>Have you discussed the study by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell, "The
>Effects of Plant Closing or Threat of Plant Closing on the Right of
>Workers to Organize," commissioned by the NAFTA Labor Secretariat?
I know about it. But it's one factor among many, and I think attention to this sort of thing eclipses everything else. How much is the UAW doing to organize nonunion parts plants in the U.S.? Are unions doing all they could be to organize the service sector? What are they really doing to support workers in Mexico?
And then you have stories like this...
Doug
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New York Times - March 5, 2001
Hard Feelings Outlast a Divisive 20-Month Strike at Domino Sugar By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Bobby Horn should in theory be rejoicing that the 20-month strike at Domino Sugar is finally over, but instead he is so disgusted that last week he joined a group of workers who descended on their union's leaders to give them a piece of their minds.
After piling into two minivans that carried them from the immense refinery, on the Brooklyn waterfront, to the union hall several miles south, the 12 angry workers shouted and screamed that while they were mad at the company, they were even madder at their union, the International Longshoremen's Association. "We lost the strike," said Mr. Horn, a mechanic who has worked at Domino for nearly half his 54 years. "Our union didn't support us. They didn't help us in any way."
Mr. Horn is angry that the union did not provide strike benefits and did little to rally support from the labor movement. He is also furious that the union's national president, John Bowers, never visited the workers on the picket line in what was one of the longest, hardest fought strikes in New York in decades.
"I always thought the I.L.A. was a real powerful union," Mr. Horn said. "I guess we all learn."
The Domino dispute was a classic labor standoff, pitting a few hundred tenacious workers, eager to hold on to the benefits and protections they had won over decades, against Tate & Lyle, the multinational company that acquired Domino in 1988 and was intent on cutting costs and workers to keep an aging refinery competitive.
While Mr. Horn and many strikers attribute their loss to the lack of support from their parent union, some labor experts say the die was cast against the strikers from the day the walkout began, June 15, 1999. With few resources other than their own grit, the 286 unionized workers took on a multibillion-dollar corporation not known for backing down in its fights with unions. And the strikers had just one strategist and none of the elaborate war plans that many unions develop before a successful strike.
"They began their strike in a traditional fashion and not thinking through the consequences and without the artillery to back it up," said Greg Tarpinian, president of Labor Research Associates, a New York consulting group. "Some fights are lost the day they begin because of the balance of forces. Valiance is important but it does not always mean victory."
Leaders of the national longshoremen's union, meanwhile, insist that they did everything they could to help. A spokesman, Jim McNamara, said the union "offered financial support throughout the months and years." But the strikers said the parent union contributed only about $200,000 to support the strikers, who each lost an average of $50,000 in wages.
The contract that the workers ultimately approved, 56 to 48, was not much different from one that workers overwhelmingly rejected just before the strike started. It weakens seniority rights, reduces the number of holidays and sick days and gives management the freedom to contract out work and cut the work force by 110 people, or two-fifths.
With his black leather jacket, silver earring and distant, smoldering gaze, Mr. Horn could be a character out of a Bruce Springsteen song on the tribulations of blue-collar America. The refinery's locale, just north of the Williamsburg Bridge, is definitely Springsteen territory. A century ago it was a thriving manufacturing area, but today it is marked by garbage-strewn lots and deserted factories. One of the few exceptions is the 143-year-old sugar refinery, a gloomy, dark-brick building that seems like a dinosaur that escaped extinction.
Mr. Horn, who earns almost $19 an hour, is filled with bitter memories of the strike: of picketing in biting winter winds that whipped off the water, of watching dozens of co-workers stream across the picket line nine months after the walkout began, of Domino security guards filming his every move while picketing.
But he was not always bitter. He remembers the strike's heady early months when not one of the 286 union members crossed the picket line. The strikers, who included immigrants from Egypt, Italy, Poland and Yugoslavia, and blacks from the South and the Caribbean, likened themselves to a successful United Nations of workers who knew how to stick together.
