Rosie Miller: Staying busy, but time for family
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
When Rosie Miller first walked into the employment office of the Kaiser Aluminum plant, she was just trying to meet the job-hunting requirements to collect unemployment.
"The guy who was doing the hiring was from my hometown in Iowa," recalled Miller.
When the Kaiser Aluminum strike ended, Bonney Lake's Rosie Miller was not called back to work. Now she makes picture frames from recycled wood. Paul Joseph Brown / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Her Marshalltown, Iowa, connection got her the job.
That was 1974, and Miller was one of the first women to work at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Tacoma. Nearly 28 years later, Miller was there as the plant closed.
Today, she and hundreds of other former Kaiser employees are riding out the sliding economy on unemployment and residual pay provided through their Steelworkers union contracts.
"I really never was a big spender, as far as going to the mall every weekend," Miller said. "Once in a while, I splurge and go to Reno."
Miller, 56, was a welder in the plant's maintenance division and for most of that time, the aluminum company and the other people who worked there were her life: Miller's first husband worked at the plant on Tacoma's Tideflats, as did her second husband, Ben, who died from bladder cancer in 1997.
On Sept. 30, 1998, nearly 3,000 Kaiser Aluminum workers went on strike after the company offered a new contract that included 400 job cuts at plants in three states. The strike dragged on for a grueling two years.
"For the first three or four months," Miller said, "we were really hurting."
The strike ended in September 2000, and Miller was offered a job in the production plant, which would have given her less pay than the $15 an hour she had been making as a maintenance worker.
Unable to find out how the change in pay would affect her retirement benefits, Miller decided to wait until there was an opening in her old department.
But before she was called back to work, Kaiser shut down its Tacoma plant, leaving just a skeleton crew to prepare machines for storage.
Miller still meets former co-workers for breakfast occasionally, e-mails a few others, talks to some on the phone.
"I miss the people more than anything," Miller said.
After her husband died in 1997, Miller was awarded death benefits. That money, along with supplemental unemployment benefits written into her union contract, about 70 percent of her pre-strike pay, has allowed Miller to maintain her lifestyle -- as long as her expenses are modest.
Last year, Miller took a minimum-wage job at the Puyallup Fair, washing dishes and running errands, to pay for the property taxes on the log cabin-style home she shares in rural Pierce County with her two dogs, Bear and Little Bear, and two cats, Alice and Pita.
"I did the dishes until I didn't have any fingers left," Miller said.
These days, she has time for regular visits with her eight grandchildren and her new hobby, framing pictures.
"I have lots of projects going on," she said, "so I keep busy."
But Miller said she knows plenty of others still struggling financially. Her ex-husband, for one, had to move in with their daughter.
"He can't afford to live in Tacoma," she said.
