This time last year, 10,000 workers and UAW members at John Deere waged a massive strike that became a national news story. This year, workers at another industrial manufacturer are spending Thanksgiving carrying on a strike that has lasted for seven months, but has received significantly less national attention. As Mel Buer reports, “CNH Industrial, a multinational corporation, is an agricultural machinery and construction equipment manufacturer with 13 locations across the United States producing its Case and New Holland brands of equipment. Workers at the Burlington and Racine locations are unionized with the United Auto Workers (UAW)—UAW Local 807 and Local 180, respectively—and have been embroiled in contentious contract negotiations with the company since earlier this year. Their previous six-year contract with Case New Holland officially expired on April 30. After weeks of stalled negotiations failed to produce an acceptable contract, over 1,000 workers in Burlington and Racine walked off the job on May 2.” As the holidays approach and the weather gets colder, we need to remember the brave workers holding the line and fighting for a better life for themselves and their families. In this mini-cast, we speak with Marcques Derby of UAW Local 807, who has worked at CNH Industrial for 11 years.

Marcques Derby:  I’m Marcques Derby, United Auto Workers Local 807, Burlington, Iowa. I’ve been employed with Case New Holland Industrial for going on 11 years in January. Let’s see… We’ve been on strike since May of this year, so just shy of seven months, I believe.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. Well, welcome, everyone, to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

So, we’ve got an important mini cast for y’all today, that we are getting out there ahead of Thanksgiving weekend. Of course, we are sending nothing but love and solidarity and well wishes to everyone out there. We hope that if you are able, if you have the time off, and if you are around loved ones, that you can find some time in this holiday weekend to rest, to recharge, to be present with the people that you love, and to unplug a bit from the nonstop, endless bullshit that we seem to be dealing with in this country and around the world on a week-to-week basis. It can get very exhausting, and so we hope that everyone out there can find some time to rest and recharge as we head into the holidays.

But it’s also important for us to remember as we head into Thanksgiving and we got the holidays coming up after that, this is a really crucial time for us to remember those who are still fighting the good fight. Things are getting colder, the pocket books are getting tighter, and that is why it is super important for us to take this time to really show solidarity with folks like Marcques and his coworkers at Case New Holland Industrial, who have been on strike since May 2 of this year. We need to remember the folks at Warrior Met Coal, the coal miners in Alabama who have been on strike for almost two years now. We need to remember the Starbucks workers who are being unjustly fired, having their stores closed, all of that.

Just think for a second how much tougher the holiday season is for folks in that position. And I know that we all can’t do everything, but as we love to say on this show, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. And so we wanted to ask our amazing listeners, if you are able, please help us spread the word about these folks who are on strike and still on strike, folks who are still fighting for justice at their workplaces. Let’s use this holiday season to show some solidarity, send them some love, and help keep the fight going.

And so, as y’all heard, we’re so grateful to have Marcques on today, to talk about a crucial struggle that has been sorely under-reported in the media, I think. And thankfully, I’m lucky enough to get to work with my great colleague, Mel Buer, who’s now an associate editor at The Real News Network. And Mel actually did a great report on the Case New Holland strike for The Real News back in September. And so, I want to read a couple passages from that to set the table for everyone listening. And then we’re going to talk to Marcques about, we’re going to go deeper into what led to this strike, what it’s been like for him and his coworkers holding the line all these months, where things currently stand with the strike and with the negotiations. And of course, we’re going to end by asking what everyone out there listening can do to help.

So, to make sure that everyone is up to speed on this important strike, I’m going to read from Mel’s report here. So, Mel writes, “CNH Industrial, a multinational corporation, is an agricultural machinery and construction equipment manufacturer with 13 locations across the United States producing its Case and New Holland brands of equipment. Workers at the Burlington and Racine locations,” that’s Burlington, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin respectively, “are unionized with the United Auto Workers (UAW) – UAW Local 807 and Local 180, respectively – And have been embroiled in contentious contract negotiations with the company since earlier this year.

