Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” the bargaining committee was told at the first meeting of its first contract negotiations with Tate & Lyle, “we’re not running a welfare operation here.”

  Computerization had made many union jobs obsolete. Tate & Lyle didn’t need 750 people to read gauges and twist valves and, unlike the Staleys, wasn’t motivated to pay them for the good of Decatur. During the negotiations, Tate & Lyle insisted the union give up its eight-hour day and instead work twelve-hour rotating shifts: three days on, three days off, switching from days to nights after a month, then back to days the following month. To Watts, that was a nonnegotiable demand. The eight-hour workday was the founding principle of the labor movement. Giving it up would cost his members thousands of dollars a year in salary and disrupt their family lives by forcing them onto a schedule eccentric from the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday world.

  Watts believed Tate & Lyle was trying to provoke a strike. Unlike an auto parts plant, or a paper cup factory, Staley couldn’t get rid of its union by moving to Alabama or Mexico. Staley processed corn and soybeans, and Decatur was the capital city of a fecund prairie. Staley couldn’t take the corn to the Third World. Watts didn’t want to strike, because a strike would allow Tate & Lyle to hire scabs. In late 1992, after the union voted to reject Tate & Lyle’s offer, the company simply imposed a contract that required all plant employees to work rotating shifts. After consulting with labor experts, Watts devised a strategy to force negotiations by slowing down production. The scheme was called “working to rule,” and it took advantage of the new managers’ unfamiliarity with the Staley plant by stipulating that workers would only perform tasks directly ordered by a supervisor. Since the union was working without a contract, it was up to the frontline bosses to define the workers’ duties.

  “If I was running the air compressors, if I saw the air pressure start to drop in the plant, do we need another air compressor on?” explained Art Dhermy, who worked in the co-generation plant, which provided power for the entire factory. “I’d wait for management to notice and order me to turn one on. What we were trying to do with the work-to-rule was to show them, without us, product doesn’t get out.”

  The co-generation plant had been working rotating shifts for four years, so Dhermy knew what his union brothers and sisters were in for. The hardest part was doing “the turn” from day to night or night to day. It was like recovering from jet lag once a month. If Dhermy was going from days to nights, he would stay up a little later every evening, to adjust to the six P.M.–six A.M. schedule. Going from nights to days was more difficult. The first morning off, he’d set his alarm for three hours’ sleep, then spend his first day off “like a zombie,” so exhausted he had to go to sleep early. With their new three-day weeks and three-day weekends, workers were forced to stop coaching Little League and drop out of bowling leagues. They could no longer attend church every Sunday or watch their children’s basketball games. They were also working 120 hours more each year, while earning $8,000 less. In a Herald & Review article on rotating shifts, Mike Griffin complained that the hours were “ruining [his] sex life.”

  The new schedule and the new salary made the workforce cranky. Passive resistance gave way to militancy. On lunch breaks, workers marched through the plant singing “Solidarity Forever.” Company-issued walkie-talkies became an in-plant radio network of union news and inspirational oratory, with workers reciting passages from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The Midnight Express, a newsletter exposing safety violations and incompetent managers, was secretly passed around the plant. Whenever a union member was reprimanded, a fellow worker blew a whistle and the entire department followed him into the boss’s office. Tate & Lyle tried to improve morale with birthday cakes. On Mike Griffin’s birthday, he told his department, “I better not see one of youse eatin’ this friggin’ cake. You know what they’re doing. If you want to be a whore, go get a street corner, but don’t do it here.” Then he threw his cake in the trash.

  Profane and unreconstructed, a unionist born into a legacy of labor violence and blooded in Vietnam, Griffin transferred his enmity toward coal-mining scabs and the Vietcong to Staley management and the American professional class in general. To the union, he transferred the loyalty he had learned in the marine corps: never abandon a comrade. As a shop steward, he sent grievances directly to the chief executive officer, Larry Pillard, and organized two-hour grievance hearings involving the entire night maintenance crew. Griffin was fired in the spring, accused of allowing a co-worker to fall into a hole by not covering it properly. The real reason, he said: “I was a pain in their ass.” The next day, he began picketing the plant, hoisting signs that read “I’M A VICTIM OF CORPORATE GREED” and “I’M A VICTIM OF LARRY PILLARD AND HIS LIMEY BOOTLICKERS.”

