Kaiser Strike Similar To Fight At Ravenswood

They were Henry J. Kaiser’s workhorses: Trentwood, Mead and Ravenswood. Sister aluminum plants that made money - and paid good money - providing among the highest wages and job security in their respective counties for 30 years.

From their sale to Charles Hurwitz in 1988 to the long and fractious lockout of thousands of Steelworkers, what happened in Spokane over the past 11 months and what happened at Ravenswood in West Virginia eight years earlier are dramatically similar.

Whether the ending is the same remains to be seen.

Twenty-one years after Henry J. Kaiser died, the plants and other portions of his empire were sold to Wall Street financier Charles Hurwitz in a highly-leveraged buyout.

When Hurwitz needed cash, he sold some of the Kaiser holdings including Ravenswood, a nearly 40-year-old Kaiserbuilt plant on the Ohio River in rural West Virginia. The plant passed to an investor partnership that was under the control of Marc Rich, an enormously rich international metals trader and fugitive from justice who had sold oil to Iran and South Africa during embargoes.

Like the Kaiser plants in Spokane, the Ravenswood workforce:

Had never had a strike before their buyout in 1988.

Had given up wages and benefits in the 1980s to keep the plants afloat in a tumultuous metals market.

Had an entrenched, often militant union which had seen relations deteriorate over issues such as contracting jobs out, work rules and retirement benefits.

Had seen extensive preparation to run the plants with replacement workers well before the Steelworkers even left.

Were replaced by mostly young men and women hired from the job-starved area around the plants.

Faced a corporate structure miles away from their community competing in a global economy.

There is one key difference: At Kaiser, more than 2,900 Steelworkers struck first - walking out on Sept. 30 only to be locked out three months later when they offered to return to work. Kaiser has repeatedly said it wants the Steelworkers back.

Ravenswood Aluminum Co. locked its 1,700 workers out on the first day of the dispute.

Author Kate Bronfenbrenner said the Ravenswood workers won their jobs back only after unraveling a complex corporate structure which led to Rich, who had denied any involvement in the dispute. Local West Virginians, some of whom had never left the state before, traveled to Czechoslovakia where they stopped the government from allowing Rich to buy a smelter, to Romania where they stopped the sale of a hotel and to his Swiss hideout where they were accompanied by journalists.

The strategy has since become the model of how to wage a modern labor fight. Similar tactics were used to win recent fights at Bridgestone/Firestone and in Newport News, Va.

“This is a story of how you can take on the worst of global capitalism and win,” said Bronfenbrenner. She and Tom Juravich, both 45, were labor researchers at Penn State when they started studying the Ravenswood lockout. Both pro-labor, they began their research as consultants to the Steelworkers but decided to expand the project. They said the union had no editorial control of the book, which includes a critical review of the union’s failures.

The academics spent six years compiling eight four-drawer file cabinets of documents and hundreds of interviews. Bronfenbrenner is now director of labor education research at Cornell University. Juravich became director of Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts.

They said the biggest lesson was the human cost of the dispute. Since it ended, Ravenswood employees have donated $160,000 to other union members who are striking or locked out.

“For most people, this was the most significant event of their lives.”

It isn’t over. In 1995, Ravenswood was sold to Century Aluminum. Last month, half of the plant was sold to the French company Pechiney.