Members of several unions showed up in force at Whirlpool Corp.’s annual shareholder meeting in Chicago Tuesday.

David Jones, a retired member of IUE-CWA, and a former Whirlpool employee of the shuttered refrigerator facility in Evansville, Ind., presented the AFL-CIO’s shareholder proposal asking the company to obtain shareholder approval for any future “golden coffin” payments to senior executives.   

Golden coffins are payments made upon the death of senior executives to their heirs. Golden coffin payments make a mockery of the notion of pay for performance. At the end of 2011, the heirs of the five highest-paid executives at Whirlpool were entitled to receive posthumous payments of $34.5 million, including the acceleration of equity awards. The AFL-CIO proposal received 39 percent of the votes cast, a strong showing of support.

Jones made an impassioned plea to Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig about retiree health care and pension benefits that he and his fellow employees are still battling the company over. Fettig ignored his comments about Whirlpool's lack of compassion.

Shawn Gilchrest, from the Strategic Campaigns Department at United Steelworkers, and other USW members also attended the Whirlpool annual meeting, representing employees from the company’s Fort Smith, Ark., plant that is slated to be shut down mid-year. USW Local 370 President Rick Nemeth questioned Fettig about the company’s plans regarding that facility. 

Whirlpool has announced it would close the Fort Smith facility later this year, affecting 800 hourly workers, and a total of nearly 1,500 jobs when workers already laid off are included. Fettig said that Americans were no longer interested in the side-by-side refrigerators made by Nemeth and his co-workers. The company claims to support U.S. manufacturing, but its track record of closing facilities in this country and outsourcing jobs belies that.