Allegheny Technologies Incorporated (NYSE:ATI) has revealed that it managed to come to a tentative agreement with the bargaining committee of United Steelworkers (USW) on the new contract that involves more than 2,000 of the firm’s employees.
The contract will cater to United Steelworkers union employees working at Allegheny’s flat-rolled products business and will also cover other employees working at the company’s other locations. The agreement is now pending approval by the USW members, and the process is expected to take two or three weeks.
The tentative agreement follows a six-month lockout of approximately 2,200 workers. The agreement is a four-year contract, and it affects the 12 Allegheny facilities that are distributed across six states. The treaty is also subject to ratification by the National Labor Relations (NLR) as indicated by the recent press release.
Allegheny had previously announced that it would halt production in some of its plants including Beaver County, Midland, Armstrong County and the Bagdad plant situated in Gilpin Township. The company’s plan is to put the plants on hold until they can come up with good profits. The above plants had employed almost 600 people before the lockout took place.
The workers were sucked into the lockout due to the expiry of the previous workers’ contract that reached its end on June 30. The tentative agreement also comes two weeks after a complaint from the National Labor Relations stating that the lockout affecting the workers was illegal. ATI went on the defense with a claim that the complaint does not have any factual or legal grounds. The USW sided with the NLR, and the Union’s president Leo Gerard pointed out that the complaint had similar sentiments with what the union felt about ATI.
The United Steelworkers took to the street to place more pressure on Allegheny and luckily it seems to have worked in their favor. The new four-year agreement is the company’s solution in an attempt to handle the situation. The firm had 9,200 full-time workers as of December 31 last year.
