Whirlpool warns employees not to protest shutdown

Benton Harbor, Michigan-based Whirlpool, a company to whose fortune U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-St. Joseph) is heir, is telling workers in its Evansville, Indiana plant — which is about to be shut down to move the 1,100 jobs to Mexico — not to protest the closing of that plant or they may risk their future employment viability. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reports:

Activists planned a high-profile protest for this Friday, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka visiting the plant for the first time. But Whirlpool says the effort is futile — they are fully committed to shutting the plant down. The company, however, still seems quite wary of the potential for bad publicity. In a memo sent to its employees and passed along to the Huffington Post, Paul Coburn, division vice president for Whirlpool’s Evansville Division, offers a fairly explicit warning to his workers: If they join Trumka’s protest they would seriously risk future employment opportunity.

“In the last six months we have delivered strong results in spite of having to see a good deal of our equipment taken out of the building and moved to its new location. I believe that it is a testament to your character that you have continued to work hard to preserve the positive reputation of the Evansville workforce during this period,” Coburn writes.

“With this in mind, we have shared our concern with Local 808 leaders that these negative activities will only hamper employees when they look for future jobs. The entire community is aware and sympathetic towards the situation we all face. We fear that potential employers will view the actions of a few and determine whether they would want to hire any of Evansville Division employees in the future. We hope that this is not the case, but think it is certainly a consideration.”

A union official who passed the memo to the Huffington Post labeled it a “potentially illegal” effort to suppress speech and said that the local union is examining whether it violates labor law rules. The irony was not lost that a company closing a plant to ship jobs abroad would threaten workers with the possibility of unemployment even after it moved.

To add to the irony, Whirlpool received more than $19 million in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — i.e. the stimulus bill that was designed to encourage job creation in this country. Upton voted against the ARRA, which I suppose might be regarded as noble since it meant voting against a grant for the company that makes him wealthy; then again, maybe he knew they were only going to be creating jobs in Mexico.

As Megan Carpentier at our sister site the Washington Independent notes, Whirlpool has been very busy closing down American factories and shipping jobs elsewhere over the last few years:

Whirlpool should be used to protests after plant closures by now: After shutting down factories and laying off workers in Newton, Iowa, Herrin, Ill., and Searcy, Ark., in 2006, in LaVergne, Tenn., and Reynosa, Mexico in 2008, and in Fort Smith, Ark., and Evansville, Ind., in 2009 and 2010 as part of its latest round of layoffs affecting 5,000 people, one would think they’d know the drill. People get mad and depressed when their livelihoods disappear, and especially when their jobs get sent overseas.

At least Upton still has his private Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course with breathtaking views of Lake Michigan to play on while Michigan taxpayers get stuck with the bill for cleaning up the parcels — contaminated by Whirlpool — that were traded for the pristine public parkland to build the course.