  Dan Lane, another Vietnam veteran turned union militant, was fired for taking a supervisor’s order too literally: directed to remove all union signs from the plant, he sawed the Allied Industrial Workers logo off a plywood placard displaying Staley’s partners.

  The work-to-rule campaign was effective in slowing down production—the Staley plant was processing 80,000 to 90,000 bushels of corn a day, compared to its usual 140,000—but Tate & Lyle still refused to negotiate. In late spring, the entire workforce walked off the job for 32 hours over a burned-out lightbulb.

  A few weeks earlier, chlorine bleach had spilled inside the plant. The workers decided to respond to the next health-threatening incident with a “safety stand-down”—a plant-wide walkout to the union hall, where they would hold a meeting to discuss the problem. The burned-out bulb was it. The incident began when a production worker was ordered to change the bulb. Following the work-to-rule principle, he refused, pointing out that company policy required an electrician to do the job. Instructed to write a work order for an electrician, the worker refused. According to the company safety manual, only management could write a safety work order. The standoff lasted several hours. Finally, the worker was told, “You’re going home.”

  A signal went out over the in-plant radio: “Code Bronco P-3”—a fellow worker was about to be fired. The man who broadcast that message was fired, for “improper use of company property.”

  The day shift abandoned the plant. Instead of reporting to work, the night shift reported to the union hall.

  The next morning at six A.M., the workers were back at the plant gates—but they didn’t go inside. Instead they held a rally—unionists and their families, a thousand strong, wearing red shirts, the livid color of labor rebellion, going all the way back to the Paris Commune—marching in circles, chanting, “Union!” and “Solidarity!” At seven A.M., the start time before Tate & Lyle imposed their b.s. contract, the day-shift workers tried to reenter the plant. They were told to go home, because they’d reported to work an hour late. Management tried to force every worker to sign the rejected contract before returning to the plant. The workers refused, pointing out that the National Labor Relations Act prohibits employers from bypassing the union by bargaining directly with employees. At six P.M., the night shift was allowed back into the plant. But the truce lasted only eight days.

  It has been said (by Jean-Paul Sartre, although it seems strange to quote a French existentialist philosopher in a story about labor strife on the Illinois prairie) that three o’clock is both too late and too early to do anything interesting. At three in the morning, on Sunday, June 27, 1993, the quietest of the week’s 168 hours in a churchgoing city, a mechanic was summoned to Staley’s dry starch department for what his supervisor promised would be a “real quick” five-minute job. When the mechanic arrived, he was told, “You are going to be locked out. I will escort you to your locker. You will get your personal belongings, but you will not shower or change your clothes. I will escort you to the gate or a holding area.”

  Watts was awoken by a knock on the door from the shift’s shop steward.

  “What do we do?” the man asked.

  “Get eve
rybody to the union hall,” Watts ordered.

  At dawn, Watts climbed atop a van, lifted a bullhorn to his mouth, and addressed an outdoor rally. The picketing began that morning, outside the Staley headquarters, a ten-story ziggurat that was the lone vertical monument on Eldorado Street, a.k.a. the Levee, the main drag of Decatur’s blue-collar east side, notable also for the Soy City Motel, Mister Donut, and several taverns.

  That summer, the picket line became another Eldorado Street landmark. On Lockout Day, a yellow line was drawn across the gate to establish the new boundary between A. E. Staley and the Allied Industrial Workers. It codified in paint the union’s exile. On the narrow curb between the line and the Levee, picketers set up an American flag and this handwritten sign: “AIW 837 LOCKED OUT.” The settlement grew to include a wooden shelter, with the placard “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN FROM HER GREEDY RUTHLESS BUSINESSMAN” bolted to an outer wall. The shelter was mounted on wheels and shifted back and forth six inches each hour, to comply with a local ordinance banning permanent structures from the public right-of-way. Every evening, the Solidarity Car, a junky sedan spray-painted with labor slogans, cruised up and down Eldorado, honking its single emboldening note over and over again.

