‘Scabs?  How do you know about scabs and why do you ask, son?’

‘Jimmy’s dad got kicked out of work last week and he said a scab took his daddy’s job.  Where do they find scabs?  Is a scab going to take your job, daddy?’

‘No son, a scab won’t take my job.  I don’t have a union where I work so the company would just fire me.’

With the lockout in Three Forks in week two and the Local D 239’s business agent telling the members to hunker down for a long siege you have to wonder, just where the hell would the company find a scab to take a middle class worker’s job in Montana? Surely it wouldn’t be a neighbor or some poor schmuck down the road from Bozeman or Whitehall?  Maybe over the hill in Butte?  Never!  OK, then where?

This may sound strange, but would you believe Minnesota?  Yep, that’s right.  Those scabs who are headed to help bust the union are coming your way from the good old Midwest.  It would seem that a company called Personnel Management Group will be ‘deploying’ a team of it’s technicians to run the plant in one of our tiny Montana towns.  Of course PMG doesn’t call their contract workers scabs, they are a supplier of a ‘crisis workforce‘.

Well, it looks like the town of Three Forks and Bozeman area are going to have 30 new faces walking around.  You have to wonder where they’ll sleep, eat, shop and have a beer after a long day of scabbing?  You also have to wonder how a small town like Three Forks could tolerate having scabs walking around while families who’ve planted their roots go hungry with no paycheck.  Seems like some businesses could exercise that right to refuse service.

On another note, the start of school is just around the corner and there are 29 families who are going to have a tough time buying pencils, notebooks and crayons this year.  From the looks of PMG’s website and Facebook page they do some charitable giving of school supplies, this year to the tune of around $10,000.  How about if all you readers give PMG a call at 1-855-522-6701?  Ask for David Jacobsen, he’s the President of Scabs-R-Us.  Maybe they’d do a school supply drive for the families of the Imery Talc plant.  Surely PMG would support the middle class family as they profit from the lockout?

TGTJ

‘Maybe all men got one big soul ever’bodies’ a part of.’