Striking a defense contractor in these trying times is either a brave show of labor solidarity or mass occupational suicide. Group Technologies Corp. employed 115 Teamsters with security clearances at the company's Tampa plant before they went on strike Oct. 19 in a dispute over holidays and other issues. Group Technologies makes advanced electronic hardware. It supplies top-secret encryption devices to U.S. military and intelligence services as well as to overseas allies.
Supportive honks from truckers passing along Malcolm McKinley Drive boost morale among the mainly female picketers outside the factory near the University of South Florida. The Teamsters behind those steering wheels sound the horns in a daily salute to their union sisters.
But GroupTech seems to be winning this domestic labor skirmish, at the bargaining table and perhaps on the public relations front.
GroupTech fired the strikers after a negotiating impasse prompted the Teamsters to reject the company's final offer, 90 to 11, and walk out. The strikers were replaced with a mix of new hires and workers from a soon-to-close unsecured sector of the plant. After losing their jobs, Teamsters from Local 79 offered to return if the company restarted the stymied talks. GroupTech declined.
"I don't know what the union expects to achieve by having people picket the plant at this point," said James G. Cocke, GroupTech's president and chief executive officer. "These are ex-employees."
GroupTech has additional leverage in the form of post-Sept. 11 patriotic fervor. It hasn't hurt that GroupTech, a unit of Louisville-based Sypris Solutions Inc., is run by a decorated Marine combat veteran who was wounded in Vietnam.
"I said on local TV that I was ashamed to have people standing out in front of this defense plant striking as we were going through this national crisis," said Cocke, whose Purple Heart hangs on his office wall. "I still feel that way. They may think that is just my ploy to make them look bad. That is certainly not the case. The products that we build here are important to this country. That's what made it even more important that we didn't stop work."
Leo G. Krug, a Local 79 business agent, has tried to turn the tables on the flag-waving CEO.
Striking Teamsters profess shock that Cocke has blabbed about classified contracts. To obtain security clearances, union members had to sign pledges that forbid them from talking about their jobs. Cocke's comments about the importance of GroupTech's defense work were solely to incite the public against the strike, according to Local 79.
Krug won't confirm that a big GroupTech customer is the super-secret National Security Agency. "I'll let the president of the company tell you that, in his infinite wisdom," said Krug. "Our side is not going to compromise the security of this country."
Cocke said he gave nothing away by acknowledging GroupTech's close ties to the encrypting, decoding and eavesdropping NSA. "We have a very good relationship with the National Security Agency," Cocke said. Krug also raised doubts about replacement workers. "There's a question as to whether they are all U.S. citizens," said Krug. "You have people that are not skilled working on sophisticated programs. I'm fearful of another Firestone incident, with possibly military weapons." The 80 employees recruited from the shuttered wing of the plant, including some Teamsters now branded scabs by the union, are all Americans, said Cocke, as are another 25 who were hired from outside.
"Believe me, we have U.S. government security inspectors climbing over us on a daily basis," said Cocke. "If I had people working back there without the proper security clearances, they would shut this building down in a New York minute."
When each side puts away the Stars and Stripes long enough to count up their grievances, it is somewhat startling to learn that the negotiations turned intractable over a 12th holiday on the annual work schedule.
"The holiday was the big issue," said Cocke. "They just flatly refused to negotiate that."
On that score, Krug uncharacteristically agreed with Cocke. "The company is extremely insistent — and I think this is the major issue — in removing one of their holidays," said Krug.
The holiday the company removed was Good Friday. "We have made a business decision that we can no longer afford to pay our people 12 holidays," said Cocke.
The fact that Teamsters at GroupTech have enjoyed 12 days off in addition to their annual vacations speaks well of the union's value to plant workers.
But the company's choice of dropping Good Friday rankled some of the Bible Belt workers. "The employees have enjoyed Good Friday for a number of years, and they just don't want to lose that holiday," said Krug.
