It’S A Tight Christmas Striking Kaiser Workers, Some Small Businesses Face Lean Holiday

Jim and Judy Beck of Coeur d’Alene figure the strike at Kaiser Aluminum’s Trentwood plant in the Spokane Valley has cost them more than $7,500 in Jim’s lost wages.

Their savings are almost gone.

They’re considering selling their home.

And this Christmas will be a lean one.

“Financially, it’s pretty devastating,” said Jim Beck, an electrical maintainer at Kaiser.

He’s one of about 200 striking Kaiser workers living in North Idaho. Like other strike families, the Becks are tightening their budget, cutting out frills such as dining out and movies.

Measuring the impact of those families’ tightened spending habits is difficult. Large-volume businesses haven’t seen a difference they can correlate to the strike. But some mom-and-pop stores where proprietors know their customers on a first-name basis are feeling the strike’s impacts in their cash registers.

Economists say the impact of a strike in a community is generally double the payroll of striking workers. However, that ripple effect plays out over months and years.

Kaiser officials say the community shouldn’t be feeling any impact from the strike, since most of the replacement workers were hired locally.

For Prime Outlets in Post Falls, it’s impossible to tell whether the strike has hurt sales. Ditto for Post Falls Mazda.

But Debbie Vasser notices the impact.

She runs the Bell Pipe Shop on Seltice Way in Post Falls and knows most of her customers by name.

“There’s a high percentage of Kaiser workers that I haven’t seen for quite a while,” said Vasser, who estimates that a third of her regular clients are on strike.

Those who continue to patronize her shop buy pipe tobacco in ounces, not pounds, and pick up cigarettes by the pack, not by the carton.

“They’re buying a fourth of what they were purchasing,” Vasser said.

She’s picked up a few customers among the strike replacement workers, but overall November sales were down.

Dan Mathewson gauges the effect of the strike by looking at the growing inventory in the Corner Trading Post, a Post Falls pawn shop. Three striking Kaiser workers recently brought by truckloads of tools to sell.

“They’re trying to make house payments, car payments,” said Mathewson, co-owner of the pawn shop. “A lot of my normal buying customers are coming in with things to sell.”

December sales usually double for the pawn broker. But so far this month, his receipts are down 30 percent.

Not all of the decrease can be attributed to the strike, Mathewson said. But he figures that about half of it is.

Mathewson’s partner, Randy Wells, is also noticing a dropoff in customers at another business, the Speedway Diner in Stateline.

About a dozen Kaiser workers still frequent the diner, said Wells, the diner’s co-owner. But they’re more likely to buy a single drink than order dinner, he said.

Eating out is no longer in Duane and Dee Notter’s budget.

Before the strike, the Post Falls couple ate out about three times per week. Now, “we’re just spending the bare minimum on groceries,” Duane said.

He’s a millwright at Kaiser’s Trentwood plant. His wife is a teacher in the Lakeland School District in Rathdrum.

The strike also prompted Duane Notter to give up hunting.

The couple also put off a South Pacific sailing vacation they’d planned to take this summer, banking the money for the strike instead.

“Emotionally, it’s kind of hard on my wife, the lack of income,” Notter said. “We haven’t bought any Christmas presents this year.”

Notter has been unsuccessful in his search for other work. Potential employers shy away when they see Kaiser on his resume. No one wants to hire and train an employee for a short-time, Notter said.

Beck has been more fortunate, picking up temporary work at a thrift store. So has Gus Johnson, a striking worker who found a temporary job at Plastic Model Engineering Inc. through Humanix.

Still, “it’s going to be a slim Christmas,” he said.

For families like the Becks, who don’t have as much invested in Kaiser, the strike could be a turning point in their lives.

Jim Beck has only been at Kaiser for three years. If the strike continues, “it’ll get to the point where we have no resources,” he said. That would prompt some tough choices.

“When we got here, we were naive,” Judy Beck said. “We thought, ‘This is it. We can stay and build a house.”’ But if nothing changes by spring, they’ll try to sell the house they built.

“We had hoped to stay,” she said.