Boston-Area Union Will Block
Factory Auction to Save Jobs
By Jane Slaughter
solidarityeconomy.net
via Labor Notes
Nov. 29, 2010 - In a move to save factory jobs that evokes shades of the ’30s, the United Electrical Workers [1] are asking supporters to block a December 14 auction of presses and equipment from a plant south of Boston. The UE is calling for mass picketing and blockading of entrances to the 80-year-old plant if necessary.
Esterline Technologies Corp. of Bellevue, Washington, has refused to hold off on selling the equipment till another buyer can be found. The union’s request to buy the closed plant, which would create an employee-owned factory, has been ignored.
“They told us a year ago they did not want the presses or equipment,” said UE Local 204 President Scott Marques. “But they would rather junk them than sell them to us.”
The plant makes crucial door-seals and silicone gaskets for aircraft. Esterline is consolidating operations in Southern California and in Mexico.
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Richard Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller was born July 12th 1895 in Milton Massachusetts. A natural mechanic, he was sent to Milton Academy, and later Harvard from where he was expelled twice; once for spending all his money partying, and again for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest”. By 32 years he was bankrupt and unemployed and drinking regularly in order to remedy the pain of losing his youngest daughter to polio and spinal meningitis. He was finally moved from depression by a suicidal vision and embarked upon “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” He would become an early green environmentalist and futurist, engineer, prophetic visionary, poet and author, architect and designer, mathematician, map-maker and teacher. 
