Employees at Master Lock’s plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are urging the corporation to scrap its plans to outsource their jobs, reportedly to Mexico, noting that the operation is profitable and that there is no justification for such a move.
“There’s no good reason to do this,” a union representative said.
As Breitbart News reported last week, Master Lock executives informed more than 400 employees that the Milwaukee plant will shutter by the end of March 2024 and that their jobs will be outsourced to other existing North American plants.
On Wednesday, hundreds of Master Lock employees protested, pleading with executives to keep the Milwaukee plant open.
“They don’t care about the people, they just care about the money,” a union representative told local media. “The plant is profitable.”
“We’re extremely disappointed that someone from somewhere else could make this decision and just make [the plant] go away,” another union representative said. “It can’t do any good for the city. People are going to be struggling to find jobs that pay two-thirds of that.”
Employees said their jobs being outsourced will result in their struggling to find comparable work with competitive pay and good benefits. One such employee, who is 60 years old, said she is too young to retire but too old to take on another job.
“I’m 60 years old. I can’t go out here and compete with the 20-year-olds and try to find a new job in another location,” she said.
“If Master Lock moves, it’s almost like a death in the family, to me. And probably [feels that way] to my coworkers too,” another employee said, alluding to Master Lock being founded in Milwaukee more than 102 years ago.
United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 4 Director Brandon Campbell, who represents most of the plant’s employees, said the outsourcing scheme is merely a continuation of the nation’s job-killing free trade policies.
“The announced closing of MasterLock is one more cut to American workers that stems from our horrible trade agreements,” Campbell said in a statement:
In the 1990s, the company fired about 1,000 workers when they moved work to Mexico, so they could exploit workers there, in the name of more and more profits. CEO Nick Fink makes TEN MILLION per year – enough to cover the cost of about 250 Masterlock employees! [Emphasis added]
…
I want to be clear – UAW workers at Local 469 have done their part – they have got no more to give. They need to concede NOTHING to this company to convince them to keep work in the USA – the company should keep work here because THIS is where their profits come from. THIS is the workforce that made them the household name we all know and trust! And YOU, the American taxpayer and consumer have made this the mega-rich company it is. [Emphasis added]
The Master Lock plant, as the UAW noted, is one of Milwaukee’s “last manufacturing facilities in this storied blue-collar city” after having been hit with decades of deindustrialization as a result of U.S. free trade policy and globalization.
At its peak in the 1980s, the Master Lock plant employed about 1,300 Americans. In 2012, then-President Barack Obama visited the plant as a victory for reshoring jobs back to the U.S.
“I am calling on MasterLock and their CEO, Nick Fink, to reverse this decision and come to the table with this workforce’s representatives so collectively, they can continue their legacy of manufacturing in the industrial Midwest for 102 more years,” Campbell said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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