Employees of a Greenpoint fuel company are on the 10th day of a strike as they
continue to ask for changes to
their wages and benefits.
Nearly a dozen workers of United Metro Energy stood outside of the Brooklyn
facility Friday holding signs demanding a pay raise, pension and better health
care.
Andrew Soleyn worked at the facility for five years and says he can barely care
for his three daughters.
“I want to be able to adequately provide for them,” Soleyn says. “On these
wages, I can’t. I have to budget down to the penny.”
Workers say their union Teamsters Local 553 have
been in ongoing negotiations with the company for two years, hoping to get a
union contract that would give the workers industry standard wages and benefits.
Representatives for the union say the company has
been reluctant to agree to the benefits that the workers are seeking.
John
Catsimatdis, the head of Red Apple Group Inc. that owns United Metro
Energy, tells News 12 that another group with the company represented by the
same union settled on a contract recently.
“We want to be fair,” Catsimatdis says. “We are negotiating in good faith and
we hope that it will be settled as soon as possible.”
The union says they have not come to an agreement
because the contract is not one
size fits all.
The workers say they will be out as long as it
takes to get what they are demanding.