Shaun Richman

I was very excited to receive in the mail this week all of the books and syllabi for my first courses at the U-Mass Labor Studies program. I’m taking Labor Law, with Harris Freeman, and Labor Research, with Tom Juravich. I decided to start lightly with “Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor,” which Juravich co-wrote with Kate Bronfenbrenner, and which is included in the syllabus for the Labor Research course mostly, I assume, to add color to the discussion.

Ravenswood was an early 90’s lock-out at an aluminum processing plant of which I had never previously heard. Juravich and Bronfenbrenner argue that this little-remembered labor struggle presaged the revitalization of the labor movement experienced later in the decade, and represented the first time that American unions successfully combined a labor action with a corporate campaign, boycotts and international solidarity; a recipe for what they differentiate from mere corporate campaigns as a “strategic campaign.”

Located in West Virginia, the Ravenswood plant had been a part of the Kaiser Aluminum corporation until leveraged buy-outs, asset spin-offs, restructuring and other corporate shell games in the 1980’s produced an independent Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation, seemingly owned by a former plant manager with a chip on his shoulder and a clear agenda of union-busting. The new owners combined jobs, forced overtime and cut back on safety regulation, resulting in several deaths inside the plant. When the contract came up for renewal, management proposed austerity cuts and stalled the negotiations, while spending millions on new security and scab recruitment. When the contract expired, management rejected the union’s offer to continue working under the terms of the old contract pending a new agreement, and instead locked out 1700 union workers.

The workers at USWA Local 5668 held strong, but it was several months before the Steelworkers’ international union got directly involved in the campaign, which ultimately lasted two years. International Vice President George Becker personally took over the campaign and directed his legal staff salvage the local’s paper-thin and sure-to-be-rejected unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB.

Juravich and Bronfenbrenner narrate the book as an interesting chronological story that anyone could enjoy, but any union staffer reading the early chapters is keeping mental score of all of management’s ULPs – including surveillance and retaliation for union activity, refusal to bargain over health and safety (a mandatory subject of bargaining), general surface bargaining, unilateral implementation of a final offer and an illegal lock-out – knowing that management’s goof-ups mean that the workers have a right to get their jobs back with massive back-pay!

USWA’s intervention in 5668’s ULP case is presented as a bit of great luck, when, in fact, the question should be asked, “Where the heck were they earlier?” Fifteen years later, any union that’s serious about winning has a sophisticated program of cataloguing grievances and management activities in order to identify multiple violations of federal labor law that will protect and enhance the union’s own activities.

Elsewhere, the USWA is more inventive in pressing the campaign of the workers’ lock-out. They create an “end-users” campaign that focuses on the beverage companies who utilize aluminum cans from the Ravenwood plant and, carefully skirting the ban on secondary boycotts, pick away at Ravenswood’s significant customers, one by one. They press health and safety issues at the plant with OSHA. They join environmental coalitions in highlighting the plant’s pollution.

The Steelworkers also press a corporate campaign against Marc Rich, the billionaire investor, on the lam from the U.S. for tax evasion and illegal arms sales to Iran, who, through shadow entities is the true owner of Ravenswood. With much assistance from the international federations (global umbrella groups of international unions – mostly European and North American – that are slowly becoming labor’s answer to the trans-national corporation) engage in demonstrations and lobbying that bring unfavorable press to Rich at his Swiss hideout and sink several lucrative financial deals.

Ultimately, the pressure works. Rich ousts the management team at Ravenswood. All of the locked-out workers get their jobs back. Pay and pensions increase. The plant remains open.

George Becker goes on to become President of the USWA. Richard Trumka, who directed his union’s (the Mineworkers) support becomes Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO. Many of the tactics used at Ravenswood have become ubiquitous in the labor movement. They’re not always successful, but a strategic campaign, focused on leverage and soft spots, combined with a united workforce is more often successful than not.

Of course, then again, management has gotten a lot more sophisticated in the last fifteen years and rookie mistakes as the initial Ravenswood management team made are fewer and farther between.