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Keep Whirlpool Jobs in America

(Image courtesy Hillbilly Report)

AFL-CIO Blog:

More than 5,000 workers, community and religious activists from at least six states converged in front of the Whirlpool plant in Evansville, Ind., to say with a unified and loud voice: “Keep It Made in America.” The massive crowd stretched nearly a mile along the road leading to the plant.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka along with 40 people, including children and grandchildren of workers, clergy and retirees, used a Whirlpool refrigerator to wheel petitions with 70,000 signatures to the plant’s locked front gate. At the same time, more than 40,000 signatures on petitions were delivered to the Whirlpool headquarters in Michigan. The petitions urged Whirlpool executives to reconsider their decision to shutter the Evansville plant, laying off 1,100 people and moving jobs to Mexico. Union members also made more than 1,700 phone calls today alone to Whirlpool headquarters in Benton Harbor, Mich., and the Evansville offices with the same message.

Here are just some of the petitions that went to Whirlpool:

Hillbilly Report was there with cameras:

Richard Trumka Tells Whirlpool Like It Is. Thank You Richard! from James Pence on Vimeo.

Trumka told the crowd:

We’re going to use this shameful situation to kindle a campaign for change, a campaign for jobs so that the kind of atrocity that just happened doesn’t keep happening all across America—but instead of plant closings, we go to celebrate a plant opening.

(Image courtesy Hillbilly Report)

(Image courtesy AFL-CIO)

Tags: jobs, Richard Trumka, unemployment, Whirlpool