“Their previous six-year contract with Case New Holland officially expired on April 30. After weeks of stalled negotiations failed to produce an acceptable contract, over 1,000 workers in Burlington and Racine walked off the job on May 2. As is the case at many manufacturing job sites across the country, workers at Case see their treacherous working conditions as simply part of the job; thus, working conditions have been less focal during negotiations.

“Central to the strike, however, is the fact that Case employs a punitive points-based attendance system and splits its workforce into three immovable tiers based on the date one was hired. This tier system – Similar to those implemented at companies like Kellogg’s and John Deere, where workers also went on strike last year – Is designed to keep workers from finding equal footing with one another along wage lines.

“As Jonah Furman wrote in May at Labor Notes, ‘Workers hired before 1996 make $6 to $8 more per hour than those hired after 2004; those hired between 1996 and 2004 earn somewhere in between. Workers want to see at least the bottom tier abolished.’” 

Mel continues, “At the Burlington plant, the workforce is further divided into two departments: Workers either help manufacture equipment for construction or agriculture. UAW members in Burlington and Racine are hoping for a significant increase in wages, security in their health insurance, and better overtime and vacation policies. The previous offers floated by management haven’t done enough to address the ongoing problem of high inflation in the country. ‘It doesn’t really do us any good when bread’s $4 a loaf.’” One worker said to Mel on the line, “‘They haven’t been serious the whole time.’” “They” referring to Case New Holland.

All right, so that’s just, again, some table setting, just to make sure that everyone’s a little up to speed on what’s going on here. This is a really important strike, but it’s gotten significantly less national attention than, say, the John Deere strike this time last year, where 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike, also UAW members.

So again, Marcques, I’m really, really grateful to you for making time to chat with us about this. I wanted to turn things over to you here and ask if you could maybe say a little more about yourself and the work that you do at Case New Holland and give us a bit of a ground level view of what it’s been like working there and what led to this historic strike that prompted y’all to walk out on the picket line in May earlier this year?

Marcques Derby:  Yeah, thank you for having me on again, by the way. I appreciate it and we appreciate the opportunity to have our story heard, and it’s a blessing. So again, thank you.

Like I said earlier, I’ve been with Case New Holland since January of 2012. When I hired in, the culture in the workplace was significantly different, and I say that because we used to work five eight-hour days, which is a standard work shift. Sometimes you’d work nine-hour days, sometimes you’d work some occasional Saturday overtime, which is normal. We want the eight-hour day, that’s normal. That’s what we strive for. People went on strike for an eight-hour day. But fast forward, our biggest problem, really, is not having a work-life balance. We work 10-hour days, four 10-hour days. A lot of times those 10 hour days aren’t 10, they’re 12-hour days. So, a lot of people are upset about that. Back to a little bit more about myself, though, and what I do as well… I don’t want to get off topic there, but –

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, no, you’re good, man. I mean, again, we’re not seeing any of this, so any background that you can give is super, super helpful.

Marcques Derby:  I appreciate it. I work on the agriculture side of the business. So, we make three products in our facility. And like I said, I work in the Burlington plant and we make combine headers, so we make bean, corn… Well, I would say it’s a grain header. So, you make a draper header, an auger header, and then a corn header. And if you don’t understand the agriculture background of what a header looks like, a draper header has belts that drape across the entirety of the frame and it pulls your crop to the center, and then it pulls it to the combine. An auger, that’s self-explanatory, it has an auger in the middle instead of belts, and it uses an auger to feed the grain to the combine. And then a corn header’s pretty self-explanatory, it picks corn.

So, when I first started in the ag department, it was a relatively new startup. The product line was only about nine months old. The company had just got, I believe – And I could be incorrect on this, but I don’t believe I’m incorrect on this – But they got some assistance, some government assistance, that they would hire X amount of people in order to be able to get a stimulus in funds. And so, they brought this product line in, the header’s product line, and for a long time we worked a lot of overtime and we had a high turnover rate. It was outrageous.

And probably about 2015, 2016, that trend started to turn down because we started to figure out how to make the product. We were still working five eight-hour days. Tenured employees… We were really starting to get the assistance that we needed from the company. Health and safety standards in the back shop there were starting to really hit their stride.

