The Dodger was alarmed. “All the sudden, I’m thinking, Are they going to pull out of the health trust completely and shove this up our ass?” he said.
The IBU team reached out to Jackie Steele, a labor relations expert at Georgia-Pacific who was their new negotiating partner. Steele sent a message: Georgia-Pacific might be able to let the workers keep their pension and health care, or it might be able to give them a raise. But it seemed impossible that the company could do both.
Dodge and Hammond conveyed this message to the rank-and-file union members. The union members weren’t having it. They wanted to keep their benefits, and they needed to get a raise on top of it. The raises hadn’t been keeping up with the cost of living for years. “The guys want more, more, more, more,” Dodge said in exasperation. “They don’t know what you’ve got to go through!”
The IBU members were not inclined to listen to Hammond and Dodge. In fact, they were not inclined to the listen to the union at all. This became painfully clear in early 2016, a presidential election year. The IBU and the Longshoremen unions endorsed the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. When Sanders lost his primary battle, unions across the country asked their members to switch their support to what they considered the next best thing: the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Many IBU warehouse workers, for the first time that anybody could remember, said they planned to vote against the wishes of union leadership. They wanted to vote for a Republican. And their grievances were about to be further enflamed.
* * *
Once again, the Dodger and the Hammer arrived at the Red Lion hotel to negotiate with Koch’s team. The IBU members took their assumed seats in the familiar conference room with the view of the river, just next door to the lavishly catered room where Koch’s team of negotiators sat staring at their laptops. It was like watching the same movie for the third time. At least this time around, the process was mercifully short.
On the second day, they discussed the money. Dodge said that the IBU workers wanted to keep their IBU health care and their IBU pension. They also wanted annual raises to compensate them for roughly six years of stagnant pay.
“I said, ‘Is there any chance on that, and what do you think?’ ” Dodge recalled. “Steele says: ‘Yeah, we may be able to work something out.’ ”
Steele left the room. He returned with bad news. The company wasn’t going for it. If the IBU wanted to keep its pension and health care, then Georgia-Pacific would not offer them annual raises. The company would offer an annual bonus payment instead.
Bonuses were anathema to workers because a bonus didn’t compound in value every year the same way that a wage hike did. Raises had been a ladder for middle-class prosperity for decades. But since the economic crash of 2008, US employers started to abandon annual wage increases. Even as recently as 1991, bonuses and temporary awards accounted for only 3.1 percent of all compensation paid by US companies. Annual wage hikes, by contrast, accounted for 5 percent of all compensation that year. This ratio had flipped by 2017, when bonuses accounted for 12.7 percent of compensation spending, and raises accounted for just 2.9 percent.
The Dodger said he wasn’t having it. If he didn’t walk out of the Red Lion with a contract that promised annual raises, then his union members would vote down the contract.
“Work with me, Jackie!” Dodge recalled saying.
By the end of that day, the Dodger and the Hammer had relented. They agreed to the 2 percent raises for two of the years and $1,000 annual bonuses for the other two years of the contract. “The worst contracts I’ve ever negotiated—all of my G-P contracts,” Dodge said bitterly. “There’s no leverage. There’s no fucking leverage.”
In all, the contract negotiation took less than a week of bargaining. Dodge told Jackie Steele that if Georgia-Pacific wanted the contract passed, then they should help him hold the vote as soon as possible. The company agreed to release its employees from work hours early so they could drive down to the union hall for the vote. “The only way I’m gonna pass this piece of shit is to have them all here,” Dodge said.
* * *
The IBU members filed into the big Longshoremen’s union hall, just downstairs from Hammond and Dodge’s office. Ballot boxes had also been prepared for the day’s vote. The workers gathered around a stage at the far end of the big room, a slightly elevated platform with an American flag and a podium that was emblazoned with the Longshoremen’s crest.
Steve Hammond looked out over the crowd of workers, who were already grumbling. As he looked around the room, he saw symbols that reflected the power of organized labor. There was the big mural showing the labor strife and the solidarity of the old days. On another wall hung the banner of the Jack London poem “The Scab.” And next to that was a big glass display case full of old handheld cargo hooks. The place looked like a museum of union power. The totems, the banners, the mural. All of it had a tainted, aging quality. Like paper that was yellowing.
Word had spread through the crowd that they would not get annual raises. It was inconceivable, to many members, how something like this could have happened. Why were they paying union dues, if the contracts just seemed to get worse? Why were they constantly told that their warehouse performed far better than most warehouses in the Georgia-Pacific system, yet none of the improvements translated into a significant pay raise?
Why hadn’t Hammond bargained harder? Why hadn’t Dodge bargained harder? Why couldn’t they ever seem to win?
“Guys were pissed off. Guys in the warehouse were screaming bloody murder. And: ‘No way!’ ” Dodge said. “They got loud and vocal.”
Steve Hammond took the stage. And, for the first time that anybody could ever recall, he completely lost his shit.
Hammond upbraided the gathered union members. He scolded them. He insulted them. He told them, in so many words, that they had expected him and Dodge to do exactly the one thing that labor negotiators could not do: win a deal with their silver tongues.
Union power came down to bargaining leverage, and the IBU had no leverage. The warehouse employees couldn’t afford to strike, and everybody knew it, including Koch Industries.
David Franzen listened to the speech, slightly awed to see Hammond lose his temper. “He’s saying, ‘This is it guys. This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway,’ ” Franzen recalled. “ ‘If you didn’t do it last time, what makes you think you’re going to do it this time? None of you guys did anything about it. We told you to get ready in four years, and you didn’t get ready.’ ”
Then Hammond made the comment that everyone remembered for years: “You guys are nothing but a bunch of Trump lovers. Go ahead—vote for him,” Franzen recalled Hammond saying.
Hammond was finished, and he got off the stage. Dodge didn’t quite know what to think. Hammond had actually turned into the Hammer, but against his own union members. “He basically told them off and told them: ‘Vote no on the fucking thing. Dodger and I will sit back down and talk some fucking more with them.’ ”
The union members cast their vote in an election that felt like a foregone conclusion. The contract passed with over 65 percent of the vote. And that’s how Steve Hammond retired from the IBU.