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:
“It is given to few to add the store of knowledge, to strike new springs of thought, or to shape new forms of beauty. But so sure as it is that men live not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the future of the world lies in the hands of those who are able to carry the interpretation of nature a step further than their predecessors.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)
“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)