Well, on the flip side though, the company was spending so much time focusing on our side of the plant that they forgot to focus on the other side of the plant. So, we make backhoes as well. We used to be the backhoe capital of the world. We were the only Case New Holland plant that made backhoes. We are the birthplace of the backhoe. So, we have history, we have heritage, we have pride in what we do.

And that side of the plant, well, like I said earlier, they’re working 12-hour days, four days a week, then they’re working nine hours on a Friday. And if you work in repair, you’re still on a five eight schedule, but they’re working five tens. They’ll work you eight hours on a Saturday, two Saturdays in a row because they can’t work you three according to our contract, but they’ll ask you to come in for your third, and you’ll come in for your third. Why? Because you feel bad about not coming in for your third, because they make you feel bad about not coming in. So, you don’t have a work-life balance.

So, back to the headers area where I work, I’ve been there since 2013 in the header area. I started out in the backhoe line. I work in the line test, I run combine heads, I test them, I proof them, I make sure that they’re good to go at the end of the line to the customer before they get packed and then shipped to the customer. It’s a tough job. It’s not necessarily easy. It takes a lot of mental acuity to be able to do that job. It’s physical as well. You got to crawl up and down, around on things. You have to test electrical stuff, hydraulic stuff, pneumatics. So, the work that we’re doing is heavy assembly work.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And we’re talking gigantic machinery. All this is taking place in a very… I don’t know, it just gives me anxiety thinking about all the moving parts there, all the heavy parts, and like you said, all the tests that you’ve got to run to make sure that this massive piece of equipment that so many people depend on, whether it’s the farmers who are going to use it, the people who depend on the crops that the farmers yield, so on and so forth. Yeah, I can imagine that’s a pretty high pressure situation to be in five times a week, 10 hours a day.

Marcques Derby:  Right. The other thing is we have a lot of work content that we have to remember. So, a lot of people just automatically assume these factory jobs, United Auto Workers, well, they just put a label on, well, they’re auto workers, they got small amounts of work and a short takt time. And a takt time is a work cycle. So, that means how long it takes you to get from start to finish of your job in your work cell. Our takt time in the header area is an hour and 15 minutes. So, that’s a lot of work content that you have to remember. In an hour and 15 minutes, you got a lot of stuff that you have to do. In the auto industry, you might have 15, 20 seconds, the next car is going. 15, 20 seconds, the next car is going.

Yeah, they gotta put some nuts and bolts and rivets, and they got quite a bit of them that they got to put on, and it’s repetitive motion. Ergonomics are probably jacked up and they suck. But a lot of people probably get that confused on the differences in the industry of manufacturing. Not all manufacturing is created equal. And that is another reason why we strike against the company, because they don’t look at us as valuable. They think that we’re all just replaceable. We’re just a number, we’re replaceable, they can go out and they can find somebody else, pay them less money to do the exact same work and the work content. Well, that’s not true. We’re highly skilled, intelligent operators. It’s not like you come into the job, three days later you know how to do the job in full. Sometimes there are jobs that take three, four weeks to figure out how to do from start to finish and be proficient at it. That’s pretty crazy.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and it’s just so just jaw-dropping to hear. Because in one sense, this is such a particular type of work at a particular type of facility producing a particular kind of product.

Marcques Derby:  Mm-hmm.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But in another regard, what’s so frustrating and sad is there are so many parts of what you’re saying that I hear echoed in other industries and other jobs. I mentioned the John Deere strike. We’ll just stick with that. One of the reasons that became such a focal point for people was, A, it was a big, recognizable name, it was 10,000 workers, but also John Deere was trying to take more from workers after recording its most profitable year on record.

Marcques Derby:  Absolutely.

Maximillian Alvarez:  We’re talking billions of dollars in profits, and we’re kind of talking about the same thing here. Case New Holland’s not hurting. Yeah. They’re raking in a lot. [crosstalk]

Marcques Derby:  They’re wildly profitable. They are wildly profitable. Since we’ve been out on strike, they’ve still made profits. They have still made profits while we were on strike.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Geez.

