Bucknum stayed awake until the early morning hours, sitting at a computer in his home, trying to figure out the legal complexities of pensions. He never did get a clear picture of where his union members stood. The IBU asked Koch Industries if it would participate in a plan to shore up the pension, as all other employers who worked with the IBU had agreed to do. Koch said it would participate only if employees also paid into the pension relief fund out of their paychecks, a hard line position no other company took, Bucknum said.
It had been nearly a year and a half since the contract negotiations began. The workers had no new contract. They were afraid of being replaced. They appeared to be making no headway. And now they feared losing their pension. The Atlanta negotiating team contacted Hammond and Bucknum, and informed them that they had found a time to meet.
* * *
This is what the IBU would get.
They could keep their health care, as Barnard had agreed to. But they would pay 25 percent of the premium costs, not 20 percent. Beyond making the plan more expensive, this also exposed the workers to more risk. If the price of health insurance rose sharply during the life of the contract, the employees were on the hook to pay 25 percent of the premiums, no matter the cost. The IBU would accept Koch’s new attendance policy, unaltered. If a worker had an absence rate of more than 1.9 percent of their total work time, they could face discipline and termination.
There would be no changes to the LMS system. Any notion of transforming the system was discarded by the IBU negotiators as they fought to protect the health care and pension plans. Pay increases would be minimal. The IBU would get a 2 percent raise the first year, a 1 percent raise the second year, 2 percent the following year, and 1 percent the next. The pay raises were the equivalent of treading water. The employees would remain in the IBU pension plan, but they would pay out of pocket to rehabilitate it.
Another clause limited the IBU’s ability to honor picket lines—a crucial provision that was increasingly common in labor contracts around the country. This provision broke the solidarity between unions, making it a fireable offense to refuse to cross each other’s picket lines. The strike at Koch’s Pine Bend refinery in 1972 lasted as long as the Teamsters refused to cross the OCAW’s picket line. Now unions couldn’t honor a picket line beginning from day one without being terminated.
This was the contract that Koch offered in the winter of 2011. Hammond tried to push back. Hammond remembered the Koch team telling him: “We gave you last, best, and final. What don’t you understand about those words? That’s your last offer, the best you’re going to get out of us. If you turn it down, it’s going to get worse.”
The IBU scheduled a new vote on the contract.
* * *
David Franzen entered the union hall that night ready to encourage his coworkers to go on strike. He thought the company was bluffing and that it wouldn’t dare to lock out the workers or replace them. Even if it came to that, he seemed willing to take the risk. But before Franzen could take the stage and address his coworkers, Gary Bucknum stopped him.
“I had to get him off to the side,” Bucknum said. Bucknum told Franzen: “I recommend that you take it. Because it’s all downhill from here.”
When Steve Hammond took the stage to address his fellow union members, he said essentially the same thing. Hammond had a defeated air about him. He became a union official buoyed by hope, determined to make a change. In December of 2011, the best he could achieve was an unhappy compromise and partial surrender. He told the IBU members to vote in favor of the contract because they had no better options.
There was rage among the members. They had fought for months. They attended rallies. They hadn’t had a pay raise in a year and a half as the bargaining dragged on. Most poisonous of all was the feeling of dashed expectations. The union was supposed to make life better for its members, and the union had failed. The members had voted down the previous contract, unanimously, and now they seemed to have nothing to show for it.
Alan Cote, the IBU president from Seattle, stood in front of the crowd and explained to them the hard realities of bargaining against Koch. People didn’t want to hear it. “One guy stands up and challenges the president of the union, like, ‘What the hell do you know? You’re just a cook from a towboat, and you ain’t shit to me!’ ” Bucknum recalled. The badgering continued. For all their work, Hammond, Franzen, and Bucknum were rewarded with the contempt of their peers.
But even this contempt could not be translated into concrete action. The notion of striking was inconceivable. There were mortgages to pay. Health insurance to keep. Credit card bills. Tuition checks. The members of the IBU had no choice but to stay on the job. They voted to accept the contract.
* * *
Gary Bucknum decided not to run for reelection. The sleepless nights, the working weekends, and the disappointment were too much. Hammond, however, did run for reelection, and won. He had been whipped at the bargaining table, and he knew it. The sense of hope that led him to become a union leader now became a sense of resignation. He became a man who was playing a defensive game and who was quick to admit that he was losing it.
But there was evidence that the IBU’s struggle was not for nothing. Hammond and his team did win victories for their members, even if those victories seemed small. Ron Teninty, the University of Oregon professor, translated into a spreadsheet all the available IBU contracts for Georgia-Pacific’s Front Avenue and Rivergate warehouses between 1975 and 2016. (Some contracts during the 1980s and 1990s were missing and not included in the analysis.) Teninty found that the IBU had won modest gains for the warehouse workers between 2010 and 2016. He included wages, health insurance, and pension benefits into an estimate of warehouse worker earnings, and found that their total hourly compensation rose from $25.37 an hour in 2010 to $34.50 in 2016.
When adjusted for inflation, the workers’ hourly pay rose, but only by 8 percent over six years, or roughly 1.3 percent a year. In later years, a larger share of those pay gains went into the cost of maintaining health insurance. It hardly felt like spending money in the workers’ pockets. Looked at from a longer time frame, their compensation had only risen 9.5 percent since 2000—a gain of just 1.7 percent a year, on average. These gains were marginal, to be sure, but many nonunion workers suffered worse.
Still, the warehouse workers were losing ground over the long run, and they knew it. When adjusted for inflation, the workers were earning 21.5 percent less in 2016 than they’d earned in the contract that expired in 1981. For employees like David Franzen, this wasn’t an abstract concept. He worked at the warehouse in the eighties. Thirty years and countless hours of labor later, he was given a significant pay cut for the effort.
When the negotiations were finished, Franzen went back to driving a forklift. During the year and a half of negotiations, Franzen said he began to be cited for violating the LMS rules. He’d always ranked high in posted delivery times, but now he began to get dinged for smaller infractions, such as being outside his work area at inappropriate times. He argued against these citations and claimed they were inaccurate. But his temper eventually boiled over. He cornered a manager one day and berated him for what Franzen perceived to be unfair treatment of fellow employees. Later, Franzen saw this manager at a bar and invitations were exchanged to go outside. No one went outside and no fists were swung, but the damage was done.