REMEMBERING DECATUR

Decatur police pepper gas striking workers protesting the first anniversary of the Staley lockout, June 25, 1994.

The following ilustrates why radical unionism in the form of anarchosyndicalism is the only logical course for workers interested in freeing themselves of the shackles imposed on them by Capital. Mainstream union leadership works to ensure that workers stay on the job, and works out deals with the bosses. It also illustrates how the workers and the owners have NOTHING in common! Trade unionism divides, and thus weakens, labor, by creating the illusion that workers don't have common class interests. Any emphasis in this article is added by me.

All Quiet on the Midwestern Front

by David Moberg, In These Times, January 22, 1996 It was a David and Goliath battle, but unlike the biblical tale, this time the giant won. For more than three years, the 760 workers at the Decatur, Ill., factory of the A.E. Staley Co. had flung every rock they could at their employer, who had locked them out of their jobs since June 1993 over a contract dispute. During the fight, the Staley workers had won administration from trade unionists across the country and beyond for their tenacity and imagination.

Yet in the end, a majority of workers tired of the struggle, succumbed to financial pressures or despaired of inflicting serious wounds on Staley and its giant multinational owner, British-based Tate & Lyle. On December 22, a few days after ousting the president and several of his allies in favor of a rival group that simply wanted to end the conflict, 56% of the local union members voted to accept a company contract proposal that both union factions described as a defeat.

The decision brought to an end the last of three labor battles that have wracked the small city of Decatur for four years. A strike at Bridgestone/Firestone was broken last May, and a walkout at Caterpillar ended in early December. The Staley workers had started on a high note of remarkable rank-and-file activity and solidarity but ended in a painful morass of division and recriminations.

"The war of attrition began to take its toll," reflects ousted president David Watts. "The solidarity that was once the best in the country soon became divided. It was a wholesale win for the company." Watts harshly criticized the leaders of the United Paperworkers International Union for failing to adequately support the local.

Workers at the long-established Staley factory, which makes corn syrup, had cooperated closely with management during the 1980s to imporove operations. Then in 1991 management turned on the workers, demanding new 12-hour shifts rotating between days and nights, further drastic job cuts, an unrestricted company right to subcontract work and the elimination of many seniority rights and grievance protections.

Rather than strike and face permanent replacement by strikebreakers, the Staley local hired consultant Ray Rogers to develop a corporate campaign. Rogers inspired workers, brought public attention, raised money, helped mobilize support groups and rallies, and attacked the ties of local banks to Staley, forcing the resignation of two directors. But he also devoted much effort to a futile quest to embroil State Farm Insurance Co. in the conflict, despite its remote financial ties to Staley. Though Rogers began organizing transnational solidarity, he also provoked resentment by trampling on international union protocol.

With advice from Jerry Tucker, who led the UAW New Directions movement, the local also initiated an "inside campaign." Union members did only what company rules required while demonstrating solidarity inside the plant. The inside campaign drastically cut production, and Staley retaliated by locking out workers.

[Note: The "inside campaign" tactic they used is called "work to task." It is an old and effective tactic invented by the anarchosyndicalist Wobblies, or IWW (Industrial Workers of the World)]

Though the local organized mass demonstrations and fought Staley on other fronts, from backing pro-labor local politicians to blocking state tax breaks for the company, it primarily focused on getting customers to drop their contracts with Staley. They succeeded with Miller Brewing Co., and had mounted a major campaign against PepsiCo, Staley's largest customer. A Decatur delegation to the AFL-CIO winter executive council meeting last February embarrassed national labor leaders into taking the Decatur struggles seriously, and the new AFL-CIO leadership pledged in October to put more muscle behind the Pepsi campaign.

Though some critics say the local was unrealistically rigid in its bargaining, Tucker insists that leaders of the local were flexible on many points despite their commitment to principles. Yet there was a growing movement within the local, led by former bargaining chairman James Shinall, to end the lockout on any terms. Backers of ousted president Watts insist that Shinall had support from regional representatives of the Paperworkers, who had much earlier written off the struggle as lost and had played no role in the local union's remarkable public campaigns. Shinall's group forced a vote on a company offer last summer, but a narrow majority rejected that proposal.

Then, last fall, Paperworkers Vice President Glenn Goss took over negotiations. In early December union bargainers accepted the company's last offer as the framework for discussion. They won minor improvements on several points but no change in the fundamental corporate demands, such as unrestricted subcontracting and the denial of amnesty to seven discharged workers. The company offered returning workers only 349 jobs, a number likely to be cut within a few years to about 210, even though at least another 150 jobs will be filled by subcontractor employees. For many workers who had given up, the company's modest severance pay offer was critical in buying their vote.

On December 12, Shinall defeated Watts. The next day the company delivered its new contract offer, which Watts had kept quiet to avoid influencing the election. The union executive board--with the Watts faction still in office--considered the new proposal too similar ot an offer spurned last summer and rejected it unanimously. The board also voted 6-2 against taking it to the members. The Paperworkers international, however, ordered a vote. The international didn't endorse the contract, which includes provisions such as 12-hour shifts that violate union policy, but some officials spoke favorably about the deal, reinforcing Staley's argument that this was the best contract workers would ever get.

