It’s a little before five o’clock in the morning of November 30 and a bright moon still shines high up in the sky. Waking up warm under a blanket in the still-dark farmer’s hours of the morning, getting out of bed this morning was a struggle, I can tell you. Leaving the bed behind, warming up the car before heading out, driving through the sleepy streets of Kingston to find the Howmet Aerospace machinists’ picket line.
The asphalt road off Delaware Avenue called Corporate Drive winds up the hill to the Kingston Business Park. At the bottom, they’re already out there, eight men and one woman, armed with picket signs that read: Machinists Union, Local Lodge 1562, On Strike.
Altogether, 70 workers have been picketing the facility at the top of the hill in shifts. You can tell they’re entering into their second month of the strike. They’ve erected a canvas tent, where daily supplies — heaters, water, sign-in sheets, a cooking stove – are shared. A port-a-potty has been installed.
I’m behind a black Sprinter van that turns left from the main road and passes through the picket line ahead of me. The striking machinists step aside, scowling. When it’s my turn, I roll down my window. They explain that the van is full of scabs, heading up the hill to work their jobs, so I follow it up the hill.
At the top of the hill, eight temporary workers, mostly young men, get out of the van and walk toward the building. The driver, a man wearing a bright orange beanie and sporting a goatish beard, declines the opportunity to speak on the record.
I identify myself as a reporter.
“You’re trespassing,” he says. “This is private property.”
Back at the bottom of the hill, the striking machinists say what the driver told me was technically true. While the parking lot of Howmet Aerospace is private property, the road leading up to and around it, Corporate Drive, is not. A member of the public would be within their rights to stand outside 1 Corporate Drive and shout questions or suggestions. The private security guards Howmet has employed prevent the picketing machinists from walking up and along Corporate Drive.
A few vanloads of temporary workers are shuttled in every day.
“There’s a white Sprinter van, also,” a confiding striker tells me, “and then we think some of the replacements come in with rented vehicles or personal vehicles because we’re seeing out-of-state plates, which is unusual. We got plates from Ohio, from Michigan, from Connecticut.”
The company is able to traffic in day laborers and pay a premium for out-of-town skilled machinists during the strike. Convincing an entire workforce to relocate to Kingston for the long haul would be more challenging.
Another car pulls up to make the left turn through the picket line. The workers brandishing picket signs step back.
A striker identifies the driver. “Debbie in Finance,” he says. “She’s all right.”
At 6 a.m. a glow of sunlight has barely topped the southern horizon.
So far, the strikers say, they have experienced and appreciated robust community support.
“The community’s been very nice to us,” says one of the workers, wearing a hood up over his beanie.
“People walking by or riding by. We’ve gotten all kinds of stuff. Hot chocolate, coffee, food, snacks. And some of the businesses, Savona’s and Ollie’s,” says a mustached machinist, “they each brought pizza over.”
The strike has become something of a cause célèbre among local district representatives. Kingston mayor Steve Noble paid a visit on November 16 Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha came by a week later. Congressmember Pat Ryan followed soon after that. Even district attorney-elect Manny Nneji stopped by.
All came to the foot of the hill to demonstrate their support in a sort of pilgrimage of political fealty. The strikers say Ryan stayed for two hours, talking and asking questions.
In spite of the attention from the political class, though, the strikers say labor relations with the company have remained at a stalemate since November 15, when a top executive, director of human resources Sue Kimble, was brought out from California to take part in the negotiations.
“Our business rep, Kevin Weidman, was supposed to have a sit-down with her,” says striking worker Bob Fiore, a veteran of the trade who serves on the negotiation team with Weidman. “But we never saw her. They went back in to talk to the company, and she was off in another room somewhere. She wouldn’t talk to our business rep.”
Weidman confirms Fiore’s account. “She told us that she wanted to be out here for negotiations, but when she was here she never came to the table,” he says. “I never met with her.”
Throughout the process. a team led by Weidman and Fiore has handled the negotiations with labor manager Eileen Larocca, a local, while the boss for the facility, director of operations Allison Stirrup, has stayed aloof from the beginning. She oversees the facility and never negotiates with the union directly.
“What they told me directly was their financial package was their financial package,” recalls Weidman, “and there were gonna be no changes.”
And there the negotiations remain.
Among the strikers this morning, the running theory is that the arrival of Kimble signaled the end of negotiations handled locally. The subject may now be out of their hands entirely.
A white sedan approaches for the left turn and doesn’t bother to slow down. The driver noses quickly through the line of strikers and steps on the gas up the hill.
“You see that? She works in the office,” a worker grumbles. “She knows we’re out here, she didn’t even slow down. Some mornings schoolchildren are crossing here. That was dangerous.”
The worker decides against identifying the office worker, but he said it wasn’t director Stirrup.
“She comes in between seven and eight,” he says. “She’ll be here. She just drives through. Doesn’t make eye contact. Doesn’t wave.”
