In a 703 to 460 vote, union members approved the three-year contract. They had rejected an earlier proposal on October 21 by a vote of 980 to 243.

Chris Holder, 23, has worked on the assembly line at the Amana plant for two years. He indicated how his vote was cast by explaining that new hires will be on a two-tier setup and "it will take them up to five years to reach 100 percent of their job grade minimum. This will certainly divide the new hires from the present union workers and will weaken the union."

During the strike IAM members told the Militant that they earn about $5 an hour less than workers at Maytag factories who are represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW).

"The economic conditions were getting worse and people were starting to hurt," Holder said of the pressures on the strikers. While most other jobs in the area pay between $7 and $10 an hour, Amana workers average about $14. "A few union people had crossed the picket line shortly after the October 21 vote, although the company was getting very little production, if any, out of the work done by management and a few temp-agency workers," he said.

"I certainly think that we would have lost a lot if we had not gone on strike" said Ken Penn, who presently works on the assembly line as a valve tester and has been employed by Amana for 10 years. "We made some gains on the question of overtime," he said, "which is limited to eight hours a week after Amana's original offer was a mandatory 12 hours. On the new hires two-tier wage, although it will take five years to get to 100 percent, in Amana's original offer new hires would never reach the same wage as the present workers."

Penn said the 34 percent vote against the contract offer reflected the fact that there is no improvement in the heath insurance package over Amana's original offer. Starting next September, "the workers will have to pay out twice as much over the last contract," he said, "and many see this as a setback."

In a phone interview a few days after union members returned to work, Penn said the company "is upset that we went on strike. They tested us right away by trying to take away our personal breaks the first night and said we have to work two hours overtime on November 21, which would put us into the Thanksgiving holiday. The union workers said no to both and the company backed off, which shows there is a lot of fight left in the union members."

Peter Seidman, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union and a meat packer in Marshalltown, Iowa, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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