In the new world order, patriotism was a quaint value, to which only the backward held steadfast.
The governor of Illinois campaigned for reelection in Decatur and told the workers he couldn’t help them, either. The governor was a man whose hair could have withstood a Category 3 hurricane, a man who ironed creases in his blue jeans. A shaggy delegation of big-bellied workers ambushed him outside the Macon County Republican headquarters. The governor stood in the eye of the crowd, with his fingers forming a cowcatcher, and repeated the same five words, over and over again: “This is a federal matter. This is a federal matter.”
The only politicians who offered any help were the congressman and the mayor. And they couldn’t help at all. This was no surprise to Sergeant Davis. In his own night-shift-desk-sergeant argot, he demonstrated that he understood globalization as well as anyone in Congress.
“Shoot,” he said. “Do you think the chairman of a company in London cares what the mayor of a podunk town like this has to say? I don’t think so.”
Editorially, the Herald & Review was not sympathetic to the unionists. Our editor wrote opinion pieces lecturing the workers that their “struggle is over” and suggesting that “competitiveness” required them to accept twelve-hour shifts and unlimited subcontracting. Shortly after the lockout began, our publisher refused to run a full-page ad purchased by the Allied Industrial Workers, on the grounds that it libeled Staley. (The newspaper did run a Staley ad, rebutting the union’s rhetoric.)
Since the establishment newspaper was hostile, the union began publishing its own strike journal, the Decatur Free Press. The Free Press was agitprop, on rag newsprint, but it had a sense of humor, born of aggrievement. When Dwayne Andreas won the Horatio Alger Award, given annually to self-made men by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, the Free Press invented a series of corollary prizes for its enemies in Staley management: the Horatio Auger Award, for screwing workers; the Horatio Flogger Award, for whipping employees; the Horatio Algae Award, for behaving like pond scum.
The Free Press was written and laid out by Mike Griffin and Dan Lane in the same one-room office that housed the Road Warriors’ headquarters. It was a clubhouse for the most militant workers, with plank bookshelves supporting heavy volumes of Martin Luther King’s speeches and Mohandas Gandhi’s writings. I went there to write a story about the Free Press (published over the objections of my editor, who said, “We’ve heard enough from these guys”) and then began stopping in regularly, mainly to hear Griffin riff on the Decatur establishment, America’s economic system, and working-class pride.
“That publisher of yours, he looks like a giant pe-nis,” he growled. Central Illinois is Upper Kentucky, so Griffin sounded like a redneck insult comic as he mocked the fact that at the pinnacle of our publisher’s six feet four inches was a bald scalp as pink as a thumb. The president of Staley deserved to be “buried with his ass sticking out of the ground so wild dogs can hump him for all eternity.” Griffin was mean-spirited, but only toward people with a lot more money and power, so his commentaries were crude satire. His philosophy of class relations, however, was right out of The Communist Manifesto.
“The laboring classes and the ownership classes have nothing in common,” he said. Then, lest I conclude he was a Marxist, he added, “I believe in capitalism, but I believe in controlled capitalism.”
It was an important distinction in that place and time. As a result of the labor trouble, there were a lot of people in Decatur who didn’t believe in capitalism. Decatur is an obscure city, even for Central Illinois. Springfield is Lincoln’s hometown, Champaign has a Big Ten university, Peoria is the emblem of Middle American squareness. Decatur is unknown outside its own state, which is why Tate & Lyle could bust a union there without drawing the attention of NBC, CBS, ABC, Time magazine, the New York Times, or the Guardian. The “Decatur” dateline was, however, appearing in People’s Weekly World, In These Times, Labor Times, and other Old Left publications carrying the torch of the 1890s, 1930s, and 1960s. From Buffalo to Chicago, from Brooklyn to Detroit, word went out on the radical grapevine that Decatur was to the 1990s what Haymarket Square, Homestead, and Flint had been to decades past. Decatur was soon visited by a plague of socialists, who preached revolution to the working classes.
