Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' victory
By Mary
Owen
RAVENSWOOD: The Steelworkers' Victory & the
Revival of American Labor by Tom Juravich & Kate
Bronfenbrenner. ILR Press, 1999, 296 pages. $29.95.
"When the Ravenswood Aluminum Company locked out 1,700
workers on Oct. 31, 1990, it hardly looked like a big
opportunity for labor," say authors Tom Juravich and Kate
Bronfenbrenner in their new book about this labor struggle in
the United States.
Yet from this inauspicious beginning in West Virginia,
members of Ravenswood Local 5668 and the Steelworkers' Union
developed a fight back that reached around the globe. Their
intrepid battle marked the birth of a new type of strategic
organizing--known as escalation--that helped turn around a
decade of union-busting defeats.
The book movingly chronicles the day-in, day-out dynamics of
a lockout that lasted nearly two years. The book opens with the
death of Jimmy Rider in the summer of 1990--overcome while
working forced overtime with molten aluminum in the plant's
broiling pot rooms. His death and several others were a brutal
sign of how things would go under new owners who bought the
plant from Kaiser Aluminum.
Next came the ominous erection of a virtual fortress around
the factory--complete with barbed wire and security
goons--followed by the Oct. 31 lockout of the workers when
their contract ended. Many were middle aged and had been at the
plant their entire working lives. As with numerous strikes and
lockouts before--from the PATCO air traffic controllers to
Hormel, Phelps Dodge, International Paper and others--the
company hired scabs to "permanently replace" the workers. Or so
they thought.
But this lockout would be different, Juravich and
Bronfenbrenner explain. Faced with seemingly insurmountable
odds Local 5668, and eventually the Steelworkers international
union, launched an innovative battle against the filthy-rich,
multinational conglomerate bent on breaking the union. The
workers, with a militant history of fighting concessions,
dubbed the plant "Fort RAC." Bolstered by community and labor
support, they made good their vow to last "one day longer" than
the company.
The book details every aspect of the campaign. Some workers
followed trucks delivering scab aluminum to "end users" like
Budweiser and Coca Cola so they could pressure them to stop
buying from RAC. They leafleted the Super Bowl and Kentucky
Derby to alert consumers. Women workers from the plant and
family members of locked-out workers formed a Women's Support
Group that played a crucial role in keeping the struggle
going.
Fort Unity was constructed near the union office to welcome
solidarity delegations. Younger workers got involved. Lock ed
out workers who had never left West Virginia flew to Europe to
meet with unionists and exert international economic pressure
on the global company.
And the Steelworkers targeted Mark Rich--known as "Aluminum
Finger" among his competitors in the cutthroat world of metals
trading--costing him huge deals in Venezuela and
Czechoslovakia. Rich was a profit-hungry U.S. billionaire
wanted on tax evasion charges who was ruining RAC workers'
lives from his Swiss hideout.
The union's Mark Rich "wanted" poster became a trademark of
the campaign, which kept going and going until the company was
finally forced back to the table to bargain a decent
settlement.
The authors criticize the Steelworkers international union
for waiting five months before getting involved. But once the
international took RAC on, they point out, the union stayed
with the struggle until the workers marched triumphantly back
through the plant gates on June 29, 1992.
Above all, Ravenswood sensitively portrays the transforming
impact of a labor struggle on the workers themselves--the
hardships, the tough decisions, and growing solidarity that
fuels their will to struggle. "A labor dispute can be almost
the beginning of your life, in some ways," the book quotes
Marge Flanigan of the Women's Support Committee as saying.
In a replay of the RAC struggle, workers at Kaiser Aluminum
plants have been locked out since January of this year. But now
the Ravenswood workers are right there to support them, telling
their story and sharing their experiences. Since they went back
to work, RAC workers have also donated $160,000 to support
other striking and locked-out workers, including a recent
$3,700 donation to Kaiser workers.
Ravenswood gives an honest, inspiring look at how such
solidarity is forged and how to build it in the future.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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