Strike at Aiken Owens-Corning plant has ended Company, Teamsters have reached agreement; workers returned on Tuesday

The strike of employees at the Owens-Corning plant in Aiken that shut down the facility March 4 ended Tuesday with the staffers returning to work.

An employee of the Teamsters Union Local 509 office in Aiken said the company returned to the negotiating table with a revised proposal. Workers approved a new three-year contract Monday and were back at work the next day.

Union representatives could not be reached for comment Thursday. Jason Saragian, an Owens-Corning spokesman at the firm's corporate office in Toledo, Ohio, said the company offer improved the plant's competitiveness and was fair to the employees. He declined to discuss details of the original offer and how the subsequent negotiation differed.

"The offer was modified in a mutually agreeable manner," Saragian said. "We're pleased they ratified it."

Union Local 509 president L.D. Fletcher said after the strike started that the Aiken plant has 90 employees with 75 of them union members. Each plant negotiates separately with its employees, and the large majority of union employees rejected the original contract, he said.

Employees said at the time that the company originally had proposed freezing pensions for workers younger than 60 and reducing salaries of some future employees by $5 an hour. The initial proposal, they said, also included a $1,500 bonus in the first year and raises of 1 percent and 2 percent the next two years.

The strike was separate from the Aiken plant's expansion plans. In December, Owens-Corning agreed to proceed with a $36 million investment to add a new production line at the Aiken plant and hire about 25 new employees. At that time, management indicated the intention to begin production in mid-2012.

Contact Rob Novit at rnovit@aikenstandard.com.