Chicago Workers Beat Back the Bankers' Attempt to Hold on to Bailout Cash

When the day finally comes that Raul Flores loses his job, he will face a bitter search for another one. "I've got a family to support, so I've got to do whatever it takes," he says. "It's going to be hard. The economic situation is not good, but I can't just wait for something to happen to me."

That puts Flores in the same boat as millions of other U.S. workers. Last month alone, 533,000 workers lost their jobs -- the highest figure in 34 years. A week ago, the heads of the Big Three auto companies were in Washington, D.C., pleading for loans to keep their companies afloat. As a price, lawmakers and pundits told them they had to become "leaner and meaner," and in response, General Motors announced it would close nine plants and put tens of thousands of workers in the street. Ford and Chrysler described a similar job-elimination strategy.

What makes Flores special? He didn't just accept the elimination of his job. Instead, he sat in at the Chicago plant where he worked for six days a week, together with 240 other union members at Republic Windows and Doors.

Republic workers were not demanding the reopening of their closed factory, at least not yet. They have been fighting for severance and benefits to help them survive the unemployment they know awaits them. Yet, their occupation of the plant can't help but raise deeper questions about the right of workers to their jobs. Can a return to the militant tactics of direct action that produced the greatest gains in union membership, wages and job security in U.S. history, overturn "the inescapable logic of the marketplace"? Can employers, and the banks that hold their credit lines, be forced to keep plants open?

Unlike the auto giants, Republic is not threatening bankruptcy. It makes a "green product," Energy Star-compliant doors and windows that should be one of the bedrock industries for a new, more environmentally sustainable economy. But Bank of America, as it was receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, pulled the company's credit line, leaving workers in the lurch. Perhaps that alone led President-elect Barack Obama to support the workers. The bank-enforced closure undermines his program for using environmentally sustainable jobs to replace those eliminated in the spiraling recession. He called Republic workers "absolutely right. What's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy."

Federal law requires companies to give employees 60 days' notice of a plant closure, or pay them 60 days' severance pay to give them breathing room to find other jobs. Republic workers got three days and no money. "They knew they'd be out on the street penniless," says Leah Fried, organizer for Local 1110 of the United Electrical Workers. "When the negotiating committee came back to the factory to report that the company didn't even show up to talk with them, the workers were so enraged they voted unanimously not to leave until they got their severance and vacation pay."

While the workers acted to gain their legally mandated rights, the plant occupation resurrects a tactic with a radical history. In 1934, autoworkers occupied the huge Fisher Body plants in Flint, Mich., and when the battle was over, the United Auto Workers union was born. Sit-down strikes spread across the country like wildfire. Occupying production lines in plant after plant, workers won unions, better wages and real changes in their lives.

Seventy years later, the workers who have inherited that legacy of unionization and security are on the brink of losing everything. Just since 2006, the United Auto Workers has lost 119,000 members. The threat of plant closure has been used to cut in half the wages of new hires, to $14.50 an hour, the same wage paid on the window lines at Republic, where the union is only 4 years old.