Fact Sheet on the Goodyear Fight
Who is goodyear?
Goodyear tire and rubber company is world's largest tire company. It produces tires, engineered rubber products and chemicals and is headquartered in akron, oh.
Just like many paper companies, goodyear is a multi-national corporation with more than 90 facilities in 28 countries. It has marketing operations in almost every country around the world, and goodyear employs about 80,000 people worldwide.
Approximately half of the company's $20 billion in annual revenue is derived from the North American market, where the company employs 32,000 people.
The USW represents over 15,000 goodyear employees.
The Union also speaks for more than 30,000 retirees and surviving spouses who currently receive pension and/or health care benefits from goodyear.
Union workers took actions in 2003 to preserve jobs and goodyear's future.
In the period 2001 – 2003, Goodyear lost more than $2.25 billion and saw its stock price fall from more than $30 per share in 2001 to less than $4.00 per share in 2003. In 2003 when the Union sat down with the company to bargain a new labor agreement, bankruptcy was a very real possibility.
The Union took on this challenge and agreed to concessions in wages, health care and pension benefits. The USW also developed extremely innovative arrangements to improve Goodyear's operations and productivity.
With that contract in hand, along with other changes made by management, Goodyear's future dramatically improved.
In 2005 Goodyear made a profit of $489 million before taxes and its shareholders saw the value of their investment in Goodyear increase by more than five-hundred percent from 2003.
2006 bargaining: The company forgets – or ignores - the commitment and sacrifice of its North American workforce.
In 2006 the North American tire industry found itself battered by a number of challenges – rising raw material costs, high energy costs – which caused many consumers to defer purchases of tires.
In typical corporate fashion, Goodyear's reaction has been to retreat from the North American market and to single out its union workers and retirees to bear the brunt of these challenges.
On June 21 the company announced that it was abandoning the private label market, thus ceding this ground to imports.
In bargaining, Goodyear demanded the right to close union factories and says it wants to "get out of the retiree insurance business altogether."
Goodyear also wants to abandon its retirees by setting up a trust with only enough money to provide the current levels of benefits for the next five or six years. When the fund is exhausted, current retirees as well as those working would be left without any health care benefits when they retire.
The company has made numerous other demands, including the right to reduce wages by up to 40% for older workers who can no longer do the physically demanding work of building tires, doubling health care premiums, providing no cost of living increase for most employees and hiring a temporary workforce with no benefits.
The goodyear fight is our fight.
American manufacturing must work with workers to keep jobs here, not give our jobs away to other countries. It must also reward, not punish, workers who have spent many years contributing to its profits and have made sacrifices so that american manufacturing can survive.
All American manufacturing workers —in fact, all U.S. workers — have a stake in the Goodyear fight. If Goodyear succeeds in pulling out of North America, ditching their retirees and dropping their health insurance, we all lose.
The rest of American manufacturing is watching this fight. Join USW tire members in holding Goodyear accountable to its workers. When Goodyear workers win, we all win.
