print this page

First Contract Bargaining Begins in March
For Employees of Kenwal Harbor Steel Processing

By a resounding three-to-one margin, about 50 employees of Kenwal Harbor Steel Processing in Porter, Ind., have voted to join the United Steelworkers.

According to Tom Long Jr., a member of the recently-elected negotiating committee, there were two main issues that led workers to seek Steelworkers' representation -- job security and fair treatment.

“The company was bringing in a lot of temps and they were canning people within two days. Basically, they were being given one day of training and were expected to know the job the second day,” Long Jr., said. “If they couldn’t do the job, they were fired. We felt like new workers should be treated better than that … that they should be given the time and the opportunity to be trained on the jobs properly.”

The company is also inconsistent with how they treat their employees when it comes to work rules.

“There is no real structure with work rules, either. Something that one guy would get written up for, another guy would get fired for,” Long Jr., said. “We need to have some structure.”

The company hired an attorney and ran a heavy anti-union campaign. One of the things the company did regularly was mail letters to the employee’s homes.

“There were times when it felt like we were getting letters every other day,” Long said. “They did a lot of twisting of words, saying that the union would take things away from us, when it would really have been the company that was taking them away.

“The one thing they did that I didn’t like was to send a letter to my wife,” Long Jr., said. I didn’t care for that at all and I made it clear to the company that I was the employee, not my wife.”

The first negotiating sessions have been planned for March 14 and 15, 2006.

Workers at the facility, located about 15 miles east of Gary, Ind., take large rolls of coiled steel and cut them into smaller strips to their customers’ specifications.

Kenwal Harbor Steel Processing employees become the newest members of USW District 7 where Jim Robinson is Director. Today’s USW is the largest industrial union in North America and represents more than 850,000 workers in a wide variety of occupations.