Marcques Derby:  It is bizarre. And I mean, what we’re asking for in negotiations, we’re not asking for the world, we’re just asking for our fair shake. We’re asking for our fair piece of the pie. It blows my mind that a company that is as wildly profitable as CNH is doesn’t have the respect for their employees. And I don’t think that it just is in our two plants. I don’t. I think that it’s the same mentality in Wichita, Kansas, where they make skid steers. I would be willing to bet you that they don’t treat their employees down there any better.

And in fact, they’re a non-union plant, and they probably work endless amounts of overtime. They probably get paid a little bit more than we do, but they probably have insurance. It’s absolutely garbage, garbage that if you break your ankle today, you might pay a low premium week to week, but if you break your ankle, you go get surgery, it’s going to bankrupt you. The company is self-insured. You’re asking to bankrupt your employees so you can make profits for your shareholders, so Scott Wine can make more money as a CEO, that’s what it is. The fat cat gets the bag, and they’re getting the bag, they’re selling the bag.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and to put a fine point on that for listeners, I actually pulled this up before the interview. So, for folks listening, I’m looking at macrotrends.net report on CNH Industrial revenue from 2014 to 2022. Top two bullet points here, I will read verbatim: “CNH Industrial revenue for the quarter ending in Sept. 30, 2022 was $5.88 billion, a 23.9% increase year-over-year. CNH industrial revenue for the 12 months ending on Sept. 30, 2022 was $36 billion, a 59.97% increase year-over-year.”

So again, that’s what we’re talking about when Marcques says, the fat cat gets the bag. A lot of money is being made here off the backs of folks like Marcques and his coworkers, not only there in Burlington, but at the plant in Racine and the other plants around the country. And yet, again, so many other companies that we’ve been hearing about that have been raking in record profits, whether that be Amazon, whether that be service industry jobs like Starbucks and Chipotle, or whatnot, they’re trying to take more and it’s just not right. It really, really is not.

And Marcques, I was wondering if you could say a little more for folks about the strike itself? Take us back to the day when y’all hit the picket line, and I guess any other basic points that you think folks should understand about the path that led to this strike and what folks like yourself and your coworkers have been talking about, and what it felt like to hit the picket line back in May.

Marcques Derby:  Yeah. So, leading up to April 31, because that was our deadline, that was the end of contract expiration, we started negotiating our national agreement with the company during the first week of April, which we thought was a little odd that they wanted to wait so long to do that. We had asked for an additional week to negotiate ahead so we could get our local negotiations done a week prior, in March, just to give us a little bit more time. Because we knew that there were some items, based on the surveys that we had sent out to the memberships, that were significant. In 2016, we had things that we knew that we needed to work on for the membership. And I wasn’t on the bargaining team in 2016, I was a health and safety appointee at that point.

But being in the membership, I know that there were issues in 2016 that we had to work on. And for the most part, those marks were met. I mean, the agreement was pretty decent. There were some things that needed to be worked on, but you can’t get everything all at one pass. You still have to be reasonable. That’s why you negotiate. Both sides have to be collective. Well, that didn’t happen this time. There were times where we would make a pass in negotiations that it’d be 8:00 in the morning, you’d give them your offer, give the company your offer, and you’d wait. 5:00 had come around and you’d get a message saying, well, we’re not prepared. Can we meet back again tomorrow morning?

Well, I just wasted a whole day waiting on your response to our proposal, to come back the next day to give us the exact same proposal that they gave us the day before with red line items in it that essentially look like the New Testament. They wanted to completely gut the whole contract. So, when it came down to crunch time… That last week in April, there was some significant movement the last two or three days. And the trend was going really, really good. So, we agreed as a council, as a committee, the upper leadership did, they agreed that they were going to do a 24-hour extension. And something happened within that 24-hour period that the company came back with an offer that was just wildly off base. It wasn’t even what they had discussed the day before, not even close.

