Community is the first casualty in America's labor wars

It's been one roller-coaster ride to hell, and it's still going down.-a Staley worker

The union guys are gone from the gates, their run-down folding chairs with them. The long days spent bearing witness to their grievances in a slow monotonous circle are finished. The days spent trying to keep warm around smoky oil drums in the winter or sweating through their T-shirts in the summer are ended. 

The signs declaring Decatur, Illinois a labor war zone still linger around town, unhappy memos from a militancy that can only seem feigned now. After almost three years, one of the most bitter labor fights the nation has seen since the early part of this century is over.

Three unions went up against three of the world's largest corporations. When these separate battles in the war of Decatur finally exhausted themselves in late December with the weary capitulation of locked-out workers at A. E. Staley, the companies pretty much got exactly what they had wanted from the beginning, and the unions had to accept mere survival as victory enough.

Father Martin Mangan, pastor of Decatur's St. James Church said last summer, "I really hope Decatur can be the Stalingrad of the labor movement, where they dig in and say: 'Enough is enough is enough.'" If Mangan's metaphor holds, then Stalingrad has fallen.

Such a complete union defeat would have been unheard of years ago. But as one embittered observer in Decatur remarks: "union has become a bad word today." Burdened as they are by an arguably unjust reputation for corruption, bloated wages, and technological obstructionism, unions no longer compel the unqualified support of the public, nor even the automatic loyalties of working union members.

In Decatur, the unions battled with what they deemed an uncaring, even brutal, corporate management, with other unions who crossed their pickets, with an AFL-CIO hierarchy that seemed at times majestically indifferent to their struggle, and finally, inevitably, with each other. There is bitterness to spare among the Staley diehards who wanted to continue the fight and the exhausted majority that wanted it to end. A new leadership has taken command at United Paperworkers International Union Local 7837; workers who had tired of the seemingly endless confrontation with management, workers ready to make a deal.

Where things go from here remains anybody's guess. Like bloodied but unbowed pugilists who simply don't know when to call it quits, union spokespeople admit labor has taken a beating in Decatur, and then start discussing strategy for the next round.

Catholic social teaching is full of grandiose terms like common good and human dignity, but the tradition started with a few more humble words that pertain in Decatur: worker and union. Whatever it has come to mean or achieve in the years since, the church's social teaching began in 1891 as an impassioned and, for its time, radical defense of worker rights before the power of capital.

Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum asserted the special dignity of human labor and defended the right of workers to form unions, the right to collective bargaining, the right, yes, even to strike. It is not a stretch to call this focus on the rights and dignity of workers the foundation of all the social teaching that has followed. Now, 105 years later and teetering on the edge of the 21st century, it may be time to blow the dust off of Pope Leo's encyclical and take it out for another look.

It couldn't have hurt a few years back if folks in Decatur had. After years of growing tension between management and labor at A. E. Staley, a producer of cornstarch and sweetener, 760 union workers were finally locked out of the plant altogether in June 1993. Management justified the lockout with accusations of industrial sabotage and vandalism. Staley's workers called it a naked attempt to bust their union.

Just a short ride down Decatur's 22nd Street from the billowing jumble of the Staley factory, the Caterpillar plant workers walked off the job the following year. Corporate managers there were seeking changes in work rules and wage and benefit concessions.

A month later, they were joined by workers at the Firestone tire factory because its managers sought similar concessions. Decatur, Illinois had become the unlikely and undoubtedly reluctant nexus of America's labor woes. Analysts and academics saw big issues being warred over in Decatur. The future of trade unionism, the future even of America's economic order, it was declared, were being determined at the battlements of Decatur.

But as in all wars, it is the foot soldiers who have simultaneously the worst and best view of the action. Decatur's workers weren't fighting for the future of unionism or to change national industrial policy-at least, that's not all they were fighting for-they were fighting to hold on. They were fighting for their lives.

A lot of guys have lost their homes, their families. They're the casualties of this war; we'll never forget it.-a locked-out Staley worker

Since the takeover in 1988 of the A. E. Staley company by Britain's Tate and Lyle, a multinational food-processing giant, a lot of sentences in Decatur begin with "Old Mr. Staley wouldn't have done that." Whatever faults Staley's eponymous previous owner might have had have been smothered in a nostalgic haze thanks to the noxious behavior of his corporate progeny.

J. Patrick Mohan is a Staley executive vice president and primary union bogeyman. He betrays little emotion one way or the other when he announces that the labor strife at Staley has finally been "settled." Those who have "elected" to return to work are being returned to work. Others, he says, have "elected" to accept "enhanced severance or enhanced retirement."

"The transition [back to work] has been going very, very smoothly," Mohan says.

To Mohan the causes of the battle at A. E. Staley are clear and simple. The plant carried more workers than it needed; the workers it had were unwilling to adjust to new global competition; the union local was poised as an obstacle to that adjustment. "What the situation involved was necessary change versus a total resistance to change," he says.

"You have to look at the plants with whom [we] compete; they have significantly lower employment rates. This industry has become far less labor intensive than we once were; we rely more now on brain than on brawn."

Tate and Lyle plans to invest $60 to $70 million to modernize the facility over the next year, Mohan says. And that modernized facility will require fewer and fewer workers. He says the union workers needed to understand this reality. "We needed a modern labor agreement to go with the modernizing of our plant."