Dave Watts welcomed his new left-wing allies. In their political zeal, they did the grunt work of a union campaign: raising money, making phone calls, licking envelopes, stapling picket signs. There was tension, though, between the factory workers and the middle-class revolutionaries. Even college-educated radicals who took jobs at the Chicago steel mills in the 1970s were derided as “colonizers” by their white, ethnic, working-class linemates. In Decatur, the cultural gap was even wider. The socialists were postmodern urbanites dropped into a rural, traditional community. They were every bit as internationalist and post-Christian as the Thatcherite executives at Tate & Lyle, but they’d chosen the other side in the debate over economic globalization.
“They’re not patriotic,” one union member observed. “They’re not God-fearing.”
The first colorful conflict between the socialists and the working stiffs took place when members of the National Women’s Rights Organizing Coalition showed up at the UAW hall to lecture striking Caterpillar workers on labor militancy. The young hipsters from Michigan and New York wore oversized flannel shirts (this was the autumn of 1994), safety pins in their noses, and hair dyed in hues that look natural only on lizards or tropical birds. The travelers handed out fliers encouraging workers to take over their unions and practice “mass militant picketing.” Seeing this as an incitement to violence, the unionists tried to guide the radicals off the grounds, but the kids refused to leave.
“Go ahead,” one shouted. “Let your union bureaucrats sell out, and you follow. Let the union bureaucrats lead you to your death.”
Then UAW members threatened to call the cops.
“The same police that gassed you this summer,” a radical spat back.
They were finally allowed to stay, with the understanding they could hand their literature only to workers who expressed an interest in reading it.
Then there was the evening a Cuban woman spoke at the AIW hall. While a socialist translated, she described how her country had suffered from the American embargo. The speech was intended as a lesson in worldwide class solidarity. Before it began, a thin, pretty, long-haired socialist sat down beside me and asked how much I knew about the embargo. She was trying to educate me, I suppose. Me and everyone else in Decatur. The guest speaker did not go over well with one of union wives, who thought it was Communist indoctrination. Like all the baby boomers in the room, she’d grown up with the Cold War, which had ended just five years earlier.
“I still remember the Cuban Missile Crisis,” the union wife said sharply. “We all thought we were going to get blown up. I’m not ready to forgive Fidel Castro for that.”
Almost every day, Watts had to tell one of his members, look, forget about the fact that these people dress like folksingers or refuse to eat meat or won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. They’re getting our message out across the country. Stay focused on that.
“A lot of that radical stuff turned me off, because that’s not the kind of guy I was brought up and raised to be,” Watts said. “Some people, that’s their mentality, but it wasn’t mine. Even worse, though, was the everyday plant worker that wasn’t strong union, that just worked every day, raised in the Midwest, and would go to church, all of that stuff really turned them off, made ’em afraid, and took them out of the fight, rather than drew them in. It wasn’t their kind of people. ‘That’s not what I want to be, that’s not the way I want to act, that’s not how I want to look.’ Most union organizations, whenever there’s an outsider, they shun them away. We opened the floodgates. That was my motto, my goal, and my desire. We need the resources, we need the people, and we need to know something. And I didn’t care if you were walking in the door a socialist, or walki
ng in the door a Communist. If you had experience, come on in.”
Decatur didn’t exactly meet the socialists’ cultural needs, either. The only bookstore was a Waldenbooks at a shopping mall. You had to drive forty miles to Champaign to see a movie that didn’t star Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, or Clint Eastwood. The socialists didn’t go to church, didn’t hunt, didn’t fish, and didn’t attend classic-car rallies.
“It’s not a college town, so it’s rather dull,” a socialist told me when I tried to interview him for the newspaper. Then he added, “Can you not quote me? We don’t want people to know we’re here.”
Despite their aversion to Decatur, one of the socialists ran for mayor. Although she didn’t meet the residency requirement, having lived in Decatur for less than a year, she received four write-in votes nonetheless.
