Electrolux Home Products employees voted by a 3-1 margin Monday to ratify a three-year contract for workers at the St. Cloud freezer plant.
The contract includes a $650 signing bonus, a pay freeze in the first year of the contract and pay increases of 20 cents per hour for each of the following two years.
Workers will have fewer health insurance packages to choose from, but the employee share of premiums will not increase in the packages that remain. Copayments for clinic visits and prescriptions will increase.
Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers ratified the contract in a 933-293 vote.
“I think we knew it was going to be passed,” employee Shelby Heitzman said. “I think we’re pretty happy.”
The vote followed contentious discussion about a mandatory overtime provision and movable breaks.
The overtime provision would kick in if there are not enough volunteers to work on nine Saturdays spread across six months in the plant’s peak production time.
The movable break provision lets workers shift the times of their 10-minute breaks eight times a month. It was negotiated partly because of a Muslim prayer dispute, settled last month with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
About 310 of the 1,900 workers at Electrolux are recent immigrants from Somalia, a Muslim nation. For most, voting was a new experience, said Mohamoud Mohamed, who helped translate.
The factory also has been a destination for Southeast Asians. Viet Truong, employed there for four years, hoped for contract approval because workers need jobs.
Employees went on strike for three weeks in 2000.
“For what we got out of it, we would have been better off working,” said Gene Holroyd, a 13-year employee.
Holroyd said company literature told workers about competition in other countries. Electrolux said it is thinking of moving a Michigan plant to Mexico.
“It’s not a contract that I could completely sell 100 percent, but looking at the alternatives and the possibility of alternatives down the road, I believe we did the best we could,” business agent Louie Neuman said.
Neuman blames liberalized trade policies for the loss of 127,000 IAMAW jobs nationwide in the past 10 years.
From St. Cloud Times