Steelworkers Make A Plea For Strike Help
While their union leaders met with Kaiser Aluminum’s chief negotiators in the Midwest, nearly 150 striking steelworkers gathered at the Alameda County Board of Supervisor’s office here Tuesday to ask for help.
They had come by bus to picket Kaiser’s corporate offices. “We just want to let the county leaders know what’s going on with one of their corporate citizens and ask for their support,” said Steelworkers spokesman John Duray.
Most of the group came from Kaiser’s Mead and Trentwood plants in Spokane.
While in the Bay Area the steelworkers planned to visit the gated residential area where Kaiser President Ray Milchovich lives and picket in front of Kaiser’s center of operations in Pleasanton.
In the board chambers, five striking workers explained their concerns to the county supervisors, asking them to help get the company to return to the negotiating table. Though the company and the union have met several times since the strike was called, they have not returned to formal negotiations.
“Put the pressure on headquarters so we can get our jobs back,” Dan Sampson, a Trentwood worker for more than 20 years, told the board.
The supervisors offered encouragement. Alameda County board president Keith Carson and Wilma Chan, the vice president, said they had already written letters to the union’s chief negotiator.
Chan wrote: “The whole Kaiser family of companies were born and flourished here in the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda. That is why it is extremely disappointing to see the highest standards of labor policies that the company’s reputation was built upon seriously undermined by the current corporate owners. Even worse is the company’s efforts to downsize 20-25 percent of the work force out of their jobs. This is not the type of corporate citizenship we support in Alameda County.”
Board members offered to write more letters.
Carla Din, a member of the environmental group, told the board that a portion of the Alameda County employees’ retirement fund was in Maxxam Inc. stock, suggesting putting stockholder influence on the actions of Kaiser’s majority shareholder.
Maxxam owns about 63 percent of Kaiser’s stock.
On Thursday, the steelworkers plan to demonstrate at another of Maxxam’s major businesses, Pacific Lumber, about six hours north of Oakland in the redwood forests. They will be joined by members of Earth First!, an environmental group that has for years protested the logging of the forests.
“The second leg of the trip puzzles us,” said Susan Ashe, spokeswoman for Kaiser in Spokane. She said the company does not understand why the union would ally itself with such an “extremist organization.”
Ashe added: “It’s a diversionary tactic away from the important work before us - negotiating an agreement.
“Maxxam and (Maxxam CEO) Charles Hurwitz have nothing to do whatsoever with Kaiser’s current labor dispute,” Ashe said. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ill-informed or willfully misrepresenting the facts.”