In that same election, Watts ran for Decatur city council. One of his TV ads referred to a magazine article that had named Decatur one of the four worst cities for young people. I cannot remember the name of the magazine, but I remember exactly what it said about Decatur: “Classic Rust Belter three and a half hours from the nearest happening city.” (That same month, another magazine came out with the ten worst jobs for young people. Newspaper reporter led the list, illustrated by Seinfeld’s Michael Richards hunched over a typewriter. As a twenty-eight-year-old newspaper reporter in Decatur, I began questioning my life’s course.) Watts made the runoff but finished fifth among six candidates in the general election. His campaign to bring labor militancy to city hall was popular only in the factory-rat precincts of the smoky, industrial east side. Even the Democratic politicians shunned him as a one-issue candidate. “They’d say, ‘You’re doing the right thing, I’m proud of you, but I can’t support you.’” Mayor Brechnitz quit as a result of the labor strife and was replaced by a union-backed candidate. As a souvenir of his public life, Brechnitz framed a photo of himself with his back turned toward a group of red-shirted union gauleiters. His arms were folded, his mouth pulled down at each corner. It illustrated Decatur’s class estrangement.
The Miller Brewing Co. stopped buying high-fructose corn syrup from Staley when its three-year contract expired at the beginning of 1995. Factory work inspires a lot of drinking, and enough union halls unscrewed their High Life taps to convince Miller that its beer was making Milwaukee infamous in the labor movement. Even though Miller accounted for 11 percent of Staley’s sales, losing that contract did not convince the bosses to negotiate. So the union went after Staley’s biggest customer, Pepsi. At Chicago’s most visited tourist attraction, Navy Pier, the union’s local supporters climbed up on the roof and unfurled a banner over the entrance, while wearing T-shirts that read “Pepsi Destroys Decatur Families.”
Dan Lane had been radicalized by the tear-gassing outside Staley’s main gate. The pepper spray had permanently burned away a patch of skin on his face; he could feel it sting when he stood in the sun or when he exercised. Lane was growing his hair and wearing a bandanna, just like the hippies he’d been so shocked to see when he came home from ’Nam. Pepsi, Lane realized, might determine the winner of Decatur’s labor dispute. Convincing Coke and Pepsi to replace sugar with corn syrup had made Staley worth buying in the first place. If Staley held on to Pepsi, it would have fuck-you money until the great-grandchildren of the locked-out workers were old enough to walk a picket line. If Staley lost Pepsi, it would turn into a money-leeching lamprey on the corporate body of Tate & Lyle. To draw attention to the boycott and to inspire his union brothers to endure a third year without work, Lane decided to fast. As Gandhi had fasted in India. As Bobby Sands had fasted in Ireland. Before he stopped eating, Lane wrote a letter to Wayne Calloway, CEO of PepsiCo:
Dear Mr. Calloway,
There is no doubt in my mind that if PepsiCo would withdraw its business, Staley would come to realize the serious consequences of terrorizing our community. It is my family’s and my hope that you, sir, will sever all ties with A.E. Staley. Until that time, I will fast … The lives of 750 families, including my own, are in your hands.
“During the war, I risked my life when my country called upon me,” Lane told his wife and children. “Now I have to risk my life for my union and for the labor movement.”
Taking a room at the rectory of St. James Catholic, which was pastored by a priest allied with the locked-out workers, he reduced his diet to juice and broth. Too weak to continue delivering the paper route that provided his only income, Lane lay in bed praying and reading the Bible, John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Even as his strength diminished, he traveled to the AFL-CIO convention in New York, where he made a speech asking all of labor to boycott Pepsi.
“By God,” he shouted with as much strength as his drained body could muster, “if I can do without food for sixty days, then you can do without Pepsi! If I can do without food for sixty days, you can do without Frito snacks! If I can do without food for sixty days, you can do without Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken!”
In response, three thousand unionists chanted, “Boycott! Boycott! Boycott!”
