Shipyard strike continues

PASCAGOULA, Miss. – Striking union workers manned picket lines outside Northrop Grumman’s shipyard for the fifth straight day here Monday with no progress reported in resolving a contract dispute.

Officials with both the company and the unions said no additional contact has been made between the two sides since the strike began Thursday at the yard that competes with Maine’s Bath Iron Works for Navy destroyer contracts.

“There are currently no plans to go back to the bargaining table,” Northrop Grumman spokesman Bill Glenn said this past weekend.

He declined to comment further on whether Northrop Grumman would try to wait the strikers out before making contact, saying that was as much as he is authorized to say.

Jim Couch, business manager for Local 733 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, also said there have been no contacts between the unions and the company since the strike began.

Couch said that while he would take a call from company officials, it would take his union telling him to call the company before he would make the initiative.

The strike was sanctioned by both the 1,200-member IBEW and the Pascagoula Metal Trades Council. The council represents 11 unions and 6,200 workers.

Employees at Northrop Grumman plants in Gulfport, New Orleans and Tallulah, La., approved their new labor agreements, officials said last week.

The latest version of the contract offered by the shipyard’s management wouldn’t give workers enough of a raise to offset cost-of-living increases caused by Hurricane Katrina, IBEW members said.

When asked if Northrop Grumman might be trying to wait the strikers out, Couch told www.gulflive.com that “if we were on the other side of the table, we might know their strategy.”

Couch said his members would hold out “indefinitely.”