Kaiser And Union Will Move Back Contract Sessions Pittsburgh Talks Will Focus On Company’S Latest Offer

The Steelworkers’ union and Kaiser Aluminum have agreed to push their next scheduled negotiations session back one week.

The change, announced Wednesday, would allow negotiators to devote more time to the talks.

Now the two parties will meet on April 24-25 in Pittsburgh, instead of next week in New York, where some participants had meetings outside of the labor negotiations.

The Pittsburgh meeting is one of a series of planned talks between the two parties in the 19-month labor dispute affecting 2,900 Steelworkers. The two sides will discuss the company’s latest offer, a 57-page document that raised many issues the union thought the company had agreed to table.

The company has said the offer makes new compromises.

This week, presidents of the five union locals involved in the dispute have been in Minneapolis going over the proposal Kaiser offered last week. Mead President Dan Russell was one of them, representing about 900 Spokane Steelworkers who have been locked out of their jobs since January 1999.

“We were just there to go through it page by page,” Russell said of the offer. “Dave Foster (the Steelworkers’ chief negotiator) thought it was important that we review this proposal together. Then we’ll review it with the membership within the next couple of days.”

Wes Beck, president of the Trentwood local, which represents about 1,100 Steelworkers, joined Russell, Foster and the presidents of the locals at plants in Newark, Ohio, Tacoma and Gramercy, La., for the contract proposal review.