Kaiser Workers Get A Big Welcome Back

Welcome back, neighbors.

You’ve been away for a while and it’s nice to see you back where you should be. You overcame a great deal to be here.

There won’t be any ticker tape parades or presidential medals for what you did, but I think there should be.

Throughout one of the longest successful strikes in history, you managed to keep your spirits up and your families together - sometimes on little more than grit and gall.

Few people thought two years ago that you had the sand to stand up to a billionaire businessman and his underlings who demanded you tighten your belts while they went to the bank to cash their six- and seven-figure paychecks.

It must have come as quite a surprise when they found that not everyone would lick a Nike for a key to the executive washroom.

You stood tall even when your own sheriff treated you like criminals, and your elected county officials sided with a company owned by outside interests.

Even worse was the scorn shone by some of your neighbors, many of whom will benefit from your sacrifices.

Some withheld support, others even tried to steal your jobs while you shivered in the cold outside.

Maybe those neighbors have forgotten they owe their good jobs and higher standards of living to working people like you, who had the courage to walk the line.

Maybe they never heard of the Everett Massacre of 1916, when representatives of striking shingle workers on a docking ferryboat were shot down by hired gun thugs and a vicious town sheriff, for seeking the right to speak on a public street corner.

Maybe they have forgotten the 1914 miners strike of the John D. Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel and Iron, Ludlow mine, when the compromised state militia burned alive 11 women and children hiding in a pit beneath a tent that miners were forced to live in after the company ejected them from company shacks in the dead of winter. The miners were striking for an 8-hour day and official checks of the company’s weigh scales.

Maybe the people who mock your efforts for better working conditions don’t remember the 134 young women, most of them still in their teens, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 because they were locked in their work spaces.

Two years earlier, many of those desperately poor young girls had marched the winter streets of New York, some in clothing so threadbare that bystanders threw them coats, protesting for fire escapes; a 54-hour week, and unlocked doors.

Luckily, the people who stand against you are as rare as business ethics. For every one like them, a hundred others pulled for you and your cause; even if it was just the honk of a horn or a kind thought.

I’m sure you’ll remember barbers who gave free haircuts, restaurants that lowered prices, and merchants like Safeway stores that gave helpful discounts to strikers. The food bank kept many of your families fed while you looked for worked.

For one reason or another, many of my neighbors won’t be going back to work for Kaiser.

Some of you retired, some had jobs that no longer exist, and some found better jobs or moved away in disappointment.

For those going back, it will be tough at first.

The company will be a sore loser; they will have new rules and restrictions that will anger some. Most returnees will discover the true meaning of “downsizing.” Companies call it streamlining operations. What it usually means is demanding more work with no increase in compensation.

Be careful. Don’t get hot-headed. They’ll be looking for any excuse.

Only so much work can be crammed into an 8-hour day before production and safety begins to suffer.

You’ve already proven what you’re made of. Don’t fail yourselves now.

With courage that few gave you credit for, you held out against a management that would rather lose what may be as much as $500 million to break a union than give it to you in wages.

For giving up so much and standing together against the odds, and teaching Charles Hurwitz that Spokane isn’t Texas, I thank you, and I thank you on behalf of my children’s children.

Welcome back, men and women of steel.