For some, Kaiser was a crucible

Dan Russell, like thousands of others in the Northwest, will not be going back to work in the aluminum industry.

An employee of Kaiser Aluminum for 36 years, Russell had knee-replacement surgery this spring. As a crane operator at the Mead smelter, he sometimes worked 12-hour shifts putting all his weight on his right foot while he worked the brake pedal with left. It took five minutes after he climbed down from the cab at the end of some shifts to get the right leg moving again, he says.

Russell’s hearing is impaired, as well, thanks to years using a jackhammer to blast congealed aluminum and lining material out of the burned-out pots in which alumina, juiced with electricity, became liquid metal.

Barring a miracle, the last aluminum has been poured at Mead. Commercial Development Co. of St. Louis took possession of the 62-year-old plant June 3. Russell and the handful of other workers still in the plant drove out the gates on East Hawthorne for the last time May 28. Chores since the smelter closed for good in December 2000 had included cleaning toilets.

Plans call for converting the Mead property into warehouses or space for light industry. Russell figures the only hope there will be any aluminum-related activity inside centers on a carbon plant capable of producing anodes for other smelters. Kaiser spent $50 million in the 1990s refurbishing that facility. One potential operator dropped out of the bidding for all of Mead.

Kaiser continues to run the rolling mill at Trentwood. The company is hiring, and two of the Mead workers who left in May have already caught on there. Russell gets around now with just the slightest of limps, but he says he will never be mobile enough to navigate Trentwood.

Instead, he will finish out his recovery mandated by the Washington Department of Labor and Industries, which paid for the knee surgery; register for unemployment benefits, and explore retraining options.

In the meantime, Russell presides at Local 329 of the United Steelworkers of America, which represented Mead’s non-salaried work force for decades.

The local hall on East Francis is locked most of the day, with Russell dropping in for perhaps an hour to respond to telephone messages and attend to residual union business.

No dues have been paid at the local since Sept. 30, 1998, when Steelworkers walked out of five Kaiser plants in Washington, Ohio and Louisiana. The strike, later a lockout, was not resolved until September 2000. Just three months later, Kaiser sold the electricity needed to operate Mead. The plant shut down, never to reopen. In February 2002, the company filed bankruptcy. Retirees have lost their health care benefits. Their pensions will be paid by the federal government’s Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp.

Russell says he still deals with local members bitter about the walkout, the settlement, and the fallout from the bankruptcy.

“We’ve been through so much the last five years,” he says.

Russell has been president of Local 329 since 1996. Two years earlier, he says, the local had been put into receivership because its treasury had dwindled to $3,000. The officers — Russell was vice president — were ousted. When new elections were held, Russell says he ran in order to clear his name.

“We did everything by the book,” he says, and the treasury held about $180,000 when the strike began. All the strike and strike defense fund records are stored above the union hall. Someone will have to come get them if, as Russell expects, the local is to be dissolved, or consolidated with Local 338, which represents Trentwood workers. Everything in the office belongs to the Steelworkers union.

Russell says he will not be the one who turns out the lights.

“My loyalty is right here,” he says. “I’m going to go down fighting to maintain the identity of this local.”

Russell says he misses the work at Mead, and the camaraderie. He had hoped the end of the strike/walkout would allow wage and salaried employees at Kaiser to work together again and rebuild what had been one of the world’s largest aluminum companies.

“We never made it,” he says, adding that he would feel worse if Mead was the only shuttered Northwest smelter. Of the 10 that once produced 40 percent of the aluminum made in the United States, only two operate today, and those just barely. Kaiser’s Tacoma smelter has been demolished. Crews are razing another in Troutdale, Ore.

Russell and his wife, Mary, are ready to move on.

“There’s life after Kaiser,” Russell says. “I can retire and take my pension any time I want.

“We’ll be all right.”