Long Kaiser dispute ends, but hundreds of steelworkers lose jobs

By Drew DeSilver
Seattle Times business reporter
One of the longest and most acrimonious labor disputes in recent U.S. history ended yesterday, when a federal arbitrator dotted the final I's on a five-year contract between Kaiser Aluminum and the United Steelworkers union.
But only about 1,800 of the nearly 2,900 workers who went on strike in September 1998 will be coming back to work anytime soon.

As part of the deal resolving the two-year work stoppage, up to 540 jobs - including 39 at Kaiser's smelter in Tacoma - will be eliminated.

An additional 148 jobs were cut earlier this year at Kaiser's rolling mill in Trentwood, near Spokane, and 356 people - including 226 in Tacoma - were laid off this summer because of rising energy prices.

Those who do return will get an immediate raise of $1.18 an hour, with an additional $2.30 or so phased in between now and October 2004. Before the strike, the average wage at the five Kaiser plants affected by the dispute was about $14.59 an hour, union spokesman Jon Youngdahl said.


New-contract provisions
Reduction of between 450 and 540 jobs across the five affected plants, including 39 positions at Tacoma smelter.

Immediate wage boost of $1.18 per hour, plus $2.24-$2.30/hour increase phased in over four years.

Increased flexibility in using outside contractors.

30 percent increase in pension benefits.

Elimination of cap on company contributions for retirees' health care.




Both Kaiser and the union said they basically got what they wanted in the new contract.

Kaiser spokesman Scott Lamb said the company's plants will be more efficient, with smaller payrolls and greater use of outsourced labor for such tasks as maintenance and groundskeeping. "We didn't want this dispute in the first place," Lamb said. "But having found ourselves in this situation, we wanted to achieve our original objective, which was to improve the productivity of these plants, and we think this agreement does that."

Youngdahl said union members - those who still have jobs - will get better pay and pension benefits, while retirees will get health-insurance coverage for a longer period of time.

Just as important, he said, the union demonstrated it would hold firm throughout the long dispute. "We were successful in breaking the company's desire to break the union," he said.

After 3-1/2 months on strike, workers offered to return to work in January 1999. Kaiser refused, saying it wanted to pressure the union into agreeing to more of its proposals.

Kaiser - a distant second among U.S. aluminum producers to industry giant Alcoa - initially wanted to eliminate 400 jobs and contract out an additional 150. Later, it raised the number of proposed cuts to 700.

The lockout was the nation's longest and largest work stoppage in 1999, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), with 750,000 person-days of work lost. It is likely to come close to the top of the list for 2000 as well.

But the Kaiser dispute has been conspicuous by its very rarity. Despite such recent examples as last winter's engineering workers' strike at Boeing and this summer's telephone workers' strike at Verizon, major work stoppages have become exceedingly uncommon.

Last year, according to the BLS, there were only 17 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, compared with 51 in 1989 and 235 in 1979. Most of those disputes lasted two weeks or less. Robin Gerber, a former union lobbyist who is now a senior fellow at the University of Maryland's Burns Academy of Leadership, said those numbers reflect both the relative decline of heavy industry in the U.S. economy and the corresponding weakening of industrial unions.

"These are the jobs that are leaving the country, or have already left the country," she said. "It's like striking against a dying industry."

In the midst of the dispute, an explosion in July 1999 idled Kaiser's alumina refinery in Gramercy, La. Soaring energy prices this summer led the company to shut down the smelters at its Tacoma plant and curtail smelting operations at its Mead facility near Spokane.

The two sides gradually reached agreement on several of the disputed points - including how many jobs would be eliminated and where the cuts would come - and sent the remaining issues to binding arbitration last month.

Callback letters should start going out to workers over the next several days, Lamb said; seniority will be the biggest factor in deciding who gets called back. The company expects recalled workers to be back on the job within 35 days.

At the Tacoma plant, only about 45 of 300-plus workers who originally went on strike, will return by next month. The rest will await Kaiser's decision to restart the "pot lines," where aluminum metal is smelted out of ore.

In the arbitration, the Steelworkers sought a $4 million loan from Kaiser to replenish a benefits fund for the 356 laid-off smelter workers at Tacoma and Mead. But the arbitrator sided with the company; as a result, union negotiator Jim Woodward said, benefits will only be available for workers with 10 years or more experience with the company.

Woodward said the union will seek retraining money from the state for workers with less experience, and will again ask the Legislature for extended unemployment benefits. Lawmakers this year turned down a similar proposal.

The union is pursuing a $337 million back-pay claim against Kaiser for what it alleges was an illegal lockout.