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10 October, 2011
The ICEM North American affiliate International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) won a new collective agreement with Bayer AG after several months of struggle. ILWU Local 6 in Berkeley, California, mounted an aggressive campaign for its 420 pharmaceutical workers at a Bayer HealthCare plant in blocking the company from imposing from higher employee health care costs, and winning job security in a new collective agreement.
The new four-year contract is expected to be ratified by union members on Wednesday, 12 October.
The ILWU used intervention by IGBCE of Germany, and established a Bayer Workers’ Council in America involving other unions that represent workers at the German company’s US operations. On 24 August, the day a prior labour agreement expired, workers at the other US plants wore stickers and conducted informational picketing on behalf of Berkeley workers.
Those unions include the United Steelworkers (USW), the International Association of Machinists (IAM), and the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU), part of the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW).
The agreement freezes workers’ share of health care premiums at 18% and it contains new provisions against outsourcing, in essence giving workers enhanced job security. In 2009, Bayer threatened to move jobs away from the Berkeley plant, but reversed that decision when the ILWU marshaled political support in gaining tax subsidies for the company. The union used that same political support to remind Bayer of its duty to keep family-sustaining jobs in the plant.
The new agreement, if ratified this week, will give workers a 3.1% wage increase in each of the first three years, and a 3.2% increase in year four, or 2014. The Berkeley plant manufactures Bayer’s profitable drug Kogenate, a hemophilia or blood-clotting medicine.