Lane’s fast lasted sixty-five days. He ended it only after a personal phone call from AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, who promised the national organization would use all its power to help the Staley workers win a fair contract.
The union’s greatest public demonstration was another march down Eldorado Street, on the second anniversary of the lockout. Jesse Jackson finally came down from Chicago, answering years of pleading. The teachers joined that march. The nurses, the ironworkers. The autoworkers. The rubber workers. The Progressive Labor Party. In red T-shirts, white polo shirts, blue denim, each of the five thousand marchers was a stitch in a living banner that carried itself over the viaduct that vaults traffic over the Staley rail yards. At the pinnacle of the arch, a worker stopped to peer through the chain-link fence, down at the tracks stitched into the bald earth.
“Look out here,” he said. “You used to be able to see all kinds of people working here. Now it’s just a ghost factory. The softball diamond is gone. I lost my pride in working at Staley after the last contract expired. When I hired in, we had two thousand at the union. If we ever go back, it’s only going to be three hundred fifty. If they ask me to come back and load corn syrup into tank cars, I don’t think I’ll do it for long. I can’t take those twelve-hour shifts for long.”
As they turned the corner onto the Levee, the marchers were a host, blurred by distance, by the heat reflected from the asphalt. The audible vanguard was a blurry beat from a sound truck, resonating off the street at its top register. A gospel diva belted out union hymns with the passion of a singer on strike from the church choir: “Hear that union train a-comin’ / We’ll be comin’ by the thousands / We’ll be marching through Decatur.”
The chants were unamplified, so it was blocks later before they reached the distant ear.
“We are!” a man shouted, and everyone in the circle of his voice shouted back, “Union!”
Jesse Jackson was in the front rank—where else would Jesse Jackson be?—chanting his assonant rhymes.
“We’ll march until victory is won. Say, ‘I want to work. I need to work. I need to get paid for the work that I do.’ We’re marching not for welfare but for fair share.”
The march paused for a moment of silence at the main gate, through which the night shift had been led out two years before, where workers had been tear-gassed a year before, then continued to the Civic Center, where Jackson’s speech was broadcast to the lawn on loudspeakers.
“The race doesn’t go to the swiftest,” he said. “It goes to ‘hold on.’ This struggle is worth our lives. We can hold on just a little while longer.”
They could hold on a little while longer, but they couldn’t hold on longer than Tate & Lyle. In July, three weeks after Jackson urged forbearance, the union voted down a contract offer that required twelve-hour rotating shifts and did not offer amnesty to workers fired during the work-to-rule campaign, inclu
ding Lane and Griffin.
“Our members have demonstrated that they are committed to this fight and that we will not allow Staley to starve us into submission,” Watts told the press. “We will step up the pressure on Staley by reaching out to our supporters nationwide to continue the efforts against Pepsi.”
Nothing, not even a demonstration outside PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, New York, could break the soft drink company’s contract with Staley. That December, though, Watts’s four-year term as local president expired, and he was defeated for reelection by a rival who promised to “end this within a week of taking office.” It ended even sooner than that. A week and a half after voting out Watts, the workers voted to accept a contract with rotating shifts and only 350 union jobs—fewer than half the workers who’d been marched out of the plant three and a half years before. Everyone else got a severance check—up to $30,000 for thirty years.
On Main Street, a union household’s yard had displayed a wooden sign that kept score of the lockout’s length with numbered boards, hung from pegs. The tally ended at 908 days. Just as Watts had feared, the union lost.
“The last six months, there was a lot of dissenting going on in the membership,” Watts said. “It was because they’re tired, they’re broke, their cars are gone, some of ’em lost their house, some divorced. Everybody’s not seeing an end to this thing. I was committed to go on as long as it took, but we didn’t have the deep pockets of these corporations, the support of the city council and all of the organizations that are antilabor. The chance of little old Decatur coming out on top of this thing, it was the David-and-Goliath situation.”
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 24
