It seems so, based on this story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Union workers at Mercury Marine Inc. are getting one more chance - probably their last one - to vote on contract concessions aimed at keeping hundreds of jobs at the company's plant in Fond du Lac.
If the proposal is approved in a union vote scheduled for Thursday and Friday, company executives say they will keep the outboard engine manufacturing plant in Fond du Lac and will bring additional work to the plant from Stillwater, Okla. Mercury Marine also would probably keep its world headquarters in Fond du Lac, protecting about 1,000 jobs in addition to the 850 jobs at the manufacturing plant.
That was the Brawler's bold, and bold it should be.
Because it may be feasible for Mercury Marine to get a manufacturing force up and running in Stillwater to replace a closed Fond Du Lac plant. It's not clear that Mercury Marine could replicate the logistics/supply chain/management force it has in Fond Du Lac.
How many of those folks would want to relocate to a dump like Stillwater? Not many. (And while the Brawler doesn't know enough to say a shift to OK would result in supply chain disruption, that's a possibility as well.) And a HQ in Fondy with a manufacturing plant in OK isn't the most optimal scenario. And MM would be losing a vast amount of institutional knowledge if it were to move everything to Stillwater. Either way, you're introducing a great deal of potential disruption, which is always a risk in production shifts in the best case.
But that's just this Brawler's read.
MM is claiming its "last, best and final" offer is unchanged. The IAM is claiming it got some better language in. The Brawler suspects they're both right.
Comments