In Bid to Resume Talks, Caterpillar Stages Lockout

Caterpillar Inc. said Thursday that it was locking out 5,700 workers represented by the United Auto Workers at factories in Aurora, East Peoria and the Peoria area.

The affected workers were told not to report to work beginning with the Thursday shift at about 11 p.m., the company announced. Caterpillar management said the move was a bid to force the UAW back to the bargaining table.

“That’s the purpose of these types of actions. We should quit playing games and get back down to the bargaining table,” said Wayne Zimmerman, Caterpillar vice president responsible for labor negotiations.

“This is very, very serious. We’ve got to get down to business and bargain,” Zimmerman said. “That’s what this is all about.”

The UAW has told the locked-out workers to join picket lines at key assembly plants in Decatur and East Peoria. The limited strike against Caterpillar began Monday after five weeks of deadlocked negotiations between labor and management.

UAW Secretary-Treasurer Bill Casstevens said Caterpillar’s action betrayed its workers.

“The management of Caterpillar is displaying more severe coldness of heart towards its employees and their families than any winter wind could ever inflict,” Casstevens said, who called the strategy “ill-fated.”

“The union hopes that Caterpillar management will awaken to the need to engage in realistic, traditional collective bargaining and negotiate a pattern agreement that makes sense for Caterpillar, its employees and its competitors,” he said.

UAW spokesman Karl Mantyla said there were no immediate plans to expand the strike. He said all locked-out workers were told to apply for state unemployment compensation.

Zimmerman said the company does not believe that they will qualify for unemployment benefits because Caterpillar was reacting to a labor-organized work stoppage.

The lockout closes the Aurora plant, where bulldozers, loaders, landfill compactors, excavators and farm tractors are built. All buildings in East Peoria are closed, including production facilities for track-type bulldozers and pipe-layers.

Manufacturing will continue at Caterpillar’s engine plant in Mossville, its foundry in Mapleton, its engine fuel systems plant in Pontiac and component production plant in York, Pa.

And the company’s parts distribution facilities will remain open in Morton and York, Ill.; Denver, Colo., and Memphis, Tenn. About 400 employees at those facilities have a no-strike clause in their contracts that bars them from walking out when the manufacturing employees are on strike.

The lockout brings the number to about half the UAW-represented work force who are on strike, Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman said the union had tried to “inflict maximum damage to the company” by striking key assembly plants in Decatur and East Peoria.

Those facilities produce some of the most profitable machinery built by Caterpillar, the world’s largest maker of earth-moving equipment. The company said the strike-targeted plants “compete toe-to-toe with Japanese manufacturers” such as Komastu Ltd.

The union is demanding that Caterpillar accept a contract patterned after a recent pact signed with Deere & Co. of Moline. Caterpillar is insisting on health benefit concessions and lower wage increases, citing its unique position as a major exporter and intense foreign competition.

Zimmerman renewed Caterpillar’s offer to extend the previous contract and called for the union to accept federal mediation. The company’s last offer remains on the table, he said.