My first thought was: Was Good Humor a union workplace?
“Unilever ice cream plant in Hagerstown to close doors July 27”
391 hourly and salaried employees will be eligible to receive job training after factory closes
Graubard said Unilever was negotiating with United Steelworkers Local 9386, which represents workers at the plant, on whether to issue severance packages.
yes-from the original closing:
“We’re scared, and we’re frustrated,” said Larry Lorshbaugh, president of the United Steelworkers Local 9386, the last steelworkers outpost left in Hagerstown.
Lorshbaugh has worked at the plant since its beginnings in 1983, when it was owned by Gold Bond Ice Cream. He is a pasteurizer. His hands are gnarled and battered, and so, too, is his psyche — from defending his union against Unilever, against city officials he says haven’t been supportive to the union and even against the international union his workers belong to.
He and other workers say United Steelworkers officials didn’t fight Unilever hard enough and consider the local a lost cause. Union officials deny such accusations but have placed Lorshbaugh’s local under administratorship, suspending its bank account — a standard procedure in plant closings, they say. Lorshbaugh insists those actions aren’t standard.
Sitting in his union office — the United Steelworkers charter hangs on one wall, the U.S. flag on the other — Lorshbaugh recalls a simpler time in Hagerstown-
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“Where else are they going to make ice cream better than we can make it here?” Lorshbaugh said. “They can’t. They will never make it better than they can make it here.”
True or not, the company thinks it can make ice cream cheaper elsewhere. In interviews, company officials wouldn’t put a figure on how much money they expect to save, but Lorshbaugh said he was told his plant’s ice cream bars cost 14 cents more a dozen to produce compared with those of the company’s other plants.
Ken Wells, the plant manager, said energy and labor costs were key factors in the “ice cream network restructuring.”
Economists and trade group representatives say the high cost of manufacturing in Maryland, particularly in areas close to big cities, helps explain why the state has shed manufacturing jobs while other parts of the country are winning them back.”