CLEVELAND USWA is rebuilding its foothold in steel

Steelworkers who make tires are part of a union that's branching out.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- When Steelworkers member John Shotkoski tells people he has had a long career in the tire and rubber industry, he sometimes gets confused looks.
Shotkoski considers being a Steelworker at Goodyear, the world's biggest tire company, a natural fit. His former union, the United Rubber Workers, merged with the United Steelworkers of America eight years ago.
The Pittsburgh-based union is rebuilding its foothold in a consolidating steel industry, such as in Cleveland, where International Steel Group was formed last year. Even so, Steelworkers increasingly do not make steel. Some make tires, rubber hoses or glass. Others are security guards or help teach preschoolers.
"Most of the people seem to understand it now throughout the community," said Shotkoski, 59, vice president of Steelworkers Local 286 in Lincoln, Neb., where he started working at the town's Goodyear plant 36 years ago.
"But there are people here and there who still say, 'You're in the rubber industry and belong to the Steelworkers? That's kind of silly.' But then I explain how things happened," he said.
URW weakened
In 1995, the Akron-based United Rubber Workers was in its 60th year when it was weakened by a 10-month strike against Bridgestone/Firestone. It agreed to merge into the larger, more financially secure Steelworkers union.
Among the Steelworkers' big challenges is Akron-based Goodyear, the world's largest tire company, which wants to trim as much as $1.5 billion in costs by 2005 to shore up its North American tire operations. The union's contract expired April 19 but had been extended for 14 plants.
The Steelworkers' Goodyear/Kelly-Springfield/Dunlop bargaining committee negotiates for about 20,000 active members and is aiming for a contract that could be applied to other tire companies, including Bridgestone-Firestone and Michelin.
U.S. Steel Corp. is challenging to regain status as the biggest employer of Steelworkers, after its recent acquisition of bankrupt National Steel. U.S. Steel is expected employ about 19,000 workers represented by the union after job cuts.
Still the biggest
The nation's steel industry was staggered by plant closings since the late 1970s and has been struggling with bankruptcies and industry consolidation.
Basic steel is still the USWA's biggest employer, with about 106,000 workers, followed by rubber and plastics, with 70,600.
The union, now with about 600,000 active members, in June added 280 Head Start workers in Alabama through an organizing campaign and 12,000 members of the Toledo-based American Flint Glass Workers Union through a merger.
Job diversification in organized labor was spearheaded by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and is now common to many large U.S. labor organizations, said Roland Zullo, a research scientist for the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Michigan.
"With the possible exception of the building trades, nearly all the industrial and service unions have become more [job] diverse," Zullo said.
Teamsters members that include truckers and warehouse workers, also include those who work in public service, dairies, breweries, bakeries, airlines and the film industry.
Branching out
United Auto Workers members who don't make cars or trucks may work for small manufacturers, state and local governments, universities, hospitals and nonprofit organizations.
"The way labor unions are branching out, no one should be surprised if a nurse is in the same union as a steel worker or a college graduate student is in the same union as an auto worker," said Greg Tarpinian, president and executive director of the Washington-based Labor Research Association.