It’s A Great Life

By David McCall
USW International President

Lance Jablonski worked a couple of jobs in his 20s that provided little more than low wages, poor benefits and bleak prospects.

But then, he said, he applied for a union-represented position at ATI’s mill in Brackenridge, Pa., and edged out 4,000 other candidates for one of 40 openings.

That job provided the path forward he never had before. Over the past 26 years, a series of strong United Steelworkers (USW) contracts at ATI enabled Jablonski to raise a family, buy a house, own two vehicles at a time and prepare for a retirement that’s now just over the horizon.

Unions anchor millions of Americans like Jablonski in the middle class, enabling these workers to leverage the power of solidarity and forge significantly higher wages, better health care coverage, safer working conditions and stronger work-life balance than peers at non-union workplaces.

All of this explains why public support for unions keeps increasing, even as anti-labor Republicans not only try to make it more difficult for workers to organize but even attempt to rob federal public servants of their bargaining rights.

“It’s a great life,” said Jablonski, a mechanical technician and president of USW Local 1196 at the Brackenridge facility.

“When I got in there, I just couldn’t believe it,” Jablonski said of his first days at the specialty steel company. “I had the best medical coverage around.”

More than 90 percent of union workers nationwide have employer-paid health benefits, compared to just 71 percent of non-union peers, according to research by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.

What’s more, companies with union work forces are more likely to provide the paid sick days that parents need to care for their families, the researchers found.

“It just makes for a healthier community,” observed Jablonski, noting his health insurance covered operations for his wife and son last year.

It’s important to remember, especially this Labor Day, that gains like these are hard won. Rather than bargain in good faith, for example, ATI illegally locked out USW members at Brackenridge and nearly a dozen other sites in 2015 and then forced the same workers into a months-long unfair labor practice strike in 2021.

Collective strength only grew during these trying moments as workers drew closer together, dug in and beat back concessions to preserve good jobs for years to come.

“The union helped us with our grocery bills,” said Jablonski, recalling the hardships he and his co-workers faced during the company-instigated disputes. “It made sure we could survive, and we didn’t lose our houses, and we didn’t lose our cars.

“Union members from Illinois would drive down with a check for our strike and defense fund,” he added. “It was very humbling to have people willing to do that.”

As a local union leader, Jablonski assists with bargaining, mentors co-workers and works to hold the company accountable. But he insists he’ll never be able to give back enough to the union that opened up his future.

“I got way more out of it than I ever put in,” he explained.

Mary Morris was a single mother of two, struggling to make ends meet at a low-wage job, when she landed a position at Metsch, a maker of industrial ceramics, in Chester, W.Va.

Twenty-five years later, Morris remains grateful to union co-workers who welcomed her into the plant, showed her the ropes and eased her entry into a male-dominated environment.

“They really look out for you,” she said, noting she and her colleagues stand strongly with the USW even though Republican-led West Virginia is a so-called “right-to-work” state that opposes unions and discourages workers from joining them.

The group’s solidarity repeatedly paid off over the years. Their wages, among the highest around, support Chester’s economy. And the union affords workers a voice that continues to fuel the company’s global growth.

“I’m really proud of working here,” said Morris, who now serves as Local 328M president and recently negotiated a contract with big gains. “If you get in here, you’re lucky.”

Unions give every worker a voice.

They fight against two-tier wage systems, which pay some workers less than others for doing the same jobs and undermine collective power. Unions also narrow racial- and gender-based pay gaps, which companies use to pad profits on the backs of disadvantaged groups.

“If you’re a union member, you’re a union member, no matter your race, your gender, your class, who you love, or what you do in your free time,” declared Chris Puckett, a steward and organizer for USW Local 8888 at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.

“You’re one of us, and we’re all in this together. You’re going to get the same advantages from the company everyone else does. And if you don’t, we’re coming,” vowed Puckett, one of more than 10,000 USW members who build aircraft carriers and submarines for the Navy.

Sadly, Puckett and other workers see their hard-won labor rights imperiled by Donald Trump and other pro-corporate Republicans.

Trump fired a pro-worker member of the National Labor Relations Board, paralyzing the agency’s efforts to enforce workplace laws. He rolled back workplace safety protections. And he illegally stripped millions of federal workers of their bargaining rights, robbing them of a voice on the job.

“No union member should be comfortable right now,” said Puckett, who spoke during an AFL-CIO bus tour that wraps up on Labor Day after crisscrossing the country to promote labor rights.

“No union member should be happy. We should be prepared to fight.”

Preserving these rights is essential to building the middle class and ensuring future generations of workers also get a fair shake.

Jablonski’s son already gets it.

He’s growing up with a firm grasp of labor’s transformative impact and recently told Jablonski about his plans to become a union electrician.

“I just think it’s wonderful that he sees that kind of power in the union,” Jablonski said.