The summer of 1978 was long and arduous for Local 153 members.
Mark McCrady remembers scrambling to find whatever work he could during the five-month strike to stay afloat.
“When we went on strike in 1978, I had no sellable skills, and so it was difficult to find enough work to pay the bills,” the retired Longview Fibre Co. employee said Friday.
McCrady, 59, said he picked up work on the docks and on construction sites to scrape by.
“I can’t even explain to you how broke I was, not having enough gas money to even get to work,” recalled McCrady, who years later was Longview mayor.
Like McCrady, former Fibre employee Rick Von Rock also took up odd jobs.
“I painted houses, mowed lawns and then went back on the picket lines,” said Von Rock, 71.
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His wife at the time took a clerical job to help support their three children. They used food stamps.
Although the ’78 strike was much longer than mill workers had thought it would be, Von Rock said, “We realized the importance of it, so we are able to stick together.”
Until last week, the strike of 1978 was the last time workers walked off the job at the Longview plant, now owned by KapStone Paper & Packaging. But the two situations are different, circumstances have changed radically, and that old strike gives little insight into how long the new one may last.
“Now you have a whole new group of players with the different company. And the whole premise of what this country is going through now and what the average worker is going through (is different),” Von Rock observed.
Labor relations have shifted as the mill came under new owners; the company is faced with rising health care costs and fiercer foreign competition; membership at the union has dropped as paper mills shuttered up and down the coast. Underpinning these local changes, traditional unions have lost ground under the weight of globalization, the right-to-work movement and the decline of manufacturing jobs.
When Local 153 members walked off the job in 1978, they were among 7,000 pulp and paper workers that went on strike that summer, joined by Camas workers for Crown Zellerbach Corp. as well as Longview workers from Weyerhaeuser-owned R-W Paper Co.
AWPPW wanted a common expiration date for all of its common labor contracts to bolster its bargaining power, according to records from the Cowlitz Historical Society and The Daily News archives. Local 153 in particular hoped to increase pensions and wages as well.
Mill workers didn’t just picket during the strike. At one point sheriff’s deputies were called to persuade 60 strikers to abandon a blockade that left 160 salaried workers stranded inside the mill. At another point, a court issued a restraining order against Local 153 after strikers set up 100-car caravan to block mill entrances.
“At that time, we were able to have more direct actions,” Von Rock said. Now, he argues, people have to worry about stricter regulations, getting sued or offending someone.
“Back then we never even thought about an unfair labor practice strike,” he said, referring to how Local 153 categorizes its current strike. The distinction between an economic and unfair labor practice strike could make a difference in whether the company is able to hire permanent replacement workers. KapStone denies committing unfair labor practice charges, and the National Labor Relations Board could decide the matter.
“You looked at us, you look at the longshoremen, you at Teamsters — everyone was more militant then to get something accomplished. … Now you can hardly do anything,” Von Rock said.
In AWPPW’s heyday, there were 20,000 union members on the West Coast. That number has plummeted to just about 5,000, a loss Greg Pallesen, vice president of AWPPW, blamed on outsourcing encouraged by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Local 153 had about 1,550 striking workers in 1978, according The Daily News archives. Now there are just 800 members, although the union is now affiliated with the larger United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
AWPPW’s shrinking membership is part of a national trend: An estimated 34 percent of private sector manufacturing workers were part of union in 1978, compared to just 10 percent today, according to a database from Georgia State University and Trinity University.
“The loss of union density in the last 40 years has weakened the power of working people in the employment relationship,” said Sarah Laslett, Director of the Washington State Education and Research Center in Seattle. “Unions were always a minority, but at least they were a big minority. Now they are a small minority.”
The employee/employer relationship has changed, she said.
“What you’re looking at right now (in Longview) is kind of struggle that harkens back to a time when manufacturing workers and employers really did have this compact … this agreement that capitalism was fine, but that the workers had to be taken care of,” Laslett said. “It sounds like those workers (at the Longview mill) are trying to resist having their jobs … made less secure.”
Old timers have described how the relationship between workers and management changed after Longview’s Wollenberg family, which had managed Longview Fibre for decades, sold it to Brookfield Asset Management under pressure from investors.
The pulp mill had been hemorrhaging money, but Brookfield cut hundreds of workers and made it profitable before selling it to KapStone in 2013. Brookfield also managed to do away with defined pension plans (although workers still have 401(k) plans) and early retiree health care coverage.
“We used to have Wollenberg family and we may not have always agreed, but we respected one another ... it was workable,” said Von Rock, who bargained with the Wollenbergs in several contract negotiations throughout his forty years at the mill. “Dealing with KapStone is not quite the same.”
This is the first contract KapStone has bargained with Local 153, and it faces different challenges than Longview Fibre in the 1970s: Loosening trade restrictions have bolstered global competition. Health costs have zoomed, and KapStone says it needs to rein-in those costs and avoid a 40 percent Obamacare excise tax for its “Cadillac” health care plan.
While KapStone has grown tremendously since its founding in 2005, its profits have faltered in the last nine months because of the strong U.S. dollar, and after several of its customers shifted to other companies during the West Coast port slowdown. (The company is still profitable though.)
“The Longview (mill) has had a good history in labor relations over the years, and I understand there’s a new health care world we live in these days, and it’s tough for everybody out there, but I do think there will be a happy medium struck at some point,” said Paul Latta, industry analyst at Glacier Peak Capital. “Hard to speculate on when the timing is though.”