As the end of April and international Labor Day May 1 approached, 240 striking union members at a Dow specialty chemicals production site in Deer Park, Texas remained locked out without pay or benefits.

The lockout that started Apr. 22 followed nine weeks of talks between site management and the United Steelworkers Union (USW) over a new collective agreement. The union said the workers were locked out after they rejected two contract offers by Dow, the first by 96%, the second by 98%.

Dow is renegotiating contracts signed with employees prior to its merger into DowDuPont and subsequent demerger into the “new Dow” minus the Chemical suffix. The company said it is seeking to harmonize collective agreements across its workforce.

The chemical producer – the “new Dow” focuses heavily on plastics – currently has 37,000 employees worldwide, compared with 56,000 prior to the 2017 merger with DuPont.

According to the union, Dow is cutting staff and redistributing the work among remaining employees; this, it said, has resulted in chronic understaffing and long hours of forced overtime, which cause fatigue and undermine safety in an already dangerous industry.

In a statement, Dow said Deer Park, a former Rohm and Haas facility, is “operating safely and reliably without the United Steelworkers,” adding that the site (which supplies the adhesives and sealants, automotive coatings, acrylic plastics, personal care products and water treatment sectors) is being operated with a contingent workforce comprised mostly of “highly trained technical experts.”

Dow added that it has made USW an offer to return to the negotiating table. The company also told local media outlets it has offered to spread overtime more evenly and has proposed “a competitive wage increase.”

Speaking to local media, Ben Lilienfeld, subdistrict director for USW in Texas, said that in an average week a Dow Deer Park employee typically works about 30% overtime hours and that redistributing hours does not address the underlying staffing problem.

Other reports said understaffing at the site has been an issue for some time. During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, USW is said to have asked Dow to provide more information about its overtime and fatigue policies, and later filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing the company of failing to provide the requested information.

The union said it has concerns that understaffing could endanger safety in a region that has seen several accidents recently. Lilienfeld remarked also that USW is unhappy with how the company handles arbitration to settle labor grievances.

As to workers’ pay, Dow told the newspaper Houston Chronicle that its employees’ wages "are in the upper quartile” of pay within the local chemical industry and that its proposed increase at the Texas site is in line with its pay practices across North America.

As the union sees it, however, even given the company’s proposed raise of 1.8% annually, its employees would still earn less than other chemical and refinery workers in the region who have successfully bargained for increases of 3.5-4%.

"(Dow's) wage proposal barely keeps up with the cost of living and really is far below their peers here in Houston and on the Ship Channel," Lilienfeld told the Chronicle.

The safety argument being leveraged by the union reflects lingering concerns about safety generally following two major incidents involving chemicals in March and April this year.

In mid-March, a fire at the petrochemical tank farm operated by International Terminals about a kilometer away from Deer Park raged for several days, spilling chemicals into waterways and leading to a protracted closure of the Houston Ship Channel, one of the most important transport arteries for petrochemicals on the US Gulf Coast.

At the beginning of April, one worker was killed and two others injured in an explosion and fire at the KMCO coolants plant in nearby Crosby, Texas.