GroupTech's targeting of that holiday enabled Krug to rally the rank-and-file to his uncompromising cry of no givebacks. "This is not greed," said Krug. "This is maintaining what they have."
Cocke said Good Friday gave Krug a chance to act as a demagogue. "I'm a little bit skeptical that Good Friday is that big of an issue," said Cocke. "I think they made it an issue just to try to bolster their position."
Cocke contended that GroupTech tried to soften the blow.
The company increased a proposed 45-cent hourly raise so that, over the course of the year, Teamsters would receive the equivalent of a holiday pay differential for coming in on Good Friday, said Cocke. At the end of the year, workers would have slightly heftier W-2s for working their former holiday in exchange for GroupTech gaining an extra day of production, he said.
"They refused that," Cocke said of union negotiators. Cocke said he is unsure that the enhancement offer was ever communicated to the general membership. Krug said the company's final offer of 50 cents an hour wasn't presented in the context of easing the sting of a lost holiday.
The two other sticking points were the elimination of a fifth week of vacation for workers with more than 20 years on the job and the doubling of medical insurance premiums for employees.
Cocke said the company made another concession on the vacation takeaway by allowing current workers eligible for the five weeks to retain the same amount of time off for as long as they work at GroupTech.
Striking workers don't see a compassionate, flexible employer. They see a profitable defense contractor that will only get more so with grave security threats facing this country, fattening the bottom line on the backs of workers who got the company to where it is today.
GroupTech doesn't report financial results individually to investors, but as a group of three Sypris subsidiaries. The group had net revenue of $51-million for the three months ending Sept. 30, a 12 percent increase over the same quarter last year. The group's net revenue for the first nine months of 2001 was up 19 percent.
"They want people to work for cheaper wages to build a good product for the government," said Wanda Valez, who carries a topical placard on the picket line reading: "Scab — you are the weakest link."
"That's been their aim since this Jim Cocke took over," added Valdez.
Cocke's own pay is a sore point with Teamsters. They said their annual wages, before overtime, hovered around $25,000 for even the most senior and skilled members. The GroupTech CEO's total 2000 compensation was $275,807, according to a Sypris filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That was up $50,187 from 1998, when the company's fortunes began to rebound from a disastrous foray into civilian semiconductor manufacturing.
Yet the picketers, now jobless and some sustained only by holiday turkeys and $55 in weekly strike pay from the Teamsters, pray that the season of giving melts Cocke's resolve to punish them.
"I want to have a little bit of confidence that he has some compassion, somewhere in his heart," said striking Teamster Deloris Zeigler. "No matter how much business you do, you know what you're doing to the people was unjust and you can do better. You know you can do better."
Cocke said some strikers might be invited back when fresh orders come in and they agree to a new wage-and-benefits package that GroupTech unilaterally imposed on the replacements after the union dismissals in October.
Judging from Cocke's claims about October productivity, GroupTech is doing fine without the strikers. "We didn't miss a beat," he said. "Our customers are pleased that we haven't missed any production deliveries."
Although sounding conciliatory at the end of an hour-long interview last month, Cocke said there has been "so much animosity traded between the two sides." Striker taunts, he said with a chuckle, have included "variations on my name that are more numerous than I ever thought possible." (For the record, Cocke pronounces his last name as "Coke.")
The strike has divided families and created odd spectacles. One of the most vocal strikers drops off her still-employed technician son down the street from the plant each morning so she may rejoin the picket line unmolested by union comrades, according to Cocke.
"Around the holiday time, it's tough to know that these people are out here, not collecting unemployment," said Cocke. "We know some of them have already signed up for welfare and food stamps. It's tough for me personally to think that we've got 25-year employees that decided that that's the way for them to go, rather than coming to work here for what we think are fair wages and benefits."
Contact Staff Writer Francis X. Gilpin at 813-248-8888, ext. 130, or frangilpin@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2001.