From The Deckplates

Senior management has said BIW has no intention of offering code 14s for Christmas Eve. Hundreds of employees are on final written warnings for absenteeism. They will have no choice but to show up on Christmas Eve. The second shift ends at midnight, so second shifters will have to stand at the gate until Christmas arrives.

A 2024 MOA gave us a limited shutdown after the union negotiated it away in 2023. The MOA came with a caveat. “The Company does not intend to offer a shutdown or additional code 14s for the 2025 holiday season.”¹ This year, BIW only gave us the Friday after Christmas because the union asked. This concession means to placate the union ahead of contract talks next year, but BIW still won’t budge on Christmas Eve. Granted, we wouldn’t have gotten anything if the union had not approached management. But the new MOA falls short of many members’ expectations for what a shutdown ought to look like. Nobody wants Christmas Eve to be a scheduled workday.

A huge number of our members are from away. They relied on the holiday shutdown to have enough time off to see their families. Restoring the holiday shutdown needs to be a high priority in upcoming contract negotiations.

Unfortunately, I fear that rising healthcare costs will eclipse any shutdown talk. According to the Portland Press Herald, ACA premiums for 2026 will increase an average of 77% in Maine.² This will put inflationary pressure on employer-sponsored healthcare plans like BIW’s, too. According to Politico, employer-sponsored healthcare premiums are likely to increase by 7% nationwide.³ This is far more than the 3.5% average increase in wages employers plan to offer in 2026.⁴ Peterson-KFF attributes 4 of those percentage points to the looming expiration of ACA tax credits.⁵ These credits were a temporary relief measure enacted during the pandemic. The Inflation Reduction Act extended them through 2025.⁶ Yesterday, the House voted against extending the tax credits again.⁷ Maybe they should expire, but Americans deserve more than “concepts of a plan” for what comes next.⁸

Contract negotiations are what come next for us. BIW will want to push rising healthcare costs onto its employees just like they did in 2023. The union successfully fought back against the worst of these increases, but healthcare has been a ticking time bomb for years. The Republican government has done nothing to defuse it. It may blow up in 2026. Even if we successfully fight back higher premiums, deductibles, and copays, every dollar BIW pays toward healthcare is a dollar they can’t offer us in raises. This will severely limit what we will be able to accomplish at the negotiating table next year.

I’ll try to do a more detailed write-up on healthcare before the negotiations, but today’s Fake News Friday. If you only read one of the articles I link this week, make it this one:

Rolling Stone: Melissa Hortman died in a shocking act of political violence. This is the story of her life

Stephen Rodrick’s profile of Melissa Hortman almost moved me to tears. It’s written entirely in the present tense because “not one of the dozens of family, friends, and colleagues [Rodrick] interviewed can bear to refer to Hortman in the past tense. Maybe it is a coping mechanism, or maybe it is a belief that her achievements are a living, breathing thing.”⁹ Maybe it can be both. In any case, this article’s a beautiful testament to Hortman’s legacy. It’s a great reminder of the human cost of political violence, too.