So, the council called back to the bargaining committees at both Locals and said, we’re going to go on strike at noon on May 2. Get everybody to these points and these locations. We’re all going to walk out together in solidarity. And we walked out in solidarity, hand in hand, arm in arm. And it was moving. It was huge. If you’ve never done that, that changes you and it gives you a whole different perspective on what it means to fight for something that you believe in.

And now being out this long, seven months, the passion of the membership is still there just like it was at the beginning of the strike. Yes, people are getting restless. We’re in the winter now. It’s cold. I think it’s 17 degrees today with the wind chill, it’s like eight degrees outside. It’s cold. And we’re out striking on the picket line right now. We got fires going. Our brothers and sisters up north in Racine, they can’t have fire pits, they can’t have shanties out. They don’t have any shelter or covers because their municipal code prohibits that. So they’re really roughing it.

So yeah, it’s starting to get tough, but that solidarity that we had day one when we walked out hand in hand and arm in arm, it’s still there. It’s huge. It’s monumental. And we look at our brothers and sisters across the country, we’re just in the Midwest, but you look at our brothers and sisters out there in California and how they’re fighting right now, we stand in solidarity with them and we hope that they win their rights just like we win our rights.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. No, I think that’s beautifully put, man. And it’s something that, yeah, I wish we heard more, and I’m so grateful to you for mentioning that, because God, man, I mean, we spend so much time fighting each other and flinging mud at each other, and trying to divide ourselves, saying like, yeah. Look, here’s that archetypal industrial manufacturing work in the Midwest. This is what real work looks like. These are real workers. But the 48,000 higher education workers who are waging the largest strike in the country right now at the University of California system, they’re not real workers. They’re little grad students who don’t deserve our sympathy.

Marcques Derby:  That’s bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. I’m with you, man.

Marcques Derby:  That’s bullshit. They don’t get paid their fair share. Adjunct professors get paid well. These higher education workers are not being paid adequately for the jobs that they do. They’re educating our next generation of American citizens, citizens across the world, they’re educating our people, they’re educating the next generation, and they’re not being rewarded the way that they need to be rewarded. They’re not. Some of those folks are being paid less than $27,000 a year. That is almost below poverty. That is bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Again, nail on the head, my man. I think that it needs to be said that clearly. Same goes for, I mentioned the Starbucks workers, this past week in what was called the Red Cup Rebellion. You had Starbucks workers going on a one-day strike at locations across the country, because Starbucks is waging, as we all know, a ruthless, sustained, deliberate campaign to break the law, to violate workers’ rights, and crush this union wave. They know they’re breaking the law, they just know how slow the law works. So what they are hoping to do is demoralize people by firing union organizers, by closing unionized stores, by making it harder for workers to pay rent and all of that crap. Making their lives as miserable as possible, so that eventually workers say, look, this isn’t worth it. We’re going to stop unionizing.

And if you are one of the people who thinks, well, they’re just service workers, they’re baristas. Again, that’s not real work. That’s not like what Marcques does. Again, you are playing yourself, I promise you. Because what Starbucks is doing, every goddamn company in the country is watching them right now, because if they succeed at this campaign, this will continue to be the playbook for any company anywhere that is experiencing a unionization wave or where workers are just standing up for themselves and exercising their rights in the workplace.

If companies know they can just break the law, go scorched earth and squash those efforts and they’re just going to get a slap on the wrist and the public’s not going to really do anything, politicians aren’t going to do anything, that’s going to hurt all of us. That’s going to hurt people in manufacturing, that’s going to hurt people in the service industry, healthcare, education, writ large.

Marcques Derby:  Absolutely.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So, stop pitting working people against one another. Stop trying to carve out the true blue working class and listen to what Marcques is saying. We need to support everyone here. And as much as we are supporting and sending love to the folks at the University of California or the New School in New York, we need to be sending that same solidarity to Marcques and his coworkers at Case New Holland Industrial, at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, so on and so forth.

This is so important that we not do the boss’s work for them by dividing ourselves and by not showing up for one another when we need each other most. And as you heard Marcques say, it is cold right now and it’s getting colder. Imagine what it’s like to be doing a shift on the picket line in that lonely, frigid atmosphere when you’ve been holding the line for seven months. And the holidays are approaching, everything’s more expensive. Anything that we can do to show solidarity with folks is so vital to keeping this fight going. And that’s where I wanted to end up, Marcques, because I could talk to you for days, but I don’t want to take up too much of your Sunday here.

