Kaiser picket lines finally coming down

TACOMA: Arbitrated settlement will allow Steelworkers to return to their old jobs

News Tribune staff and news services (News Tribune staff writer Stacey Burns and The Associated Press contributed to this report.)



After nearly two years on the picket lines outside Tacoma's Kaiser Aluminum Corp. plant, striking employees Ron Dawson, Neil Palmer and John Wheeler signed the strike log book for the last time Sunday.

And in the coming days, the men and their coworkers will vacate their worn strike area in front of the plant in the 3400 block of Taylor Way. They'll pick up wooden pallets used as firewood on chilly days, tow away their wooden shack and retire the dirty and tattered flag that flapped in the wind for months.

As of today, the established picket lines are coming down in anticipation of an arbitrated contract settlement between Kaiser and the United Steelworkers of America.

"It's almost surreal," Palmer said Sunday morning.

"It's weird it's all over," Dawson added. "This is the last day we're standing out here."

Today, Seymour Strongin, a Washington, D.C.,-based labor expert, will release a labor agreement intended to send about 2,900 Steelworkers back to jobs in five Kaiser plants in three states. Tacoma's plant is among them.

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 last week from the union's headquarters in Pittsburgh.

In anticipation, many Steelworkers spent the weekend dismantling entrenched picket lines that have been up outside the company's plants since union employees walked out Sept. 30, 1998.

The Steelworkers left in a dispute over wages, job security, grievance procedures and benefits.

The company hired replacement workers and continued to operate plants. In January 1999, the union offered to go back to work without a contract.

Kaiser refused, and a lockout has existed since then.

Kaiser has said replacement workers will be laid off but will be considered for vacancies left by Steelworkers who don't return.

The Tacoma aluminum-rod division has up to 50 union jobs available for the most senior Kaiser workers. At full strength, the Tacoma plant employed about 380 people.

Earlier this summer, Kaiser officials said surging electricity prices prompted them to shut down of much of the Tacoma plant's manufacturing operation.

Pickets that continue outside Kaiser plants until union workers return will hold signs thanking supporters, said Dave Carlson, vice president of the union's Local 330, representing workers at the company's Trentwood rolling mill near Spokane.

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 off-site training required, it will be mid-October before the union employees return to the plants, Carlson said.

The locked-out Tacoma workers said they were determined to walk back into the plant with no regrets.

"A lot of us just want to go back just to show them they are not going to break the union," said Wheeler, a Kaiser employee for 35 years.

"Nobody won. This is a victory for unionism. We held our ground here."

In addition to the Tacoma plant, the labor dispute covered employees in the Mead and Trentwood plants near Spokane and plants in Gramercy, La., and Newark, Ohio.

Kaiser 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. 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.