Strike Testing Kaiser’s Mettle Salaried Workers, Executives Getting Better At New Tasks

Salaried employees of Kaiser Aluminum Corp. performed such unfamiliar tasks as setting carbons and casting ingots inside the Mead smelter Saturday while hourly workers walked the picket lines along Hawthorne Ave.

Steelworker pickets were joined Saturday by representatives of the Teamsters and Amalgamated Transit Union.

Nine-hundred Steelworkers usually work at the smelter, where a raw form of aluminum, alumina, is converted into the finished metal by applying huge amounts of electricity.

Since Monday, their places have been taken by 450 accountants, sales and marketing executives and other salaried employees and retirees, many of whom have never seen a smelter before.

They are working 12-hour days, seven days a week.

In the casting room controller Ken Johnson and accountant Vicki Carter, armed with shovels, were skimming hardening ingots of contaminating material.

Carter said she had been in the casting area before to take inventory, never to do the work.

Sandi Armitage was stamping hardened samples of metal bound for the laboratory. She normally processes claims at Trentwood.

Armitage said she has been inside the plant since Monday, sleeping in an office with two other women and eating catered food.

“We’re awful tired, but we’re comfortable,” she said, noting that she is missing a weekend soccer tournament her 12-year-old son has been working towards for months.

“It’s a heartbreak,” Armitage said.

Operations Manager Dave Kjos said 70 percent of Mead’s output would be trucked in molten form to Trentwood under normal conditions.

Since Monday, none has gone to the rolling mill, and the ingots have been hauled away by railcar for direct sale to customers or on the open market, where aluminum is fetching a precious $1 per pound.

But Kjos said managers focused on maintaining production in the early hours of the strike, not on deliveries, and the plant’s courtyards are piled with metal awaiting shipment.

He said equipment has held up better than expected, but there is no effort being made to preserve or replace pots reaching the end of their normal service life.

“We had a slow start,” Kjos said, estimating the plant was operating 80 percent more efficiently by Saturday than it was when the salaried work force took over.

Employees setting carbons - electrodes plunged into the glowing pots - joked with Vice President Jed Daniel that he ought to join them “doing the dance.”

Daniel said the replacements have learned their new tasks quickly.

Although he would like to have the strikers back in the plant, he said “We are prepared to run this facility for however long it takes.”