Marcques Derby:  No, that’s all right.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I wanted to ask about that. You started talking about this, but just maybe bring us up to speed on where things stand now, how folks are doing, if there’s been any movement at all at the bargaining table, and what folks listening to this can do to show solidarity with y’all as we head into the holidays?

Marcques Derby:  Yeah. So, we got a last, best, and final on Sept. 29. The company proposed some, as they put it, modest wage increases with the ratification bonus. And some other bullshit. They really dicked around on our insurance. I mean, really dicked around on it. It’s essentially creating a whole nother tier of employees if you’re hired on or after a certain date. And then, if we didn’t vote on that piece by Oct. 14, it would revert to a lesser, and they were going to take wage increases away and they were going to take some insurance cap percentages away, and they were going to take a no plant closing moratorium away, because we don’t want job security when we’re negotiating, right? Because those are all things that are important, I guess. Not to them.

I’m being very facetious right now and I know that the way that I put that off maybe isn’t perceived, because you can’t see my facial expressions. But those are all important things for us and that is why we’re still where we’re at. We have not voted on this piece, because our memberships deserve better. Point blank, our memberships deserve better. We’ve reached out to a third-party mediator, so to speak, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be able to say who that is because of a non-disclosure. So, we’re just waiting to find out what the next step is with that, whether the company is going to accept that mediation or the assistance in that.

We really hope that they do, because we think that that would be very impactful for both sides. That is our belief and we stand with that. The membership really wants this to start moving again, the wheels start churning. Like I said, Sept. 29 was the last time that we met at the table, so it’s been a while. You want to start talking, and the membership gets restless when you’re not talking.

So yeah, and like I said earlier, it’s getting cold. Christmas is coming, Thanksgiving’s next week. We’ve got some fundraising stuff that we’ve got. I know that there’s a GoFundMe page that one of our brothers that walked out with us that was not a union brother, he was a member of the CNH team that decided that he was not going to stay there. He said, F this place, I respect these employees. And he walked out with us. But now he has started a GoFundMe page and he has been very influential and very helpful through this whole process, while we’ve all been on strike. I appreciate him and everything that he does for us.

We also have a Target gift registry we’re doing for Christmas, I believe that’s for both locals. I don’t want to speak out of turn or out of pocket on that, but I do believe that that is how that is supposed to be. I do know that there are some solidarity days coming up in Racine, Wisconsin. If anybody’s in the area up there Dec. 17 at 2:00 PM there will be a rally with UAW 180 members. The picket line will be supported at 3:00 PM. They’re asking for kids’ gifts, non-perishable food items, hand and foot warmers for the strikers.

There’s a Facebook page, it’s facebook.com/uawlocal180, and you can get more information on that there. They’re also having a holiday food drive on Dec. 2. That is at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, I’m not necessarily exactly sure where that’s at. They don’t have an address on their flier there, so that is super helpful. But it’s from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM on Friday, and then Saturday Dec. 3 from 9:00 AM to noon. And again, that is at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council. It’s a food donation drive for UAW Local 180.

Just pass the word on, tell your friends, tell your family. We want to get back to work. That’s really what it boils down to. We didn’t plan on going on strike. We didn’t want to go on strike. An immensely profitable company made us go out on strike because they wanted to be greedy. Now we’re going into the holiday season. We have brothers and sisters that are definitely struggling. So, anything that anybody can do.

I know that we have a kitchen down here at Local 807. It’s in Gulfport, Illinois, at the fire department. Anybody is more than welcome to stop by anytime and drop off anything. You’ll be more than welcomed. If you want to tweet about us, Twitter’s a great place. It’s a great media avenue. If you’re on Reddit, the anti-company Reddit threads, those are all great places as well to get some information out, too. Anything anybody can do to help us get our message out, to put pressure on an immensely profitable company would be great. I appreciate your time.

---

---