Kaiser will say anything.

Kaiser Aluminum, controlled by the notorious corporate raider
Charles Hurwitz, locked out its unionized workforce in January 1999*. In a recent
ad, they claim that they're trying to "support family wage jobs and retiree
benefits." If that were true, they wouldn't have locked out their own employees.


Meet someone who's given his best years to
Kaiser Aluminum. Now they want
to 'contract out' his job to someone else.

    "My name is Randy Bronkhorst. I started working at Kaiser Aluminum - the Mead Plant - in September 1976. I've been there over twenty-years. I spent most of that time in the Carbon Bake area. Because of my work at Kaiser, I had to have three surgeries, two on my left wrist and one on my right.

    After the surgeries, they wouldn't allow me to work in Carbon Bake any longer, so I transferred into the yard crew. It was my union contract that allowed me to transfer. I had alot of seniority, but when I went to the yard crew, I went to almost the lowest pay in the plant.

    Now Kaiser wants to contract out my job. I read a Kaiser ad recently that said Steelworkers would get $70,000 to cut grass or shovel snow. Well, that's just not true. There's no person in the yard crew that they can point to that would produce a W-2 that would show they made $70,000.

    When I was on the yard crew I was straight days, with weekends off, no holiday overtime at job class four - which is almost the lowest job class in the plant. If I worked the whole year I would have made $26,700, or somewhere close to that.

    I have to go six more years to retirement. My father was a Steelworker there for 25 years and then went into management for another 10 years - he's since passed away. My older brother is a superintendent down there who just recently retired once the strike started. I have a younger brother who's in maintenance. I have four cousins there, and two uncles that work there, and numerous people that are my neighbors and friends.

    These are people I've spent more time with than I have with my wife and my family. When I think about them saying that Steelworkers would make $70,000 to cut grass or shovel snow when I know what kind of lifestyle I'm living - I just can't believe it. My immediate reaction when I picked up that newspaper and saw that Kaiser ad was, 'well they're lying again.' And that's all I focus on now, is it's all just lies.

    We don't call it wealth on my end - we just call it survival. But up where they're at, those people have made millions. Now they want to eliminate my job from the yard crew. When I saw that Kaiser ad, I couldn't even finish reading the last paragraph."

Kaiser Aluminum is hurting some of
Washington's hardest-working families.

End the lockout now.