Mar 11, 2016 3 min read

It was fair weather for a cookout Friday evening, and members of the United Steelworkers union at the Allegheny Ludlum Plate Mill had plenty of reasons to hold one, the least of which was the recent run of springlike temperatures.

Skip Longdon, president of USW Local 7139-5, said earlier Friday the union received notice from the company that its members will head back to work Monday.

“We have a start date,” Longdon said, adding the company is also reinstating health insurance benefits.

The news was particularly good for George Evans, a 10-year employee at the plant, and his wife Katie, who until the lockout, worked part-time as a physical therapist and spent the rest of her time at home with their daughter, who turns 2 next month.

In a shift of roles, George stayed home with the baby, while his wife worked full-time during the lockout.

“We had to put life on hold,” Katie said.

“It’s something that should have been settled a long time ago,” George said of the seven months it took to reach a new contract agreement.

ATI announced March 4 union workers would return to work next week, beginning with safety training and job-specific refresher training.

Longdon said parts of the plant will return to production Wednesday.

Monday’s return to work will be one day shy of seven months of being locked out of the plant over a contract dispute with their employer. The lockout, which began Aug. 15, affected about 2,200 USW members at 12 ATI plants in six states.

On March 1, members voted by a 5 to 1 margin to ratify a tentative agreement that was reached with the company Feb. 22.

According to the union, the new four-year pact protects retirement benefits and maintains affordable, quality health care for active workers and retirees. It also protects union jobs against outside contractors, maintains the grievance procedure, and introduces a new profit-sharing system that allows USW members a bigger share in ATI’s future successes.

Part of Friday evening’s get-together was to celebrate the exit of the contract workers from the Canton Township plant, who were brought in by the company just after it instituted the lockout against the union employees.

The round-the-clock manning of pickets during the long lockout became a show of solidarity among the union members, something they’ll display Monday, Longdon said.

As he passed out T-shirts imprinted with “Steelworkers Union USW 7139-5, ‘Til Idle,” Longdon explained the strategy of everyone wearing the shirts.

“It’s to show solidarity when we go back,” he said, saying the union has hired a bus to take workers to the plant Monday.

“We’re going to have a school bus take us in the way they took in the scabs,” he said.