He has that now. The members of United Paper Workers International Union Local 7837, the Staley local, have grimly endured the lockout on part-time jobs and $60-a-week strike pay for almost three years. Last December they succumbed to what may have been the inevitable in the era of the permanent replacement worker and voted 56 percent to 44 percent to accept the company's last offer, which bore more than a passing resemblance to its first.

St. James' Mangan is one of the few religious leaders in Decatur to have taken a stand in support of the strikers. "I used to try to be neutral, but the more I learned, the more I understood. I really had to stand on the side of labor," he says. He calls the coming fight over the rights of workers the civil rights movement of the future.

Mangan has stood on the pickets with workers and behind them at rallies. Mangan's position has not been altogether popular in town; he's had more than his share of confrontations with members of corporate management in Decatur. Cornering the unfortunate Mohan at a community luncheon, Mangan decided it was time he did some ministering to the comfortable. "In Germany there was a systematic destruction of people called the Holocaust, and I really believe that there is also a systematic process going on now to destroy the economic lives of people. In Germany, the ministers were silent; I'm not planning to be this time."

"I said this to Mohan and he said, 'I really, really resent that,' and I said, 'You should!'" Mangan cackles in delight at the memory.

"Part of what this plant was to old Mr. Staley," Mangan says, "was to provide jobs to the people [of Decatur]. That's the sort of distance between the economy then and the economy now. This is absentee landlordism at its worst; [Staley's management] doesn't have the same ties with the people. It's a pretty classic case of a multinational corporation not having any investment in the community at all."

In fact, both the Staley plant and the Firestone factory are owned by multinational corporations. Firestone was purchased in 1988 by Bridgestone, the Japanese tire manufacturer. Though Caterpillar remains U.S. owned, management over the last few years has used its presence in the global market to justify the concessions it sought from its United Auto Workers. Caterpillar has to face stiffer global competition, they told their employees, and UAW salaries, benefits, and work prerogatives were making that difficult. Similar calls for enhanced competitiveness, modernization, and industrial restructuring were also variously cited at Staley and Firestone.

But perhaps the major issue of contention for workers at Staley and Firestone has been the switchover to 12-hour rotating shifts. Only a handful of workers at Caterpillar work 12-hour shifts-and none on a rotating basis, says Caterpillar's Chuck Hippler. "We just don't run the kind of continuing process that requires that."

But a corn-processing facility like Staley runs "24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Mohan says, arguing that limiting production disruptions is crucial to maintaining Staley's market competitiveness. Staley workers could only argue that they found the new schedules inhuman.

How to moderate the corporate behavior of multinationals like Staley's parent Tate & Lyle and Firestone's owners Bridgestone Tire will likely prove a major preoccupation of American labor over the coming years. That job has become especially difficult as the specter of the permanent replacement worker continues to haunt trade unionists. The number of strikes called in the United States hit a 50-year low last year.

These are companies that appear to have opted for an acceptance of workplace antagonism and increasing pressure on workers as the best way to maximize profits for their shareholders. The long-term efficacy of that strategy is not as clear to other American companies that have determined to seek productivity gains and profit maximization through more positive engagement with their working community.

Caterpillar was one company that briefly explored then bitterly abandoned such a "team management" approach at its plants. It's the fallout from that experience that accounts for much of the animosity between management and the UAW workers today.

"Keep the working class working, keep them out of politics, keep them out of community life . . . it's all part of the grand design," UAW hard-liner Charlie Holt assures. In addition to all the bitterness and hard feelings among one-time friends and family members, Decatur's labor woes have generated their fair share of conspiracy theories.

"One world government; they've been after that since the turn of the century. They're all doing the same thing; it's all unions everywhere they're attacking," Holt says, leaning up against his desk at the office of Friends of Labor, a group of Decatur residents, business peo-ple, and union workers that serves as a bridge between the workers and the broader community in Decatur.

"George Bush talked about it constantly-the New World Order. All the New World Order means is that all of the working people in the United States have to go down to Third World standards. I want no part of it.

"These giant corporations-you cannot even classify them as Japanese or American or British because they don't have any allegiance to any country-they go all over the world. They have plants all over the world, and they're taking advantage of all the working people all over the world . . . Once you get in and learn and actually see what's going on, it becomes quite evident.

"The people who do not see this, choose not to see it. They've been working on this for decades, and now it's all coming together. . . . They got the farmers in the '80s, and now a decade later, they're going after the unions."

Crazy talk from a disgruntled paranoid or unflinching insight into cold corporate realities? That probably depends on whether you happen to be clutching a pink slip or a golden parachute after the latest round of "corporate restructuring" is finished. But whatever else it is, Holt's soliloquy is the kind of language taken up by at least one presidential candidate to great effect this year. Pat Buchanan has made corporate bashing all-American through his campaign promise to repeal GATT and NAFTA and rein in runaway American capital.

There are animosities that have grown out of this that will last our entire lives.-A Firestone worker

In their 1986 pastoral letter on Catholic social teaching and the U.S. economy, "Economic Justice for All," the U.S. bishops quote Pope John XXIII's Mater et Magistra: "The dignity of the human person, realized in community with others, is the criterion against which all aspects of economic life must be measured.