  Picket headquarters was across the street and behind a dirt parking lot in a brick garage labeled “War Room.” On a company calendar that marked the days of the lockout, “A. E. Staley Mfg. Company” had been scribbled out with a pencil. Written underneath, in thick red marker, was “TAKE & LIE,” the postlockout variation of Tate & Lyle. Nobody referred to the company as Staley anymore. Staley had died with A.E. Jr. Tate & Lyle was a cruel and brutal stepfather who’d moved into the house and demanded to be called “Dad.”

  I first visited the picket line after the Fourth of July. It was high summer. The prairie sky—a blue hemisphere in that flat, treeless country—was the backdrop for a few transparent clouds that looked like chalk marks from beaten erasers. The lockout still felt like a vacation. Larry Pearse, a skinny, mustached man in a baseball cap and a polo shirt, was on the three P.M.–to–seven P.M. shift with picket partner Buzz Glasco. Three hours to go, according to Pearse’s digital watch.

  “You can always tell the day Buzz walks picket,” he said, nodding at a constellation of sunflower seeds on the asphalt.

  Glasco raked his thick fingers through a family-sized bag of seeds, picked out the meat with his teeth, and spit out the shells—always toward the road. To spit toward the plant, regardless of his sentiment toward Tate & Lyle, would have projected a strand of his union-affiliated DNA across the yellow line, which would have constituted trespassing. The law regarding private property was subordinate to the First Amendment, however. Whenever a heavyset female guard marched military-style along the line, picketers called out, “Miss America!” and tried to bait her with a Twinkie hooked to fishing pole.

  “We spend so much time out here in the sun, we’re thinking of holding a tanning contest,” said Glasco, inspecting arms the color of roasted chicken. “I’ll tell you what: this is the best tan I’ve had in twenty years. May not win, but it’s the best.”

  A pickup truck with a Clinton/Gore sticker rolled past. Pearse and Glasco lifted their hands in unison, as though they were marionettes on the strings of the same puppeteer. A middle-aged man on a bicycle pantomimed honking as he pedaled past.

  The picketers had been pelted with cigarette butts. They had been sworn at and flipped the bird. A kid in a pickup truck screamed, “I’m going to get your job!” On the other hand, the afternoon shifts from Hardee’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken had delivered leftovers. Strangers offered hot coffee and soft drinks. On a rainy afternoon, a man pulled up to the curb and asked, “Do you guys need umbrellas?”

  At five o’clock, a group of union boilermakers returned from a day of work repairing the co-generation plant. As their cars crossed the Yellow Line onto Eldorado, a few waved sheepishly, but most averted their eyes. Crossing the picket line was a trial for members of other unions. In the first days of the lockout, a trucker showed up at the War Room in a quandary.

  “I’m a union truck driver, I can’t cross,” he said to the picketers. “What do I do?”

  A call to his office resulted in an ultimatum: cross the line or clean out your locker. The trucker went to lunch to think it over. An hour later, he regretfully drove through the gates. The picketers understood. The man had a contract, a job to do, probably a house, a wife, a son, a daughter.

  Picket duty was four hours a week; picket pay was $60. After the lockout, Tate & Lyle refunded the workers’ final health insurance premiums. The same coverage the company had provided for $25 now cost $325. Tate & Lyle was also fighting the workers’ unemployment claims. Already, the suddenly unemployed were canceling their cable and newspaper subscriptions, cutting off their phones, cutting each others’ hair or letting it grow long, now that they didn’t have to go to work. For $15, you could buy $50 worth of groceries from Catholic Charities: fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit. If you were already poorer than proud, Second Harvest gave away canned goods, and trucks arrived at the AIW hall with donations from unions all over the Midwest. Everyone stopped drinking Pepsi, not because it was expensive but because it was sweetened with Staley corn syrup. The fact that store brands or Kool-Aid were cheaper was simply a pecuniary benefit of a principled boycott.

  Pearse, who was forty-seven, had spent more than half his life at Staley. He had been planning to retire when he was fifty-five, to become a rare-coin dealer. The lockout had not only given him the time to pursue the new business, it had made that pursuit a financial imperative: the following week, he would be taking his collection to the American Numismatic Association convention in Baltimore. There, he would attempt to sell coins he had once considered precious but whose economic value was now more consequential than their sentimental value. The coins were nothing but money now.