By the time the sun rises, a ten-foot inflatable rat — grey fur, red eyes, paws outstretched — had been set up on top of the walkway wall behind the strikers, overlooking Corporate Drive. It’s bearing a sign: Union 1562 On Strike.
The workers get paid out of a strike fund to get them through the duration. The wages are a pittance compared to the compensation they command when they work up the hill. Before taxes, excluding overtime, a 40-hour-a-week worker at Howmet Aerospace makes an average of $49,305 a year.
“However long it will be,” says Weidman, “people are being paid a portion of their wages. Not nearly as much as they would be making if they were working.”
No Christmas bonuses this year, no Thanksgiving turkeys.
Weidman is hopeful that negotiations will resume. The union is seeking an increase to the $25.86 an hour an average Howmet worker makes. He’s cagey about stating the exact increase in wages the union is looking for.
The workers on the line aren’t shy about their belief that the cost of living in general, and the pressures of rising costs among non-fungible goods like gasoline and food in the specific, has outpaced their compensation. They expect that squeeze would continue if they didn’t take a stand now.
“There’s two things left on the table right now,” says Weidman. “It’s the wages and then the way the company is going to be calculating overtime. They want it so somebody has to have 40 hours to work if they work Saturday to get overtime. Our belief is if you’re working Saturday, an extra day on one of your days off, it should be overtime.”
How long the striking workers can hold out heading into the bleak months of winter is an unknown quantity. Morale seems high. Laughter is frequent in spite of the weather. None present say they are feeling tempted to climb back up the hill, repentant and humbled, to work for pay they say is insufficient.
“And throw away the month we’ve already been out here?” asks a striker. “Please.”
A gnawing worry persists. What if rather than come back to the table, Howmet closes shop?
“We’ve always been a profitable company,” says Fiore. “We don’t … we have no idea …, I mean, you know how big Howmet is, they could have that building packed up in a week. But they would lose our skills. I think it would be hard to set up somewhere else, you know? It’s our livelihood.”
It is known that fabricated product that needs heat treatment hasn’t been leaving the building.
“We don’t do any heat treating on-site,” says the mustached machinist. “A lot of our stuff because of what it does, we machine it, it gets heat-treated, and then we further machine it or grind it, and then it goes to the customer. The heat-treat guy, he complains because he comes all the way from Jersey. Drives up the hill and he’s coming back down with nothing, so that would mean you know, they’re not making stuff.”
Only one out of the nine strikers on the first shift — the picket line runs in three four-hour shifts — graduated college. None are members of a business honor society. And yet the Kingston facility is the only facility in the world that manufactures the special type of fastener tool produced here. The silhouette of the tool is drawn like a sigil over their union number.
“Have you looked at a plane close where you see, like, the little rivets?” asks the mustached machinist. “Or like a tractor-trailer frame, you’ve seen all those bolts? All those rivets in the school buses? We build tools to do that. Our tools are used in aerospace, military planes, commercial planes, trucks, buses, solar farms, windmills — and we actually specifically design tools for customers. So if you were Airbus, and you were trying to put a particular thing together inside of a wing of an airplane, and there was no tool yet that exists to do that, our engineers would manufacture something, and we would produce it.”
That includes products for the defense sector. “For over 40 years, Howmet Aerospace has been a key defense manufacturing partner to the U.S. military and allied nations,” the company says about itself. “In collaboration with prime contractors, our products support systems across the air, sea and ground-based radar and aerospace markets.”
Named business of the year in 2021 by the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce, the facility ships in the neighborhood of four million dollars of product a month, according to a worker in shipping who puts the total this year higher, at between $50 million and $55 million.
Considering the size of the company — 41 locations across the U.S. in 15 states — the workers are banking that the money that’s made at this location, one of only two in New York State, and the products they specialize in producing, is incentive enough to keep the facility open. Business people, they surmise, will always threaten to take their ball and go home, but profit always turns them back around.
For his part, Weidman views talk of the plant closing as par for the course.
“Every negotiation. Gossip, innuendo, you always hear that,” he says. “If we don’t accept what they offer, they’re going to go, they’re gonna leave. They’re making $55 million here. So if they close now and have to train people, they’re not going to make that money. So it just seems to be a gamble for them.”
In the meantime, it’s unknown how much money Howmet Aerospace may be losing. Until this Friday, all attempts to speak with the administration of Howmet went unanswered. On December 1, general manager Allison Stirrup released a two-sentence message about the union work stoppage: “We have listened to their concerns, but some differences do remain,” it said. “We feel that our offer is fair, and we hope to reach an agreement in the near future.”
The last strike at this location was in 1986, when the facility housed a predecessor company called Huck. Weidman’s understanding was that the stoppage was over medical costs. That strike was successful.
All on the line are holding out hope that this one will be as well.
With the slow-rising winter sun finally climbing in the sky a little before 8 a.m., the black SUV of general operations manager Stirrup arrives at the bottom of the hill and makes a left turn through the picket line, with the large rat and the striking machinists looking on. Stirrup, in the driver’s seat, looks straight ahead.
She did not smile. She did not wave. And the strikers did not laugh.
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