The refinery inside that gate had provided the men with everything they had: the income that fed their kids and paid down their mortgages. It made a middle-class life possible for them. And none of the men knew if they would ever get back inside or if their job would ever be open to them again. Bernard Paulson and Charles Koch had made it clear at the negotiating table: Koch Refining planned to break the OCAW. And the union men had to make it clear to Bernard Paulson and Charles Koch: the OCAW could not be broken.
This wasn’t an easy thing to do. None of the OCAW men were happy about using their jobs as a bargaining chip. Joseph Quinn, for example, had a wife and five children. Quinn didn’t see his kids a lot—he missed at least five Christmas mornings in a row because he’d been working at the refinery. His wife, Rita, handed out the presents without him. But through his absence, Quinn gave his kids a life that he had never known. He and Rita owned a tidy home in suburban Minneapolis, near Rosemount. Their kids went to good public schools. They didn’t work long days in the farm fields under the hot summer sun, as Joseph Quinn had done growing up in western Minnesota.
But Quinn didn’t question his union when the OCAW told him to walk off the job. There was a simple idea that motivated his obedience: solidarity. Solidarity encapsulated everything that the union stood for and everything that made the union strong. Quinn hadn’t learned about solidarity growing up. He was raised by a farmer, so he learned about individual accomplishment and the value of hard work. Quinn’s dad taught him that unions were Communist front groups and that unions encouraged laziness. But when he moved to Minneapolis, the only jobs available to Quinn were union jobs. When Quinn raised his right hand and pledged allegiance to the OCAW, he pledged solidarity to his union brothers at the refinery. But the pledge didn’t sink in too deeply; Quinn just wanted the job.
Then Quinn got in trouble for the first time.
One of his jobs at the refinery was to check on the level of crude oil in the big white tanks on the south end of the plant. This was a critical job because the tanks could overflow if their levels weren’t closely monitored. At the end of one shift, Quinn was unable to check on the oil in one tank because men were welding some equipment there. After the men left, he went to check the oil levels, but a fellow worker was urinating near the hatch that Quinn was supposed to check, so Quinn backed off to give him privacy. The end of his shift came, and Quinn still hadn’t checked the level of that oil tank. He told his manager as much, and his manager told him not to worry about it.
“The next thing I knew, that big, beautiful white tank was black, covered completely in oil,” Quinn recalled. The tank had overflowed, and it would not have done so if Quinn had checked the oil levels as he was supposed to.
Quinn was suspended without pay for three days for the transgression. The paycheck that covered his mortgage, that fed his kids, would be about one-third short of what it should be. He couldn’t afford to take a financial hit like that, and he didn’t think it was fair that he should need to. So Quinn filed a union grievance over the punishment. A grievance is a formal complaint that only union members can file. It is a complaint that is handled somewhat like a lawsuit, with the union acting as the employee’s personal legal team. Without a union, there are no formal grievances—an employee can simply complain and he or she is on their own to persuade the boss to take their complaint seriously. With a grievance, the employee has the union on their side.
After Quinn filed his grievance, he was summoned to the refinery offices. He went into a meeting room and found a company lawyer there, who wanted to discuss Quinn’s punishment. But Quinn wasn’t alone. There was a representative of the OCAW sitting at the table next to him. As Quinn and the company lawyer were talking over the issue, the OCAW man kept interrupting. He kept correcting Quinn, kept interjecting new details into the story. Quinn disagreed vehemently with some of those details, even though the details skewed the story to Quinn’s benefit. Quinn even started to argue with the OCAW man as the company lawyer sat there and watched. Finally, the company lawyer called an end to the meeting, seemingly in exasperation. It was hard to get a straight answer about anything with the pushy OCAW man sitting right there.
A few days after that meeting, Quinn was called to the front office once again. This time it was only his manager there. His manager pointed to the desk, where there was a check made out to Quinn in the amount of the wages he had lost from the three days he was suspended. “He told me, ‘Don’t take this as a victory.’ But there was the victory right there on his desk!” Quinn recalled. Quinn happily took that check and cashed it.
The episode taught Quinn an important lesson. The OCAW negotiator had made the grievance process hellish for the company lawyer and had chosen to fight for just three days’ wages for just one guy. Thanks to that episode, Quinn understood what solidarity meant: “I saw how things really work.” When it came time to walk off the job, Quinn walked off the job. He didn’t question the OCAW, because the OCAW hadn’t questioned him. It was all for one and one for all.
* * *
When the strike began, Joseph Quinn helped organize the picket line. The refinery employees took scheduled shifts to picket at the refinery’s three main gates to ensure that the picket line was staffed around the clock. The OCAW organized much of this activity out of a small trailer parked just outside the refinery property. Guys lounged and played cards outside the trailer. Others showed up to get picket signs that they would hold during their shift, signs bearing slogans like: “Koch For Slavery” and “OCAW LOCAL 6-662—ON STRIKE.” It was Quinn’s job to make sure the shifts ran smoothly and that the signs were always available.
The striking employees carried placards and signs, but the picket line was far more than a simple form of public protest. It was an economic weapon that had been employed to great effect over one hundred years of American labor struggles. The goal of the picket line was to financially strangle Koch Refining Company.
The picket line was a barricade designed to stop any truck traffic going in or out of the refinery—a barricade that would effectively shut the refinery down. A huge proportion of products made at the refinery were shipped out by big tanker trucks that took heating oil to nearby school buildings or gasoline to nearby service stations. If the trucks couldn’t come and go, Koch couldn’t sell its products. The OCAW aimed to starve the company out, forcing it back to the negotiating table in a weakened position.
The tanker truck drivers—and even the cops who patrolled the road outside the refinery—belonged to the Teamsters union, which meant that crossing the picket line was akin to violating their own sacred oath of solidarity. The picket line worked. On a typical day at the refinery, about two hundred tanker trucks passed through the gates to pick up fuel and ship it out. That number dropped to near zero after Quinn helped get the OCAW picketers organized and standing in shifts.
The union had cut off the oxygen supply of cash to Koch’s refinery. They knew that the owner, Charles Koch, was losing enormous amounts of money for every minute the OCAW was on strike. It seemed certain that Charles Koch would have no choice but to fold. He might hold out for a week or two to save face, but there was no way Koch could hold out for long.