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State Senator Tim Kennedy addresses the crowd in the rain.
State Senator Tim Kennedy addresses the crowd in the rain.

Workers on Strike Rally Outside Ingersoll Rand Plant

by / Aug. 25, 2015 10pm EST

Along Broadway, Buffalo’s eastern arterial into Cheektowaga, hundreds of labor supporters gathered on the sidewalk outside the Ingersoll Rand centrifugal compression plant on Tuesday afternoon in solidarity with the 240 International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union members who have been striking for three weeks. The workers walked out after their contract expired on August 9, voting 237-5 to strike due to the company’s two-tiered wage system and the company’s transition to a high-deductible insurance plan.

Supportive honks from passing cars and thunderous train horns from CSX freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains on the opposite side of the street filled the air under heavy cloud cover. “It’s been like this every day since we started picketing,” one IAM member said. Picketers have been camped out at the plant’s two major entrances to detain the temporary or “scab” workers for the allowable three minutes as they enter and exit the premises.

At issue for most members, more than the two-tiered wage system that has on average a $4/hour gap based on seniority, is the change in health insurance provision, according to IAM’s local 300 business representative Pete Cooney. Ingersoll Rand favors a plan that Cooney says carries a $3,000 deductible with a 20 percent contribution on costs thereafter. If put in effect, it’s a plan that could be financially ruinous should a medical emergency strike a member’s family.

Cooney is in regular contact with the company in effort to resolve the matter, but so far neither side has budged. Cooney has countered Ingersoll Rand’s medical plan with three different options provided by Blue Cross Blue Shield that are cheaper than the plan Ingersoll Rand is proposing.

In a prepared statement, company spokesperson Misty Zelent wrote: “We are confident in our [healthcare] plan. Since 2014, each of our locations with an expired labor contract agreed to a new four-year contract with the same medical plan design proposed for Buffalo, including two other IAM locals.”

Cooney estimates that Ingersoll Rand is using about 40-50 temporary workers, but doubts they’re able to make much progress. “These are high-skill jobs, it’s not an assembly line situation. This place, they build compressors from the ground up.”

State Senator Marc Panepinto agreed that the work that IAMAW members does is very specialized, down to “a hundreth of an inch” at times. Touting his own history with labor, Panepinto said he was “upset that Ingersoll Rand is trying the mettle of Buffalo workers.”

About the healthcare dispute, Panepinto pointed out that Ingersoll Rand acquired the plant last year from Cameron for $850 million dollars. “Their CEO makes 365 times what the average worker makes in a year, which is more than the national average of CEOs making 305 times the average worker, and they’re trying to pass the buck on to working people.”

Panepinto’s Senate colleague Tim Kennedy addressed the crowd as a brief but chilling rain started to fall, exhorting them to “hold the line.” “We’re a blue-collar town with blue-collar workers and we’re gonna see this to the end!” he shouted. “Bring on the rain, bring on the snow, bring on the sleet. We’re gonna do what we need to be successful!”

Organizer and Western New York Area Labor Federation president Richard Lipsitz Jr. estimated there were 20-25 labor unions represented at the rally, and told the crowd that this struggle for economic justice “is taking place all over the country now.”

Three weeks in, some of the members may be wearing thin on patience, but the assembled appeared resolved, chanting “Hold the line!” as poncho-wearing Ingersoll Rand security staff in the cordoned-off parking lot trained video cameras at the crowd.

An eight-year veteran at Ingersoll Rand, Gary Krupski said that the strike has brought IAM members even closer together. “I think this has made us even stronger,” he said. “We’d like to see a fair deal, we’re not asking for the world.” 

Krupski added that the worker’s former healthcare plan was terminated within a week of them going on strike without warning from the company. “I thought we’d at least have to the end of the month,” he said.

Adjoining one of the plant’s entrances, demonstrators erected a makeshift home base underneath a pop-up tent with coolers of water and 15-foot-high inflatable rat labeled “Ingersoll Rat.” The generator to power the rat is on loan from an electrician’s union.

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