After everything else Remington has been through – the Sandy Hook lawsuit, awful management, the Remington 700 trigger system failures and their refusal to own the design and correct it – there has to be this.
ILION, N.Y. — Workers at the sprawling Remington factory in this upstate New York village took pride in a local gunmaking tradition stretching back to the days of flintlock rifles. Now they’re looking ahead with uncertainty.
Jacquie Sweeney and her husband were among almost 600 workers fired by the company this week, a few months after Remington Outdoor Co. sought bankruptcy protection for the second time in two years.
Successful bidders for the idled plant in bankruptcy proceedings have said they plan to restart at least some production, though details remain scarce.
There are high hopes for a successful reload of the plant that dominates the local economy. But these hopes are tempered by questions about how many workers will come back, and when.
“My husband, he’s looking for work, just like everybody else. And I plan on going back to college unless I find a job before I start that up,” said Sweeney, recording secretary for the local unit of the United Mine Workers of America. “That’s all we can really do. We can’t sit around and wait for forever.”
It’s common for people here to say that Ilion is Remington and Remington is Ilion. Company founder Eliphalet Remington started making flintlock rifles on his father’s forge near here in 1816, and the Ilion factory site dates to 1828. Though the company moved its headquarters to Madison, North Carolina, the old factory dominates — literally and figuratively — a village that has long depended on workers making rifles and shotguns to power the economy.
Union signs reading “United We Stand with Remington Workers” are in the windows of local businesses that sell everything from pizza slices to steel-toed boots. At Beer Belly Bob’s beverage center across the street from the plant, Bob McDowell recalled the sales bump on Thursdays and Fridays after shifts ended at 3 p.m.
Remington’s recent history has been a roller coaster ride with a lot of drops. Layoffs have been common. The plant, which employed around 1,200 people eight years ago, was down recently to about 600 union workers plus an estimated 100 or so salaried workers. The company began moving two production lines to a new plant in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2014.
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Roundhill pledged in court documents to bring back at least 200 workers. They could eventually add hundreds more, but details are not clear.
Well, that was an idiotic thing to do. This is why.
Local officials believe a number of pieces need to be in place before production starts, from a collective bargaining agreement with the union to a new federal firearms license.
The UMW said it has held “productive discussions” with Roundhill. Meanwhile, it also has excoriated the outgoing owners for terminating 585 workers this week along with their health care and other contractual benefits. The union said the company is refusing to pay severance and accrued vacation benefits, sparking pickets in Ilion this week.
Legally, I agree with them on the issue of paid vacation. I agree with them morally on the issue of severance.
Collective bargaining helped kill the plant and company. You have a right to be a member of any organization you wish. What you don’t have a right to do is prevent another man from working your job.
Don’t repeat the mistakes.
