Officials from the United Steelworkers union and Bridgestone/Firestone Corp. met in Chicago for the first time in six months Monday to resolve a bitter 16-month-old dispute.
Both sides have vowed to keep a low profile in the talks and would not comment on the meeting.
They have also agreed to set a mid-December deadline for their talks, whether or not a deal is reached.
The Nashville-based company’s 4,200 production members struck in July 1994 in what turned into a suicide march for the union and one of the worst defeats for an American union in years.
Out of strike pay and fearing the union would be voted out of the tire plants by newly hired workers, the union surrendered last May, sending its workers back under a company-imposed contract.
The strike’s collapse was partially precipitated by return-to-work decisions by locals in Decatur, Ill., and Akron, where the union leaders said they wanted to save their members’ jobs.
Financially whipped and demoralized by the rubber industry’s longest strike, the Akron-based 94,000-member United Rubber Workers, a pioneer among blue-collar unions, merged in July with the 600,000-member steelworkers union.
At the time of the workers’ return, the Japanese-owned company had hired 2,300 permanent replacements and another 1,300 union members had crossed the union’s picket lines.
The union’s goal in the talks, said steelworkers spokesman Gary Hubbard in Pittsburgh, is to get a contract with the company and a return to work for about 1,700 strikers who have not yet been called back.
Bridgestone/Firestone also has put its factory workers on 12-hour shifts.
To keep up its pressure on the company, a large group of steelworkers demonstrated Monday outside the Japanese Consulate in downtown Chicago. Joe Roundtree, 52, a 30-year veteran from Decatur, was one of them.
“It is pitiful in there,” said Roundtree, who is back on the job. “You’re tired on your feet from working 12 hours.”
