by James Parks, Feb 26, 2010
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (far right) rallies with workers at the Whirlpool plant in Evansville, Ind.
Nearly 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.”
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 65,000 signatures to the plant’s locked front gate. 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.
