Strike
On 1 April 2006, workers at the Bach plant in Elkhart began a strike that lasted three years. Production was interrupted until the company hired replacement workers, and roughly a third of the strikers returned to work. The strike ended when workers voted to dissolve the relationship between the company and the United Auto Workers union. As a result, retired employees lost their pensions.
The 70 strikers who returned to work constituted 30% of the pre-strike workforce, but they constituted 57% of the workforce after the strike, which shrank by 46% to 124. In the post-strike period amidst severe economic crisis, sales were down from pre-strike levels by 31%, but gross profit rose from 20% to 22% of sales revenues. Re-work and quality complaints dropped sharply in the post-strike period. Reductions in employee compensation were credited with returning production of student-line horns (the TR-300) from Asia to Elkhart.
Read more about this topic: Vincent Bach Corporation
Famous quotes containing the word strike:
“If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,—for the root is faith,—I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And, once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)