News

Coronavirus Update

In the past couple of weeks, two Great Lakes freight vessels experienced an outbreak of COVID-19 that necessitated an extended stay in port in order to quarantine infected crew members.

State Tax Withholding Changes for Interlake Employees

Interlake employees received an email from Human Resources a couple of weeks ago with information about changes being made to the process of reporting earnings to state tax agencies.

2021 Season Begins

We are now just days away from seeing the vessels crewed by our members returning to service across the Great Lakes.

Updates from Winter Meetings

Brothers and sisters,

Just wanted to share some of the subjects of discussion that came out of the Winter Meetings:

Free College Benefit

Brothers and sisters,

Winter Meetings

Dear Sisters and Brothers, we are having winter Union  meetings this year. The first union meeting will be at USW Local 979 Dave McCall Hall located at 3421 Independance road Cleveland ohio 44105.The meeting will be on Thursday Feburary 20th 2020 at 10:00AM. Please RSVP to Tom Zidek at thomaszidek@gmail.com  if attending.  The second winter Union meeting will be on Thursday March 5th at 9:00AM at the Hampton Inn 230 Dickerson RD Gaylord Michigan 49735. If attending please RSVP to thomaszidek@gmail.com.

New Year 2020

Dear Sisters and brothers it is 2020 and I want to wish all of you a very Happy and safe New year. First i want to discuss something tragic that happened to one of our members on the Sykes a boat owned by Central Marine. Unfortunatley one of our members was killed when she tripped on the dock and fell in the water and drowned she also had head trauma. One of our members went into thewater after her but could not get to her in time. Please everyone be as safe as you can while on the boats and docks.

CONTRACT UPDATES

We have reached tenative agreements with Interlakes and Keylakes. You should have your summaries by now. We are still having issues with Central Marine around language for retro and the signing bonus we hope to have these resolved soon.We apologize that that this has taken so long but it is difficult getting everything together logistically.  When we get Central Marine finished we intend to try and get to all the boats to explain the summaries and then vote. Please be patient a little while longer. In solidarity Tom Z 

negotiation updates

Interlakes: we have come to a tenative agreement on Friday September 6th. We are currently putting together a summary of the changes tenativley agreed to. we hope to have this summary to everyone early next week.

Keylakes and Central Marine: we have made good progress with these two companies but we have a few issues with both companies still to resolve.

we are going to try and schedule meetings aboard the boats after you recieve the summaries. we will try and do Interlakes as soon as we can so we can answer any questions you may have.

update for negotiations with Interlaked

Dear Brothers and sisters on Thursday 8-14 and Friday 8-15 the bargaining committee met with the company represenitives. The Company represenatives were Thomas M. Wynne VP and General Counsel, William M. Thornton CFO and Jason Toth Director of training for Interlakes. The union participants consisted of Gary Dubey Wheelsman from the boats Jamie Wakler International Represenative and myself.  We discussed local issues such as training, safety and other local issues. We also exchanged proposals on 8-14-2019 the company returned on 8-15- 2019 without much of a response.

Updates for contract negotiations

Central Marine: The union committee met with the company on 7-23- 2019 and 7-24-2019, the committee members were Adam Larson and Jeff Thompson along with Tom Zidek Business agent for Local 5000 and Dan Vorrees International staff represenative. We discussed some local issues and we think we have agreed how to resolve some of these local issues given to us by our members. We gave the company our economic proposals on 7-09-2019 and  we were expecting them to respond at this latest meeting ,unfortunatley they were not ready to respond to our proposals.