Kaiser Strike Rolls On Workers Move Picket Line To California

Kaiser Aluminum’s striking steelworkers took their show on the road well before dawn Monday.

Armed with books, magazines and pillows, nearly 150 men and women boarded three chartered buses destined for the company’s offices in Pleasanton, Calif.

Exactly two months after the strike of 3,000 hourly employees was called, workers from the Mead smelter and Trentwood’s flat-rolled products plant in Spokane as well as the smelter in Tacoma left to deliver a message in person to their employer.

They want negotiations to resume and the strike to end.

Phil Tagariello, a Mead worker said he felt obligated to go.

“I hate the whole idea of travel - but it’s kind of like picket duty, you can’t say no,” he said before boarding the coach with 46 co-workers for the 20-hour ride.

Tagariello and others have found jobs since the strike started, but he asked for time off to make the trip.

In addition to picketing company offices, the steelworkers will appear before the Alameda County board of supervisors to discuss the business practices of Kaiser and its majority shareholder, Maxxam Inc., and seek a resolution of support. Ten pickets also recently visited Maxxam headquarters in Houston.

The striking workers will also travel to Humbolt County to meet with members of the Earth First! environmental group.

Though the alliance may seem unlikely, both the steelworkers and the Earth First! members oppose the activities of Maxxam, the company that owns 63 percent of Kaiser’s public stock and that owns Pacific Lumber and its redwood forests in Humbolt County.

“Labor unions and environmental groups have found really solid common ground to work together on,” said Darryl Cherney, an Earth First! organizer from Northern California. “That is the Maxxam corporation and its owner Charles Hurwitz.”

Maxxam took over Pacific Lumber in 1985, about the same time it became majority owner of Kaiser. Last week, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection suspended Pacific Lumber’s license to harvest, citing violations of forest practice rules.

“I think their cause and ours are similar,” said Joan Bender, a Trentwood worker who was carrying two travel mugs in one hand and pulling her luggage with the other.

As Bender and her co-workers filed through the bright union hall to pick up black and white steelworkers T-shirts and envelopes with meal money, they said they didn’t know what the trip would accomplish.

“Maybe it will get us noticed,” Bender said. Others agreed.

“We’ll go wherever we need to go to get this settled,” said Barry Mond as he finished a cigarette before boarding his bus. “Those are the guys making all the decisions. It’s good for them to know what’s going on.”

Besides Mead, Trentwood and Tacoma, steelworkers also are on strike at Kaiser plants in Gramercy, La. and Newark, Ohio.

Today members of the company and union bargaining teams are to meet in Minneapolis with a federal mediator present. The union’s negotiators and the presidents of all five locals represented under the expired four-year contract plan to present a proposal in response to Kaiser’s recently announced plan to eliminate 600 to 900 jobs - 20 to 30 percent of the union work force - at the five plants.