Photo by Steve Dondley, Prometheus Labor Communications

Boston, MA. Texas-based Clear Channel Outdoor chose the week of Memorial Day to tell striking billboard workers, including a significant number of U.S. Military veterans employed by the company, that they no longer had jobs. Members of Sign Local #391 have been on strike in Eastern Massachusetts since March 19th.

The striking workers including U.S. Army and U.S. Marine veterans met with U.S. Senator John Kerry to ask for his support and assistance in settling the strike.

“The upper management of Clear Channel is nothing more then cowards, hiding in corporate offices in Texas, while stealing jobs from workers who have served in the country's military branches,” said Painters District Council #35 Communications Director John Laughlin. “Clear Channel Executives didn't have the courage to face these workers at the bargaining table and now they'd leave veterans and their families in the street on Memorial Day”.
The strikers, members of Sign & Pictorial Local #391, work on hanging and posting over 2400 billboards in Eastern Massachusetts. Most have at least 10 years, and many more than 25 years, of working for Ackerley Communication, AK Media and now Clear Channel, which bought the company five years ago. After 18 months of negotiations, Clear Channel abandoned bargaining and unilaterally implemented a $60-a day paycut, a 7-day work week, took away pensions and health care from the workers and eliminated the grievance and union security protections. Clear Channel's actions forced the workers onto the street and the Union to file Unfair Labor Practice charges with the federal government.

Clear Channel had paid strikebreakers already at the plant on March 19th and has been flying strikebreakers into Massachusetts from Florida, Georgia and Texas on a weekly basis to take the jobs of Massachusetts workers said Laughlin.

 

For daily information on this campaign, please visit Art on the Line.