TYLER, Texas ( KETK ) – Before the Great Recession hit in 2008, East Texas lost the area’s biggest union when Goodyear announced that their Tyler plant was closing.

The strikes and labor disputes in KETK’s limited series East Texas’ Biggest Labor Disputes represent a long history of working people from across East Texas fighting against racism, discrimination and unfair working conditions.

They tell the story of how workers from all different industries fought to keep their jobs, unionize their workplaces, secure wage increases, healthcare benefits and more.

On every Monday and Thursday until Labor Day on Sept. 2, KETK will present one of the eight most consequential chapters in East Texas labor history. Be sure to stay up to date with KETK so you won’t miss the last edition of East Texas’ Biggest Labor Disputes for Labor Day on Monday, Sept. 2.

2006: Tyler Goodyear Strike

One Tyler union was at the center of an international trade dispute, a constitutional challenge and was a potential target of an anti-strike order from President George W. Bush.

Tyler’s Local 746 had a long history of labor activity going back to when their union was a part of the United Rubber Workers, before the URW merged with the United Steelworkers in 1995.

In 1986, John Nash, then President of United Rubber Workers Local 746, was the plaintiff in a case called Nash v. State of Texas . According to Nash v. State of Texas, Nash and the union alleged that the Tyler Chief of Police, the City of Tyler and the State of Texas had violated their civil rights when members of the union were arrested while mass picketing.

The court ruled in the union’s favor and declared that the enforcement of the Texas mass picketing statute Tex. Rev. Civ. St. Ann. Article 5154d, § 1, paragraph 1, and § 2 was unconstitutional.

Local 746 would later represent the workers at the Goodyear Tire plant in Tyler during a nationwide strike against Goodyear in 2006. The Goodyear plant was originally built by Kelly Springfield in 1962 and was the second largest employer in Tyler, according to the United Steel Workers .

The strike started on Oct. 5, 2006 after Goodyear announced that they were cutting retiree benefits, slashing wages and closing the plant in Tyler, destroying over 1,100 union jobs, according to People’s World .

The strike came during the midst of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. According to Labor Notes , military spokespeople claimed that the nationwide strike was causing a 35% shortage in tires for Humvees.

Then Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter, reportedly said that the Army was exploring the possibility of a presidential intervention in the strike using the Taft-Hartley Act .

The Taft-Hartley Act would allow the president to issue an anti-strike injunction by declaring a national emergency. Bush had already used Taft-Hartley to end an 11-day lockout of International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers on the west coast in 2002 .

According to NBC News , the strike came to an end when Goodyear and USW came to an agreement after 11 weeks. The agreement continued Goodyear’s plans to close the Tyler plant but only after a yearlong transition that allowed workers to take retirement buyouts.

The contract was ratified just after Christmas on Dec. 28, 2006 by a two-to-one margin among nationwide members. It created a $1 billion retiree benefit trust, less than the company’s former $1.2 billion obligation, and it stipulated that any work that would have been done at the Tyler plant be done at other USW plants and not outsourced, according to Labor Notes .

Outsourcing of American union jobs to other countries was and is a controversial labor issue. After the Tyler plant closed, USW leadership filed a petition with the new administration of President Barack Obama. According to USW@Work , Obama had pledged to increase enforcement of U.S. trade laws during his campaign.

A Congressional Research Service report said “On September 11, 2009, President Obama proclaimed increased tariffs on Chinese tires for three years effective September 26, 2009.”

Then USW International President Leo W. Gerard said the US tire industry was struggling because of tire imports from China.

“American workers are struggling to make it through the worst economic crisis in 80 years,” Gerard said. “Our tire industry is collapsing under the weight of 46 million Chinese tires entering our shrinking market annually.”

After the Tyler plant’s fate was sealed with the new contract, Twin Cities Pioneer Press reported that, then CEO of Goodyear Robert Keegan said, “The end result is Goodyear will be a stronger company, a stronger employer and a stronger overall global competitor.”

Retired president of Tyler’s USW Local 746L Jim Wansley, said in USW@Work , that their plant did everything right.

“Tyler is representative of a plant that did everything right,” said Wansley. “We built a culture there, an employee involvement culture and we became the leaders in productivity, safety, waste innovation, and company-union relations in the seven years I was the union president.”

The economic impact that the plant would have on Tyler was not lost on Tylerites.

“For the 1,200 or so jobs that we lost at the plant, the community lost another three to five times that. They lost their biggest United Way contributor. The impact just goes on and on,” Wansley said. “The state has been out untold millions of dollars in unemployment benefits and retraining and every bit of it is a direct result of foreign competition, unfair foreign competition.”

Tire Business reported that the Tyler Goodyear plant closed for good in late 2008.

According to USW@Work , the Tyler Economic Development Council estimated that plant closing lost the local, regional and state economies $948 million a year in direct and indirect spending.

“These were good, middle-class, all-American manufacturing jobs that we hated to lose,” said then TEDC president and CEO, Tom Mullins.

Mullins has since retired from the TEDC and reflected on the closing of the Goodyear plant in a recent interview with KETK.

“At the time when when Goodyear closed, they had a thousand employees there and the plant was paying about $22 million a year to the local taxing entities. It had opened in the early sixties and it was a huge victory for Tyler and East Texas to get that plant to select Tyler,” said Mullins.

He continued to describe how the Tyler economy took a dip after that and caused many workers to leave the area all together.

“It took two or three years of us being in basically a recession economically before we did pull out of it. And then a lot of those employees they were older,” said Mullins. “They had very specific skill sets and they weren’t necessarily able to retool or retrain. People just had to move to other parts to find jobs. Some people retired early and other people did find some work locally, but it was a difficult time for those families.”

Mullins said that part of why the plant closed was because of how American vehicles needed bigger and bigger tires.

“The challenge of our plant here in Tyler was that we were producing small tires for compact cars and smaller vehicles and the market in the U.S. was going towards larger vehicles, pickup trucks, SUV’s, Hummers, that type of thing,” Mullins said. “And it was going to cost well over $100 million to retool this plant and make it capable of producing those bigger tires.”

All this happened in spite of what Mullins said was actually a great relationship between the union and the company.

“We had the best management and union relationships in the whole system while the other plants were having issues with worker frustration and and dissatisfaction between labor and management,” said Mullins. “That wasn’t happening in Tyler. Tyler had a great working relationship at the plant and labor level and we were very creative in trying to find ways to be more efficient but we just weren’t, as a community and as a state, able to come up with meaningful incentives to keep the plant operating.”

To read the rest of this series, visit the following articles:

As this article shows, East Texas has a deep history of labor activity and because of that deep history this article is not comprehensive. Many labor disputes, even modern ones, are under-reported on, so they’re often only known about by the people who lived through them.

Anyone who would like to tell us about any labor disputes not covered in this series is invited to email newsroom@ketk.com.

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