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Shipyard Workers
Relaunch USS Cole
Never Too Late to Walk the Line Raytheon Members Save 320 Jobs in Wichita When Raytheon announced they were sending cable and harness assembly jobs to Mexico, Local 733 member Lee Carney decided to do something about it. She could lose her house and her daughter wouldn’t be able to go to college. Carney and fellow stewards Joanna Chadwick and Colleen Patterson got to work. Getting together with their fellow members, engineers, lean-manufacturing experts and mangers, they set out to cut harness costs for King Air business jets. The process worked. By redesigning how they did their jobs, they reduced costs enough to convince Raytheon to keep 320 jobs in Wichita. “Now I can make my house payment and I can send my daughter to college next year,” Carney told the Wichita Eagle. With 2,000 jobs leaving Raytheon last year alone, District 70 Assistant Directing Business Representative Rita Rogers wants to expand the work that Carney and her coworkers started. “We’re going to have to work together,” said Rogers. “But everyone’s goal is to keep jobs here in the United States.”
Fog covered the Chesapeake Bay when the mayday went out. The 520-foot freighter A. V. Kastner had collided with the tugboat Swift. IAM Local 2424 member Martin Jacquette heard the distress call. He alerted his fellow boat captains who operate patrol boats for the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Captains Wayne Fletcher and Wade Hague were the first to respond. “It was so foggy we couldn’t see more than a boat length ahead,” said Hague. "We made contact with the Kastner and then searched the area for survivors. There was debris everywhere.” Hague and Fletcher searched the area, but found no one left in the water. Four crewmen had perished. A nearby tug, the Buchanan 14, radioed that they had five survivors onboard, two of them injured seriously. Hague and Fletcher’s patrol boat, able to navigate the river’s shallow waters that the Buchanan couldn’t, picked up emergency personnel from shore and then sped to the Buchanan to bring the Swift’s crewmen back. “We were glad to help,” said Fletcher. “We’re all watermen. We know it could easily happen to us. We did what anyone else would have done.”
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