Kaiser Arbitrator to Deliver Decision Monday

NWCN

September 17, 2000, 08:00 AM, PST

Nearly two years after the United Steelworkers of America walked out in a labor dispute with Kaiser Aluminum Corp., picket lines are coming down in anticipation of an arbitrated contract settlement.

Seymour Strongin, a Washington, D.C.-based labor expert, on Monday will release a new labor agreement that will send about 2,900 Steelworkers back to jobs in five Kaiser plants in three states.

Strongin headed a five-member arbitration panel that ruled for the company or the union on about a dozen sticking points, including wages, benefits and job restructuring.

"The arbitrator will notify both Kaiser and us, and whichever thinks they won will issue the first press release," Steelworkers official John Duray said Friday from the union's headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pa.

In anticipation, picket lines that have been up outside the company's plants since union employees walked out Sept. 30, 1998, are being dismantled this weekend, said Dave Carlson, vice president of the union's Local 330, representing workers at the company's Trentwood rolling mill near here.

Pickets that continue outside Kaiser plants until union workers return will hold signs thanking supporters, Carlson said.

Once the master contract is unveiled, union members will return to work within 35 days, Kaiser spokesman Scott Lamb said from the company's headquarters in Houston.

With one to two weeks of offsite training required, it will be mid-October before the union employees return to the plants, Carlson said.

Lamb declined to comment on company plans to give layoff notices to thousands of replacement workers hired after the union was locked out in January 1999.

The dispute covers employees of the Mead and Trentwood plants near Spokane; a plant in Tacoma, Wash.; and plants in Gramercy, La.; and Newark, Ohio.

The company also faces a trial in November on National Labor Relations Board charges that its lockout was illegal.

An administrative law judge will hear the NLRB complaint in a trial beginning Nov. 13 in Oakland, Calif. Houston-based Kaiser could be on the hook for millions of dollars of back pay.

While pickets stood round-the-clock outside plant gates, the Steelworkers conducted a broad "corporate campaign" against Kaiser and its parent, Maxxam Corp. of Houston, in board rooms across the country.

The campaign to persuade Kaiser customers to boycott the company's product during the labor dispute ended when union members ratified the arbitration process in July.