10-Week Chicago Teamsters Strike Wins Back Health Care

10-Week Chicago Teamsters Strike Wins Back Health Care
Enku Ide | Labor Notes

Workers at SK Hand Tools were far from lonely in facing the loss of health benefits in the sour economy. According to the Center for American Progress, 2.4 million workers have lost coverage during the recession. Cuts have been most stark in manufacturing, with 733,600 workers losing employer-based coverage between December 2007 and May, when SK Hand Tools quietly stopped paying the bills....Berg says that the national health care debate hit home for Local 743 members. "The workers would look on TV or in the newspaper and only see insurance executives and business people," he said. "Nobody was speaking for working people. When we struck, workers at SK Hand Tools felt that they had become a voice for working people."

While Congress and health care executives played political volleyball with health care reform, workers at SK Hand Tools in Chicago took matters into their own hands.

When their employer unilaterally dropped health insurance and tried to strip pensions and cut pay, 70 members of Teamsters Local 743 struck on August 25.

Now they’re returning to their production lines, where they make wrenches and other tools for Sears, having saved their health care and pensions. They took big pay cuts, but not as deep as what management had demanded: dropping pay from an average $14 to just above Illinois’s minimum wage, $8 an hour.

Although management dumped health care in early May, workers weren’t told. Many had to find out by word of mouth from other workers, or were clued in when hit with surprising medical bills. Workers said managers later told them they’d been too busy to inform employees. Since May, many workers have had to forgo needed medical care or are now amassing debt. Read more.