Associates Degree in automotive technology. "Yet today, months later, I'm still without a job," said Wells, a single mom who has run out of unemployment and is two months behind on her rent. "Everyone tells me the same thing – that they're on a hiring freeze."

Grimes, chief steward for IUE-CWA Local 84755, said many of his coworkers had been laid off from other plants in Ohio when employers shut down or moved overseas.

"In contrast, Cobasys is adding jobs," Grimes said. "Why is Cobasys growing when so many other manufacturing facilities are closing their doors? What can we learn that will help us rebuild manufacturing in America?"

One of the lessons, he said, is that a union workforce with good wages and benefits -- and a positive working relationship with management at Cobasys -- builds morale and loyalty. "We feel we have a future with this company," he said. "We work with management to make sure Cobasys remains competitive."

Bugzavich said despite GE's decision to close her plant and others, she's luckier than many workers because she's had a strong union. "I've loved my job," she said. "We made a good product. I earned good wages and benefits, enough to raise a family. Thanks to my union, I'll have a pension and retiree health care."

But with fewer union, family-wage jobs in America, Bugzavich said she worries "about the future of this country. We've got to stop making it so easy for companies to send jobs overseas. We should make the new, green technology here in America. That would create good jobs so people could pay for the products they make. You can't buy a $1,100 washing machine on a $10-an-hour paycheck."

Grimes said that if more companies are encouraged to follow Cobasys's lead, America can bounce back.

"I truly believe that if our country invests in green technology, adopts fair trade policies, strengthens workers' ability to organize by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, and passes health care reform so that we can compete on a level playing field with other countries, we'll be able to revive American manufacturing," he said.