Mercury Marine Workers See Daylight, Wisc Pols Come Through

Updated: Gov Doyle saved Mercury Marine and 1,000s of other Fox Valley jobs with the biggest incentive package ever given out in Wisconsin.

Updated - "Through the efforts of state and local officials...," reads the (IAM) Local 1947 webpage. That's the lede everyone is looking for.

A radical game changer out of Fond du Lac.

After the city and county of Fond du Lac and Wisconsin put together incentives to keep Mercury Marine jobs in Wisconsin, new word comes that Mercury Marine and the (IAM) Local 1947 [now updated] may strike a deal not only retaining manufacturing jobs but actually moving jobs from Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Fond du Lac.

Details on the negotiations are sketchy but the newly scheduled contract vote on Thursday and Friday may signal some great news coming out of Fondy.

Brunswick Corp. executives likely did not suddenly convert to Louis Uchitelle's concerns expressed in The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences.

Fond du Lac and Wisconsin offered publicly funded incentive packages to Merc for the benefit of workers and the surrounding communities that constitute nothing less than the dreaded industrial policy.

Wonder how many Sarah Palin-John McCain voters in Fond du Lac County [28,155 GOP to 23,457 for Obama-Biden in 2008] are going to scream: "Socialist!"

From the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM Local Lodge 1947):

Fond du Lac, WI,
September 2, 2009

Through the efforts of state and local officials, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and Mercury Marine have met and prepared a supplement contract proposal that was presented to the members of Local 1947 on August 23, 2009.

The supplement and the contract proposal will be presented to the IAM Local 1947 membership in a voting process that will take place on Thursday and Friday, September 3rd and 4th, 2009. The supplement contains clarifications of the August 23, 2009 proposal. ...