Louisville Slugger plant is unionized. As Peoria’s Louisville Slugger Sports Complex gets busier this month, it’s interesting to note the bat company’s labor relations.

Every month is baseball season for members of Steelworkers Local 1693 at the Hillerich & Bradsby (H&B) plant in Kentucky, where Louisville Sluggers are made.

The 60 USW members there work for H&B, a family-owned company that’s run the Slugger factory for 131 years. The H&B workers produce the iconic wooden bats prized by the most famous hitters in the history of the National Pastime.

“We work hard, and we take pride in our bats,” USW member Terribo Kohn said as he applied brown stain to the barrels of a batch of bats.

The factory, a block from the Ohio River in downtown Louisville, produces 4,000 unique types of wooden bats – from ash, maple and birch – for professional baseball games, as well as souvenir giveaways and retail sales. The workers produce about 3,200 bats each day plus about 300 bats a day for Major League Baseball players.

But Louisville Slugger’s iconic status hasn’t protected H&B from financial woes.

Brian Hillerich, the company’s pro bat production manager, said declining sales and quality-control issues with non-wood products (made elsewhere) led H&B to sell the Slugger brand this spring to Wilson Sporting Goods. Wilson will own the brand, but H&B will continue to run the factory and will become Wilson’s exclusive supplier of wooden bats.

USW Unit President Glen Seabolt, who’s worked at the Slugger plant since 2006, doesn’t expect the sale to change labor relations in Louisville, where he said the union has an excellent relationship with management.

“The family has been good to us. We provide them with what they need,” Seabolt said. “It is going to stay that way. We’ve got to step up, but we’re going to make it.”

Because Wilson is known for its strong support of American manufacturing, said Gordon Nichols, president of the amalgamated USW local, the sale ultimately should be good for workers.

“Nothing has changed for USW members,” Nichols said.

Supreme Court rules against employer discrimination by religion. In an 8-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court last month slammed employers who discriminate against workers and applicants on the basis of religion.

The case involved a Moslem woman, Samantha Elauf, who applied at an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Oklahoma. The manager found Elauf was qualified, but did not hire her because Elauf violated the firm’s “Look Policy” – its preppy dress code – by wearing a headscarf that observant Islamic women don. Elauf and the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission sued, and got a split decision in lower courts. The High Court, except for Justice Clarence Thomas, sided with Elauf.

“Abercrombie’s argument is that an applicant cannot show disparate treatment” of religion under equal employment law “without first showing an employer has ‘actual knowledge’ of the applicant’s need for an accommodation. We disagree,” argued conservative jurist Antonin Scalia. “Instead, an applicant need only show that need for an accommodation was a motivating factor in the employer’s decision” not to hire a worker.

Management scheme to kill pensions forces St. Louis strike. In a confrontation with national implications for pensions, the St. Louis Mason Contractors Association (MCA) last month forced Bricklayers Local 1 to strike to protect hard-won benefits for its members.

Local 1 business manager Don Brown said the work stoppage happened after marathon bargaining failed to reach a settlement concerning contractors’ demand to eliminate Bricklayers’ pension plan. About 850 unionists went on strike after the previous four-year contract with MCA expired.

MCA’s management-side pension trustees demanded its abolition and replacement with a riskier 401(k) style plan. When the plan’s union-side trustees rejected that, management went to court to get an arbitrator to settle the issue. Imposing an arbitrator would put every Bricklayer’s pension at the mercy of the arbitrator’s ruling – and would open the gate to identical management demands in other jointly run pension plans nationwide.

“We are ready to find a workable, reasonable solution over many issues, however, we are not going to let the contractors destroy the Bricklayers’ pension plan,” Brown said.

The contractors want to kill the union’s pension plan and freeze benefits, replacing it with a 401(k) style plan, which guarantees no benefits but creates a pool of investment money in each person’s name that’s controlled by investment advisors. If the economy has a downturn, Bricklayers could suffer substantial losses.

“In other words,” Brown said, “Our members take all the risk and the contractors take none.”

News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper in Peoria