Kaiser Labor Negotiations Heating Up

The Kaiser Aluminum labor dispute may be Spokane’s longest running road show.

Negotiators have met 10 times in at least five states since January. Their travels to work out a contract for 2,900 workers have resulted in only “modest progress.”

But bargaining has intensified in the past three weeks. Instead of convening for two and three-day sessions every few weeks, lead negotiators have met several days every week.

In the wake of a recent National Labor Relations Board decision to support two union unfair labor practice charges, both sides have become more tight-lipped. Neither Kaiser nor the United Steelworkers of America’s chief negotiators returned calls about the state of negotiations.

They have been meeting in cities most convenient for the lead negotiators. The union’s central offices are in Pittsburgh and Minneapolis, the company’s are in the San Francisco Bay area and Houston.

The next round of talks is in Chicago, today through Friday.

A number of the 2,100 affected Spokane Steelworkers have said that holding sporadic meetings for two or three days at a time is a poor way to negotiate. Some resent that the negotiating teams - a handful from each union hall - get to travel the country, while co-workers struggle to make ends meet. They hear about the talks.

“There may be very little progress to report. But that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been progress,” said Scot Beckenbaugh, regional director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in Minnesota.

While Kaiser and the union have met since January without the involvement of a federal mediator, they contact Beckenbaugh regularly.

“Every negotiation has its own tenor,” he said. “In short times you can accomplish as much as you want to. I’ve seen disputes get settled in a couple of hours.”

Other contracts are bargained down to the punctuation, he said. “Those take a long time … But all of them have their own unique style and pace.”

Early in this dispute, talks were infrequent, sometimes acrimonious.

A big change in tenor came early this year, when Kaiser President Ray Milchovich became Kaiser’s CEO and started attending most of the bargaining sessions. Shortly thereafter, the Steelworkers said they thought discussions were finally progressing.

For the past three months, the lead negotiators have been trying to explore what the real issues were, said Dan Russell, president of the Kaiser Mead union local who has attended the talks. “They sort of agreed to certain things,” including setting the little issues aside, he said.

But the union says a setback occurred in early April, when the company’s latest offer, 57 pages long, looked to the union to be a step backward from tentative agreements achieved in previous months.

Still, union chief negotiator David Foster said the meetings with Milchovich have been “cordial and professional … They have not been marred by emotion or disruption.”

This labor dispute differs from its predecessors.

Where past battles occurred on the picket lines and at the bargaining tables, this one has moved far from the five plants involved.

Almost since the beginning, Kaiser Steelworkers have traveled the country to contact Kaiser’s customers, power providers and shareholders, hoping that the contact would pressure the company to reach a settlement with the union.

For more than a year, a group of Steelworkers has camped outside a posh condo building in Houston, trying to draw attention to one of Kaiser’s most influential shareholders, Charles Hurwitz. The Texas multimillionaire’s company, Maxxam Inc., owns 63 percent of Kaiser, and the Steelworkers claim he is influencing the labor dispute.

Trentwood Steelworker John Goodman knows the Houston stakeout well. He’s handed out anti-Hurwitz fliers to his neighbors.

One February morning, Goodman and several fellow Steelworkers stuffed their jackets with the glossy leaflets and bought tickets to the Sam Houston Race Park where Hurwitz was awarding the Maxxam Gold Cup.

Just before the prize was awarded, they quickly handed leaflets to racetrack patrons.

The Steelworkers have also joined forces with environmentalists in drawing attention to Hurwitz’s business practices in the northern California redwood forests he owns.

Now the union is asking locked-out Steelworkers to intensify the pressure on the company and its customers.

“We need to think about the next level of heat we can bring on this company,” Leo Gerard, the USWA International’s secretary-treasurer said when he visited Steelworkers in Spokane recently.

Stepping up public pressure is a familiar tactic for Steelworkers, whether organizing boycotts of a company’s customers, encouraging politicians to legislate against a business or even contacting shareholders at home.

“This union may be better at winning these campaigns than any other union in the world right now,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor expert at Cornell University. She has studied the Steelworkers’ labor dispute at the Ravenswood aluminum plant in West Virginia and has seen up close what the union can do in battle.

That battle, which was with private owners who had purchased the plant from Kaiser, lasted 20 months. It also had a corporate campaign as well as an NLRB decision to support union charges of unfair labor practices. The Steelworkers’ victory came when the owners sold the company, and the new owner agreed to a contract with back pay.

“What happens at the table is irrelevant,” she said. “It’s what happens outside the bargaining process in terms of the union’s power and the company’s power.”

In the current dispute, the union has claimed victory in causing six of Kaiser’s customers to stop doing business with the company.

Kaiser has responded that many of the companies, including Pepsi Bottling Co. and Daws Manufacturing, had expiring contracts, while others were buying products Kaiser is phasing out.

“We were not even a supplier to Anheuser Busch at the time the union claimed the company had dropped us,” said Susan Ashe, spokeswoman for Kaiser.

The Steelworkers have also targeted Boeing Co., a big buyer of heat-treated metal from the Trentwood plant. The union members’ campaign has focused on claims of poor quality in Kaiser metal made by replacement workers.

Kaiser’s metal “is of the highest standard,” Ashe said. During the dispute, Boeing has audited Kaiser’s plants several times and been satisfied with the results, Ashe said.

The company says these campaigns have no place in the labor dispute.

“They would like, I’m sure, for people to believe that they had the answers to how they could bring the company to its knees,” said Jeremy Sherman, attorney and chief negotiator for Kaiser in a recent interview. “They’ve been wrong.”

A few Steelworkers said they fear the campaigns and the recent NLRB decision to make Kaiser liable for back pay if the company is guilty of unfair labor practices will severely damage the company.

“They don’t realize that if they succeed, the plants will close,” said Steve Thorne, a Steelworker at the Mead plant who for family reasons crossed the picket line when the labor dispute began. He had to leave his job at Mead when the strike became a lockout in January 1999.

Others, though, say the campaign is a necessary tactic to pressure the company enough to get an acceptable contract.

This sidebar appeared with the story:

KAISER TALKS

Key points

The most recent offer and key issues (which could have changed, depending on the latest negotiations between Kaiser and the Steelworkers):

A base wage increase of $3.80 an hour on a six-year contract expiring in 2006. The union claims this would not put its Kaiser members on par with the Steelworkers at competing plants.

The company wants to eliminate “antiquated work rules,” so workers are able to perform different tasks according to the demand.

Kaiser’s offer would keep the traditional seniority structure for Steelworkers but require certain critical jobs, specifically at Trentwood, to be screened with job-related tests. Some Steelworkers say this could allow the company to put less experienced or less senior workers in the more prized jobs.

Kaiser would like to keep a cap for retiree health-care benefits but has said it could offer options for Steelworkers to avoid the existing contractual agreement.

The company has criticized the union for not taking its offers to the membership for a vote. The union responds that its members will vote on a contract as soon as the negotiators see an acceptable offer.

The union says its key issues are job security and retirement security.

The company wants to change work rules and eliminate about 700 jobs to be more efficient and productive.