Pittsburgh: Solidarity With Locked Out Calgon Workers

Pittsburgh: Solidarity With Locked Out Calgon Workers POG brings dinner for Mayday-eve potluck in support of Calgon workers

At midnight on February 29 Calgon Chemical locked out 63 members of United Steelworkers Local 5032 based at the company’s Neville Island facility. Rather than let work continue under an extension of the previous contract management locked out the workers, barring them from the plant. Workers are struggling to maintain affordable family healthcare coverage and pensions in the face of continual management efforts to cut benefits and crush the union.

On April 30, a dozen members of Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG) decided to show their solidarity and support of labor by bringing the workers dinner and standing with them on another cold night of the camp-out. POG brought them home cooked meatball sandwiches, pasta, chips, and cake. We talked with workers, thanked them for their dedication, and discussed some of our ongoing work.

Since the lockout began workers have maintained a 24-hour camp outside the plant gates (there are two main facility entrances.) Private security goons are also on hand, video-taping, and otherwise seeking to maintain an intimidating presence. Local police have also made their presence felt, protecting management and the scab labor being used to operate the plant, most recently issuing a citation to a steelworker for “swearing.” During the dinner security harassed a member of POG who took a picture of a car from the sidewalk, demanding to know who he was, refusing to say where the Calgon property line was, and then stating the local police had been called.

We live in a world where capital continues its endless march to globalize, to externalize all costs, and to crush all mechanisms of community accountability and control. Laws and borders criminalize the movement of people, while the powerful operate as they please, hidden actors within mega-corporations.

With a National Labor Relations Board stacked in favor of corporations, and a legal system that severely limits unions’ abilities to confront employers, these struggles often come down to the question of local community action and utilization of the main weapon at our disposal, solidarity.

Solidarity is more than a principle, more than an ethic; it is an imperative for social change advocates. It is simply recognition that ours is a collective struggle, and our fates are tied to the fates of others, and that no one can afford to go it alone. In this interconnected web of struggle, a defeat for labor at Calgon is a defeat for workers everywhere. Members of POG may not see eye-to-eye with the United Steelworkers on all issues, and many of our members likely have differences of political vision with many Calgon workers, yet we are united in the joint belief that workers are entitled to be the beneficiaries of their labor and that they have an unalienable right to organize for the betterment of themselves and others. We are workers and allies in the struggle.

Stated directly, it is an affront to our group’s values and aspirations to allow the continuation of a situation where locked out workers and their families suffer while scab labor and management operate with impunity. We are considering calling attention to those individuals (such as Calgon CEO John S. Stanik of Venetia) and companies responsible for the current suffering of workers and their families through the diversity of legal means at our disposal- protests at Calgon or it's customers and suppliers, home demonstrations, flyering, petitions, etc. We will be watching this situation closely.

Pittsburgh was, is, and will always be, a labor town.

In solidarity with the workers at Calgon, and all those experiencing the class-war that is being waged on workers.

Pittsburgh Organizing Group

www.organizepittsburgh.org