Production and maintenance workers at CertainTeed’s fiberglass plant in Chowchilla, Calif., are now Teamsters. Teamsters Local 431 announced Oct. 26 that the plant’s 170 workers had voted to join, and National Labor Relations Board records show the margin wasn’t close: 123 votes for the union and 31 against, with 154 ballots counted out of 170 eligible voters.
The NLRB issued the tally Oct. 2 and certified Local 431 as the workers’ bargaining representative Oct. 13, according to the case docket (32-RC-394372). The union filed its petition Sept. 8, so the whole process took 35 days.
Who’s in the CertainTeed bargaining unit
The unit is broad. It covers full-time and regular part-time hot end and cold end employees and leads, line and process operators, batch house and binder wash operators, blowing wool operators, inspector packers, warehouse workers, storeroom attendants, QA lab techs and three levels of maintenance staff. Managers, salaried workers, clerical staff, guards and supervisors are excluded.
Maintenance planner schedulers and automation controls technicians were allowed to vote subject to challenge because their eligibility wasn’t settled. Five ballots were challenged in all, too few to change the outcome. Ogletree Deakins represented CertainTeed in the case, and Beeson, Tayer & Bodine represented the union.
Seniority, not pay, led the organizing complaints
The workers’ public grievances weren’t mainly about wages. Victor Ruiz, a 23-year CertainTeed employee, said management changed policies “without transparency or notice and even slashed our seniority system.” Local 431 President Justin Scott said the union would push for a first contract with better wages and benefits. Neither side has said when bargaining will start, and CertainTeed hasn’t commented publicly on the vote.
It isn’t the first organizing election at a CertainTeed site. NLRB records list earlier representation cases at CertainTeed plants in Jackson, Mich., in 2007 and 2012, Terre Haute, Ind., in 2009, and a CertainTeed Gypsum plant in Proctor, W.Va., in 2014. The search results don’t show how those votes came out.
What a union insulation plant means for contractors
The Chowchilla plant makes fiberglass building materials that are packaged and shipped nationwide, per the Teamsters. The unit list, with its blowing wool and batch house operators, is a fair map of how insulation gets made: raw batch in, hot end forming, cold end cutting and packing, then the warehouse.
For insulation contractors and distributors, a first-contract negotiation is one more cost variable in a category that’s already getting pricier. Johns Manville is raising mechanical insulation prices up to 12% on Jan. 11.
Four of every five counted ballots went to the union. CertainTeed finds out at the bargaining table what that costs.