Bitter Strike at Domino Sugar Finally Ends
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Strikers at the mammoth Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn agreed yesterday to return to work, ending the city's longest labor battle in what even union leaders acknowledged was a stinging loss.
The 20-month strike had become a major test for the local labor movement, with 284 workers holding out on the picket line for nine months at one of Brooklyn's few remaining large manufacturing operations. But the strikers gradually started crossing the picket line, feeling abandoned by their parent union and the labor movement at large.
"It's a complete loss," acknowledged Joe Crimi, the chief negotiator for the strikers, who work at the 143-year-old refinery, a symbol of New York's onetime manufacturing might.
Under the new contract, approved on Friday in a ratification vote by members of Local 1814 of the International Longshoremen's Association, Domino will be allowed to cut 110 jobs at the refinery. The three-year contract, union officials said, also provides for a one-time 5 percent raise on top of the workers' average weekly base pay of about $600.
For the first nine months of the strike, the 284 unionized workers showed extraordinary solidarity, without anyone crossing the picket line. But then they cracked, with workers crossing the picket line in fives and tens because their unemployment insurance had expired and because, they said, they were convinced that the walkout was making little headway.
By last weekend, 104 former strikers had crossed the picket line, and the company insisted that production had long been back to normal. The workers who remained on strike felt so little hope that they voted 56 to 48 to approve the contract, which was little different from a management proposal that they unanimously rejected four months ago.
The strikers blamed their parent union for doing little for them - it did not even provide strike benefits. They blamed the labor movement for turning its back on them by not rallying to their cause. They blamed their co-workers for crossing the picket line. And they accused the president of their union local of selling them out to put this embarrassing fight behind them.
"We got shafted," said Charles Milan, who has worked for 37 years in the refinery's packaging department. "We got stabbed in the back."
Domino Sugar, a division of Tate & Lyle, a British company that is one of the world's largest sweetener producers, praised the workers' decision to approve the contract.
In a news release, the company said the new agreement "provides substantial improvement in wages and benefits for union employees, and it also contains the operating flexibility which the company sought to improve competitiveness in the volatile U.S. cane sugar market."
The company repeatedly told the workers that it needed to reduce its work force because profits were down and because the company was starting to ship semiprocessed sugar to the Brooklyn refinery, rather than the traditional unrefined sugar.
"The resulting loss of some Brooklyn processing jobs has been eased by a generous enhanced severance package," the company said.
Jim McNamara, a spokesman for the International Longshoremen's Association, defended the role of the parent union, saying it gave the strikers generous support and even paid for union officials to travel to England to protest at a Tate & Lyle board meeting.
While company officials said it was time for union and management to work together, some workers acknowledged there would inevitably be tensions between those who crossed the picket line and those who remained on strike to the end.
Charles Sekera, a machine operator, said he crossed the picket line last April, after being on strike for 10 months, because the strike was costing him a lot of money and because he was getting little information from his union.
"The union lost big-time," he said. "The union was out for more than a year and a half for nothing."
Denis Hughes, president of the New York State A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the strike seemed doomed from the start.
"It bothered me from the beginning that the union wasn't strong enough to put this together," he said. "It shows that even in the best of situations management has an enormous amount of power. One of the things we have to do better in the trade union movement is to develop strategies at the beginning of a dispute, instead of midway through."
Yesterday afternoon, the trailer that served as the center of the strike activities looked as if a hurricane had hit it. Empty Coke cans were everywhere, and the workers were tearing from the walls solidarity statements from other unions.
Hernando Gallego, a sugar boiler, conceded that he voted to ap