Volunteer Help Sent To Kaiser Salaried Workers From Texas, California Helping Out In Spokane

Salaried workers have been brought into Spokane from as far away as California and Texas to help keep Kaiser Aluminum Corp. plants at Mead and Trentwood operating.

Vice President Bob Irelan said volunteers from company offices in Pleasanton, Calif., and Kaiser’s headquarters in Houston, have joined local salaried employees at the Mead smelter and Trentwood rolling mill.

The plants, and three others in Ohio, Louisiana and Tacoma, were struck by 3,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America on Monday.

All have continued operating, some at reduced levels, with salaried employees working 12-hour shifts.

Almost all the workers arriving from outside Spokane are unskilled, Irelan said, although Pleasanton is the home of a Kaiser research center staffed in part by technicians.

Irelan said retired salaried employees have also been asked to return to work. He did not know how many outside replacements are in Spokane.

“These are people who will be delighted to return to their normal chores as soon as this crisis is over,” he said.

There was no indication Wednesday when that might be.

Irelan was noncommittal when asked when settlement talks might resume. It was the Steelworkers, he said, who rejected a contract their leadership had recommended.

“We had our negotiations,” he said.

“(Kaiser) flatly refuses to talk with us,” said Jerry Miller, president of Steelworkers Local 329, which represents the 909 hourly workers at Mead.

He said union members were angry when leadership did not call a strike when the old contract expired Oct. 31.

Kaiser managers, Miller said, lack the know-how to return the company to sustained profitability, so they keep turning to workers to make up the shortfalls.

“Quit coming to us,” he said, adding that no single issue has prompted the first company-wide strike against Kaiser in its 49-year history.

“I think these (workers) are just fed up,” Miller said.

Outside Mead, pickets echoed Miller, adding their own personal histories of frustration.

Their complaints harken back a decade to the first of a series of contracts they say traded wage and other concessions for unfulfilled promises that they would profit when Kaiser did.

“They’ve taken away and taken away and now they think it’s automatic,” said Richard Thompson. “We have to stand up.”

He said he recently pulled out a pay stub from August 1983 and compared it with one from December. He made $21 less in the 1994 week, he said.

Today, Mead workers will receive their last Kaiser paychecks until the strike is over. They lost their medical insurance when the strike started.

Union officials have been arranging what assistance they can find for workers who may need food stamps and financial or medical aid.

“We don’t know where the end is,” said Fred Gariepy, the local’s strike information officer.