UE NEWS Updates

A settlement of pay and benefit claims has been reached between the members of UE Local 1174, who formerly worked at Quad City Die Casting (QCDC), and the trustee in charge of the company’s assets. UE members will be paid for vacation to which they were entitled in 2009, and the trustee will place money from the sale of the company’s assets into a fund to settle workers’ outstanding medical bills that went unpaid when the company retroactively cancelled health coverage last year.

Warehouse Workers for Justice and clergy members in Joliet, Illinois are organizing a consumer boycott of vacuum cleaner manufacturer Bissell. The boycott movement was prompted by the firing last November of 70 workers at Bissell’ warehouse near Joliet, after the workers filed charges over violations of workers’ rights at the facility, including violations of wage and hour laws, and began union organizing.

Clergy and other religious leaders will conduct a press conference on Martin Luther King Day (Monday, Jan. 18) to announce a boycott of Bissell products. Their goal is to secure justice for a group of Bissell warehouse workers who were fired last year when they blew the whistle on violations at the warehouse near Joliet.  

The group has been meeting with workers involved in Warehouse Workers for Justice, an organization that is raising concerns over violations of workers' rights in the warehouse industry.

For workers at Cummins Rocky Mount Engine Plant (formerly Consolidated Diesel Co.), Martin Luther King Day 2010 marks an anniversary of one of their own struggles. It was 20 years ago that employees in the plant circulated a petition calling on company to grant workers a paid holiday for King Day. The petition was presented to management on January 15, 1990. Following another eight months of struggle by the workers, CDC management announced on August 1, 1990 that it would grant the new paid holiday.