Steelworkers, Kaiser Tangle On The Web Internet Levels Labor Vs. Company Playing Field
Marv Jacobs started his career at Kaiser Mead holding a 22-pound steel bar over a 1,700-degree pot of molten metal, chipping at crust as hard as concrete. For weeks, he was too sore to sleep lying down.
Today, the 6-foot-2 United Steelworker watches over another sizzling pot. But his primary tool is the mouse on his personal computer. Since October, Jacobs, 35, and his wife, Rhonda, have run an Internet Web site for the Local 329 Steelworkers at Mead.
Trentwood Steelworkers were already online. Steelworker Carol Ford launched the area’s first union Web page Oct. 5 - less than a week into the strike. Since then, she’s spent three hours a night updating the Local 338 site.
About the same time, Kaiser Aluminum broadened its own corporate Web page, offering strike updates, company news releases and a toll-free telephone line that takes between 10 and 100 calls a day.
“Once the strike began we clearly saw that this was something we could rely on to help us deliver some of our message,” said Scott Lamb, Kaiser spokesman.
The Spokane picket line has moved online and the news, friendship and political alliances have pushed an old-fashioned labor dispute into a whole new millennium.
Spokane Steelworkers so blanketed an independent Yahoo!Finance message board for Kaiser investors - 3,700 messages posted since the Sept. 30 walkout - that last Friday Jacobs put up another message board for them alone. “They needed their own place to chat.” Plus, the investors wanted their board back.
Even the deepening political alliance between Steelworkers and environmental activists nationwide sprang from the Internet. Labor’s collaboration with Earth First! began when a surfing Spokane Steelworker found Jail Hurwitz, a Web site devoted solely to incarcerating the man who controls Kaiser, Charles Hurwitz, over his role in a $1.6 billion savings and loan debacle.
“We’d been building bridges with workers for 12 or 13 years with various degrees of success, but all of a sudden we’re having the Steelworkers write us,” said Darryl Cherney, the Earth First! organizer behind the $50,000 reward campaign seeking information against Hurwitz.
Within a few months, Cherney, 43, was standing on a picnic table in Spokane surrounded by Steelworkers in “Jail Hurwitz” T-shirts. Nearly 1,000 Steelworkers have since written to California Fish and Game officials opposing the Hurwitz-backed plan for the ancient redwoods.
“I knew the Steelworkers were not a monocultural bunch who thought one way or another,” said Cherney. “There were fundamentalist Christians, gun collectors, right-wing conservatives, ex-hippies, people who were Earth Firsters and others who didn’t even like environmentalists, but they all still appreciate the support.”
As ancient Eastern sages and newcomers to the Internet learn: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“This is very different,” said John Duray, national Steelworkers spokesman. “This happened not because anyone from Pittsburgh or Minneapolis said, `We’re going to use the Internet as a base for our folks.’ Those folks in Spokane started this and they took the bull by the horns.”
Both Kaiser and the labor unions are making good use of the Internet to explain their positions, said Dr. David Chatterjee, a Washington State University assistant professor who has studied use of the World Wide Web since 1995.
But the Steelworkers may have the most to gain from the Internet. First, as an organizing tool to get information at their own convenience and absorb it in their own time, without attending union meetings. Second, as a means to sway public opinion.
“The Web page gave little old me an avenue to compete with them,” said Jacobs from his computer in his Valley kitchen.
“What this medium has done is leveled the playing field,” Chatterjee said. “Even small competitors are in the position to compete in terms of advertising and communication. Perhaps these labor unions did not have the resources, but thanks to Web medium they can advertise as extensively.”
But just as important is the Internet’s impact on morale. “It’s like a lifeline,” said Rhonda Jacobs, who is also the daughter of a striking Mead worker. “Anything to keep up hope.”
When the Steelworkers walked out, Carol Ford assumed an exhaustive load at the Trentwood union hall, organizing the food bank and union fund raising.
She brought years of institutional memory to the 338 strike committee, having joined Kaiser as an 18-year-old Montanan in 1972. But she also brought computer skills.
In 1993, Ford helped open Planet X, the second bulletin board service in Spokane. Users formed a club of nearly 300, who gather regularly. She also operated Spokane’s first cyber cafe, Koffee.com, downtown until it closed in 1997. When her union struck, she figured a Web page could provide news and connect people.
“It helps reassure people that things are still happening and tell them to not give up,” Ford said.
Ford and fellow Steelworker Stan White post the latest updates, including company press releases.
“I don’t slam Kaiser,” Ford said. “I want this site to be a fair and honorable site.”
The 329 Web page, by Marv and Rhonda Jacobs, is nearly as formal as the Kaiser corporate page. The one exception is an area titled: “Kaiser News.” Click on that and you find a laughing face with the caption: “Did you really expect us to post anything here? Not on your life.”
So where’s the blistering between sides? On message boards where almost everyone posts statements anonymously. A union critic who wandered onto a Steelworker board recently was welcomed by users calling him “Fresh Meat.” The boards serve as lively mills for rumor - some of which turn out to be true.
Three months before the strike, for instance, the coming walkout and company preparations to keep “the pots hot” during the strike were posted on the Yahoo! message board. Last week, a strike-related firing at Pizza Hut was posted on a message board - only hours after it happened.
But much of the discussion is personal, angry and fraught with fear. And both sides say the message boards probably help.
“I think it is helpful for the simple fact it gives people a place to talk about what is going on inside them,” Marv Jacobs said. “A lot of people don’t know what their future holds and they have a lot of concerns and it’s a place to get it off their chest.”
Lamb and Susan Ashe, Kaiser spokeswoman in Spokane, said they’re not aware of salaried workers or managers joining the boards, but they say they check them regularly.
Of course, the boards and Web pages are no substitute for gathering at the meeting hall. Hundreds of union and salaried people alike don’t surf the Internet or even own a computer, Wes Beck, president of 338 included.
And computers haven’t done much to resolve the dispute between Kaiser and the union.
In January, the union sent Kaiser 120 questions on its latest contract proposal. Last week, the company responded with 12 boxes of computer-generated paper. So go negotiations in the Information Age.
ON THE WEB Strike news You can check out the strike-related Web sites at the following. Kaiser Aluminum: www.kaiseral.com Local 338: www.choicenet1.com/steelworkers/index.htm Local 329: Members.aol.com/uswa329/ onstrike.html