  “I’ve had things that I’ve put back for a number of years that I’m wiping the cobwebs off of,” he said. “They’re not as important as they were a year ago.”

  “I’m probably a little more prepared for this than the rest of ’em,” Glasco said. “If it goes on past November, yeah, I’d probably have to tighten my belt a little bit.”

  If it went on past November, the pickets would go on, too.

  “If we left things,” said Pearse, “that would be like a soldier leaving the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It’d be an abomination.”

  DAVE WATTS KNEW his little union local in Decatur, Illinois, had little chance of defeating a multinational sugar corporation with headquarters in London. Watts had only eight hundred members, diminished from twelve hundred when he had been elected to the presidency, due to retirements and outsourcing of maintenance jobs. Watts had less money in his strike fund than Tate & Lyle’s chairman, Sir Neil Shaw, earned in a month. Had Watts been thinking purely as a negotiator, he might simply have tried to negotiate the best possible exit package for his workers. That was the only area where Tate & Lyle was willing to compromise. But some union—even if it was an undermanned union in an unknown factory town—had to take a stand for labor. What was happening to Watts’s workers was only a local iteration of what had been happening to workers all over America since President Reagan had fired the air traffic controllers. In just those dozen years, union membership had declined from twenty million to sixteen million. When Watts had hired in at Staley, 30 percent of American workers had belonged to a union. Now it was 15 percent. The Staley workers had lost wages, health benefits, safety regulations, even the eight-hour day, the labor movement’s natal cause. Now the AIW had to let other unions know that they were next.

  Mike Griffin had been married for twenty-seven years. Until the lockout, the only nights he and his wife had spent apart were the nights she spent in the hospital giving birth to their three children. After the lockout, Griffin became a Road Warrior, traveling by van to union halls and campuses, telling Decatur’s story and screening Deadly Corn, a thirty-minute video about the health h
azards of rotating shifts and industrial chemicals. The Road Warriors raised $3.5 million for the lockout fund. Griffin could afford to vent his grievances against Tate & Lyle full-time because his children were grown and he had paid off his house, in anticipation of this labor trouble.

  A few weeks after the lockout began, Staley began advertising for replacement workers in the Herald & Review and a dozen other Midwestern newspapers. To protect the scabs from unionists, the company rented motel rooms and catered meals in the plant. There was, however, no way to get in and out of the plant without passing a picket line. Union members wrote down license plate numbers. At first, they tried shaming the scabs, listing their names on placards, beneath the rubric “SCABS OF THE WEEK.”

  When shame didn’t work, the union tried personal pressure. Decatur is small enough that everyone knew a locked-out worker and a scab. Griffin found out that the son of a parishioner at his Baptist church was scabbing. He called the father on the phone.

  “My son needs a job,” the man protested.

  “That’s a fine Christian attitude,” Griffin retorted.

  “This ain’t about Christianity. I support my son.”

  “Well, Darrell,” Griffin said, “you and I are no longer friends. If you see me somewhere, don’t speak to me.”

  Most of the locked-out workers were in their forties and fifties—too young to retire, but too old to begin new careers. Hired in the 1960s and ’70s, they’d formed a baby-boom blockade against Generation X-ers who were sick of working at Mister Donut and eager to move across Eldorado Street into the plant that offered the best blue-collar wages in Central Illinois. I hung out with an alternative rock band whose bass player and guitarist were both working at Staley.

  “Fuck the unions in this town,” the bass player said.

  So when shame and personal pressure didn’t work, the union escalated to intimidation, vandalism, and strong-arming. Compared to the massacres, assassinations, and shoot-outs of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor disputes, the Staley lockout was a fistfight. But for cultural, geographic, militaristic, and generational reasons, it was more destructive than most modern-day strikes. Because Staley had hired so many workers between 1965 and 1975, the union was full of Vietnam veterans, who had just reached the age when they were taking over the leadership. Dave Watts was forty-five years old when the lockout started. Their military service made them militant, but the nature of their war added an extra layer of class resentment onto the usual labor-management enmity. They’d fought for their country. Their college-educated antagonists in the Staley corporate offices had been exempted from the draft.