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Union Threatens Strike At Ford Claycomo Plant

The United Auto Workers union is threatening to shut down Ford’s Claycomo assembly plant, with a strike that could start this weekend.  

Ford and union negotiators are at loggerheads over a number of issues specific to the Claycomo plant.  They involve the health and safety of workers and seniority for employees who do specialized jobs.

Workers at the Claycomo plant assemble the Transit, an increasingly popular delivery van, and F-150 pickups, a profitable, top-seller for Ford.

These negotiations come as the UAW is negotiating contracts nationally with Ford and other U.S. automakers.

Jimmy Settles, the UAW vice president in charge of the Claycomo negotiations, claims Ford is not negotiating in good faith. Ford issued a statement that it is “confident we will be able to negotiate a fair and competitive labor agreement with our UAW partners.”

Union leaders have alerted the plant’s roughly 7,500 union workers that a strike could start as early as Sunday afternoon.

The local talks are happening as the UAW negotiates new international contracts with the Fiat-Chrysler, GM and Ford. Those negotiations key on wages, with workers hoping to take back concessions made in in the recession.  

I’ve been at KCUR almost 30 years, working partly for NPR and splitting my time between local and national reporting. I work to bring extra attention to people in the Midwest, my home state of Kansas and of course Kansas City. What I love about this job is having a license to talk to interesting people and then crafting radio stories around their voices. It’s a big responsibility to uphold the truth of those stories while condensing them for lots of other people listening to the radio, and I take it seriously. Email me at frank@kcur.org or find me on Twitter @FrankNewsman.
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