Unionized Workers

THE STATE of Michigan, if you recall your geography, looks somewhat like a mitten, with the area covering the four fingers on the left and the thumb pointing right.The place where the thumb and fingers converge is where you'll find the small town of Pigeon, Mich.If you can visualize the hand and thumb being squeezed together, you will understand how Gary Bradley and some of his colleagues at Huron Castings, a small factory in Pigeon, felt last year.That's when officials of the United Steel Workers tried to put the squeeze on them to join the union -- even though they had every right to reject union membership.

In an 11th-hour attempt to save their jobs, unionized parking attendants in Annapolis proposed that the city take over managing its off-street parking lots.Mary Russell, a cashier at the Noah Hillman Parking Garage, met with Mayor Alfred A. Hopkins yesterday to urge thatthe city take control of its parking lots instead of hiring an outside management company.But Hopkins told her the move would increase the city's parking costs substantially.Russell and 24 other employees of Park AmericaInc.

Last December, the national leaders of the AFL-CIO unveiled a $1 million radio and TV ad campaign attacking freshman members of Congress -- myself included -- for supporting a balanced budget. The ads grossly mischaracterized this vote as being "against working families."Newly installed AFL-CIO President John Sweeney predicted that the ads would flood congressional offices with "hundreds" of angry calls. As it turned out, Mr. Sweeney was only partially right.Approximately 90 percent of the several dozen calls I received supported my vote.

Leaders of Bell Atlantic's union, with newly elected AFL-CIO President John Sweeney joining in, told thousands of workers rallying yesterday against the telephone company in the parking lot at Camden Yards that a strike deadline will be set soon."

For the first time in nearly three years, 25,000 unionized municipal Baltimore workers could be in line for pay raises."We have entered into negotiations this year under the assumption that we would like to, if at all possible, provide some modest pay raise for people who have not received a raise for the last 2 1/2 years," Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday."

The county's 1,000 blue-collar workers will receive 2 percent raises next year because County Executive Janet S. Owens rejected yesterday the County Council's call to give them 3 percent. Owens said the council had set a "dangerous precedent" by recommending more than she offered. She called it "an open invitation for [the] union to circumvent county executives simply by waiting them out, then going before the County Council." Owens added that county employees not represented by unions, and school principals and administrators, also will receive 2 percent more next year.

The union representing 277 workers at the Kaydon Corp. factory in South Baltimore went on strike Sunday night in a dispute over a proposal to give management greater power in contracting out work and closing operations without negotiating with the union."

Members of Teamsters Local 557 are picketing a Conrail terminal in Baltimore because the railroad has awarded the work the union once did to a company the union says is employing non-union workers.The pickets are employees of PTL Transportation Services Inc., a Conshohocken, Pa., company that had a contract with Conrail to load and unload trains at the railroad's Bayview intermodal terminal in Baltimore.Last week, PTL employees at Bayview and 14 other Conrail terminals in the Northeast were ordered out on strike by the union to protest Conrail's decision to award the work to contractors employing non-Teamster workers.

Flight attendants for AirTran Airways plan to picket at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and other locations over the next six weeks to protest what the workers view as stalled contract negotiations with the airline. The workers, represented by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, say they are frustrated by a lack of progress in contract negotiations and will begin picketing on Monday at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. They plan the last of the protests on Friday, April 1, at BWI. If a tentative agreement is not reached by April 1, picketing will continue in six more cities, the union said in a statement.

PHILADELPHIA - US Airways' chief executive officer said yesterday that the airline would, as expected, ask a bankruptcy judge to impose temporary pay cuts of 23 percent on its union workers to conserve cash during the slow fall travel season. CEO Bruce Lakefield told employees in a recorded message that the filing was to be made yesterday. The airline has refused to discuss the details of its request, but union leaders who received the request confirmed the cuts. The airline has not asked its 2,300 executives and managers for the same sacrifice.