Shortly after members ratified the contract on December 22, Shinall announced that he would take the severance package, resign from his new union office and continue his job at a nonunion trucking firm. Several other union officers (including Watts) and key rank-and-file militants are also taking the severance pay rather than return to work under the contract. Staley is demanding that all workers who return or accept the severance package drop all past grievances and forgo any future legal actions or protests against the company.

Could the Staley workers have won? "This was winnable from day one," asserts Mike Griffin, one of the most militant leaders of the local's Campaign for Justice. "It could have been won in the first year if the international and the AFL-CIO had done their jobs." Dick Blin, editor of The Paperworker, the international union newspaper, argues, "We had their customers on the run. Pepsi was close to pulling the plug [on its Staley contract] last spring." Tucker believes Pepsi could have been forced to drop its contract if the union had more aggressively mobilized civil rights groups and other labor allies.

But other observers were less hopeful. Even Joseph Uehlein, an official in the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department and an advocate of early, aggressive, "strategic action" campaigns, concludes: "I didn't see a path to greater victory. I think the union needed to settle, and the families needed to get back to work or get their buyouts."

Tate & Lyle always had an edge in the fight. It's a $5 billion company with holdings in many countries. Though Staley accounts for about 40 percent of the firm's profits, the locked-out workers hardly dented company earnings. Some other Staley plants were organized in other unions, but they had capitulated earlier to company demands and operated throughout the lockout under terms much like those the company had obtained in Decatur. Until the Decatur conflict, there had been little coordination among Staley unions. Clearly, persuading companies like Pepsi to end their contracts represented one of the local's few chances to hurt Staley's pocketbook.

"The business of collective bargaining is about power," says Mark Brooks, the Paperworker's director of special projects. "There's always more we can do to organize workers' power, but we face very powerful enemies. I know we gave it our complete effort, and in the end forced the company to begin moving at the bargaining table for the first time in three years. We'll never know if it might have been possible to do more."

Yet the Decatur militants argue that the Paperworkers were holding back, never putting the maximum effort behind their struggle. Disgruntled workers charge that some leaders even undermined the local's efforts. "The development of the surrender crowd was not organic," argues Tucker. "It began with the explicit help of the international staff." Shinall says the international had been "respectful" to him in conversation every since the merger of the Staley local's old union--the Allied Industrial Workers---into the Paperworkers two years ago. Shinall once thought the corporate campaign would work but lost hope after six months. "When you're in a battle like this, you never get enough help."

Division within the local union encouraged both Staley and Pepsi to hold out, which fueled both workers' despair and pressure for Paperworkers officers to end the dispute. "I have very clear indications that [the international leaders] were at a point where they wanted this over," says Allain "Dike" Ferris, the bargaining committee chairman.

At the AFL-CIO convention, newly elected President John Sweeney pledged to put the federation behind the Staley workers, but the task force he appointed had little time to work. It helped organize some leafleting support, planned a pop-bottle mail-in protest to Pepsi and set up a pair of private meetings, one between Sweeney and Tate & Lyle CEO Sir Neil Shaw, and another between AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka and a Pepsi director.

In the end thre were tensions among the different levels of union operations. The Paperworkers feared legal complications might arise out of a big protest planned at Pepsi headquarters and instead favored a series of smaller actions. Decatur militants were upset that the AFL-CIO task force worked through international officials they did not trust, but the task force felt obliged to respect the wishes of the top union officials.

The AFL-CIO and internatonal unions need to recognize the value for the labor movement of uniting behind groups of workers, like those at Staley, when they show such spirit. High-level cooperation is key to creating the solidarity Staley workers needed--and did not always get--from other unions. But labor's leaders must also be willing to push the boundaries of unfair laws, such as the restrictions on secondary boycotts and mutual support among workers, risking civil disobedience and legal penalties to challenge both employers and the laws.

Clearly, the new AFL-CIO leadership also needs to develop an organizational structure, both nationally and internationally, that can respond more swiftly and surely in cases like Decatur. (According to Uehlein, Sweeney has appointed a task force to discuss such a move.) Though the Staley workers planned their strategy admirably, they would have benefited from earlier strategic ties with other unions, especially those in their industry.

[Note: Here, the author unintentionally enumerates the benefits of anarchosyndicalism: 1) nonhierarchical, decentralized organizational structure lending swift, sure responses to crises; 2) abandonment of trade unionism in favor of "one big union" would facilitate strategic ties missing in atomized, fragmented trade union organization]

"I'm convinced the labor movement missed a threshold opportunity here to win a struggle that could have been won and also to demonstrate their ability to step past the parochial nature of internal relationships," argues Tucker. If the labor movement wants to be a new voice for American workers, then it is going to have to find a way to turn more of the efforts by determined workers like those at Staley into real victories.