"It felt good - as long as we stuck together," Mr. Horn said. "But then people started crossing, and that started the downfall."
Some who crossed said they did so because their unemployment insurance had run out and they had families to support. Others said the walkout seemed to be going nowhere.
Mr Horn says the 104 workers who abandoned the strike and crossed the picket line betrayed the cause. "I'm probably never going to talk to them again, although a lot of them were my friends," he said. "If they didn't cross the line, this dispute might have been over a long time ago. We might have been able to get what we want."
Although Mr. Horn, with his children grown and his mortgage paid off, was in better financial shape than most others, he still felt the pinch. Soon after the strike began, he stopped using his cell phone and took a part-time, $12-an-hour job driving a truck at night.
His biggest financial crisis came when the transmission on his Chevy Suburban gave out and to fix it he had to get $1,000 from a $140,000 emergency fund the New York City Central Labor Council had set up to aid the Domino workers.
Two others who remained on strike, Cheryl Boodie and Mary Lou Fenice, had a harder time. Ms. Boodie, a refinery worker, received welfare benefits for her 8-year-old daughter. Ms. Fenice, a machinery attendant, took a $5.75-an-hour job as a supermarket cashier to help put her 18-year-old daughter through Baruch College. "It's not fun," Ms. Fenice said. "You try to cut back as much as you can, but it's hard. Our rent is $600, and then you do a week's worth of shopping, and suddenly the money is gone."
Day after day during the strike, Mr. Horn went to the union's trailer, alongside the refinery's eastern wall, to shoot the breeze and to strategize.
He was touched by the truckers who stopped by to drop off coffee and doughnuts. The high point, he said, came when burly drivers from Teamsters Local 282 showed up for rallies and refused to deliver the cement that Domino needed to build two storage tanks. "We got more support from Local 282 than from our own union," Mr. Horn said.
If the strike had a leader, it was Joe Crimi, vice president of the sugar division of the longshoremen's Local 1814. He oversaw negotiations with Tate & Lyle and was the lone strategist, morale booster, social worker, coffee buyer and communications director.
Mr. Crimi said he knew it would be hard to take on Tate & Lyle. In a much-publicized battle that lasted from 1993 to 1995, its Staley subsidiary wore down the union after locking out 750 workers for 30 months at a corn sweetener plant in Decatur, Ill.
Mr. Crimi said he agreed with Mr. Horn that the Domino workers could have won the strike if the national A.F.L.-C.I.O and the longshoremen's union had done much more; for example, if they had sent thousands of people to rallies and called for a nationwide boycott of Domino Sugar. The largest Domino rally attracted just 300 people, and members of a different union representing workers at other Domino refineries vetoed a boycott because they saw the strike as a lost cause.
"The labor movement as a whole, from John Sweeney on down, was at fault because if they had provided some hope, all these members would not have crossed the picket line," Mr. Crimi said. "The people who stayed out were diehard, courageous union members. They deserved better."
But Mr. Tarpinian, the independent labor consultant, said that even if the longshoremen's union and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had given far more support, it might not have ensured victory for the strikers. "They are understandably bitter," he said. "They fought the good fight and lost."
Mr. Horn said the workers had no choice but to strike because of what he viewed as Domino's nonstop demands for givebacks. After a five- and-a-half month strike in 1995, he said, Tate & Lyle eliminated one of the prize benefits provided by Domino's previous owner: a seven-week sabbatical every five years.
"I fought for 25 years to get a lot of these things, and I didn't want them taking all that away from us," Mr. Horn said.
Margaret Blamberg, a Tate & Lyle spokeswoman, said the company's objective throughout the dispute was to hold down costs and increase operating flexibility at a time when sweetener prices, and thus profits, were down. She said the company was in no way seeking to break the union.
When the strike began, Mr. Horn said, he had no idea that it would last so long or turn out so badly. "We knew we were taking on deep pockets," he said, "but we stood up for what we thought was right."