Paperworkers forced to end strike after 16 months CONTRACT

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'The strikes that win are the ones where the employer's operations are shut 12 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1988 same road as the 1985-86 strike of the Hormel packinghouse workers of Local P-9 in Austin, Minn. The lessons learned from the defeat of P-9 have now become even more compelling.

On June 16, 1987, 1200 workers in Jay went out. They are mostly members of Local 14 of the United Paperworkers International Union (UPIU), with others from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers.

The paperworkers in Jay were only one of four locals around the country that were either on strike or locked out by International Paper. (The others were in DePere, Wisc.; Lock Haven, Pa.; and Mobile, Ala.) But Local 14 spearheaded the strike, while pressing for a coordinated bargaining strategy to involve all the locals.

Workers held fast

IP had a union-busting strategy from the beginning. Even before negotiations formally began, IP constructed a barbedwire fence around the mill. Finally, the company forced workers into the strike by demanding unacceptable work rules and hiring practices.

Despite the difficult conditions faced by strikers, Local 14 held fast. Only 50 union members crossed the picket line to return to work.

The union held weekly Wednesday-night mass meetings. Crowds of 1000 and more, including unionists from other paper mills and industries, gathered there to hear news of the strike, listen to supporters from around the country, and sing laborsolidarity songs.

Local 14 was very successful in rallying support from other paperworkers, the building trades, and unions throughout New England. For example, a rally in Jay on Aug. 1, 1987, drew more than 8000. A Labor Day march in September 1987 in nearby Waterville, Maine, drew 5000.

Rallies were built in Boston and other cities. Leaders of Local 14 traveled around the country, winning the support of UPIU locals and unionists in other industries.

The government-on whose side?

The strikers also had some success in getting local politicians to state that they were on their side. The town of Jay passed several resolutions (though unenforced) that were designed to restrict IP's use of scabs.

The strikers began to think that the government was on their side. But IP is the largest landowner in the state of Maine-and perhaps in the United States. The strikers soon found that IP also owns the governor, the legislature, the police, the judges, and the National Guard.

Being a small town, Jay was torn down the middle by this strike. Local management and workers live side-by-side, and are frequently in the same family. The local police, whom IP relied on at the very first to control picketing at the mill, are brothers, cousins, and uncles of the strikers. (The authorities later shifted to using the state police.)

The fight was a bitter one and a costly The authors helped build labor solidarity with the Jay strike in the Boston area. one-not economically terms.

The strike's critical phase It didn't take long for IP to bounce back from the initial shutdown of the mill. Soon after the strike began, IP contracted with BE&K, a notorious strike-breaking outfit from Alabama. Scabs were recruited from throughout the South.

Pretty soon, IP was running the mill with about 1000 scabs and management personnel, which the company described as "at full staff."

IP got judges to issue injunctions against picketing and blocking the scabs from entering the mill. The government threatened local and state police and National Guard intervention to enforce the injunctions and "protect" the scabs' "right to work."

This was the critical juncture of the strike-when the scabs began coming in. That's when the union needed to shut down the mill. To accomplish this would have necessitated a nationwide call to all labor to stand with them and stop the scabs. That call would, of course, have included the other IP mills.

These strategies were discussed in Local 14's executive committee and among the rank and file. But Local 14 saw itself between a rock and a hard place. If the scabs weren't stopped, the strike would be lost. If they did try to stop the scabs, they faced a fight with the National Guard and would likely end up in jail-unless they rallied the entire labor movement around them.

The Hormel strike This is the same essential controversy that arose in the P-9 strike in Austin, down.

Minn. On the cold morning of Jan. 21, 1986, 500 P-9 strike supporters kept the scabs out and successfully closed down the Hormel plant. But Governor Rudy Perpich deployed the National Guard, and the workers retreated.

The P-9 leadership didn't think it was possible to keep Hormel shut down. They relied on the tactic of a "Corporate Campaign" to win the strike.

Like P-9, the paperworkers took the same road, based on the erroneous judgment that, as Stephen Early of the Communications Workers of America recently said, "strikes in the manufacturing sector have been harder and harder to make work-and it's worth evaluating the effectiveness of other strategies."

Now that both P-9 and the Jay strike have been defeated, the results of Early's "evaluation" should be clear. It's time for unions to go back to the strategy that worked in the days of widespread union militancy: a fight at the point of production to keep scabs out and to keep the company from running a struck plant.

The reality is that the capitalists can only be forced to give in to the demands of workers when their plants and mills are shut down and their profits are cut off. The defeat of both P-9 and Local 14 make the lesson clear.

The strikes that win are the ones where the employer's operations are shut down, and no scabs cross the line. This is the lesson of the big union struggles of the 1930s like the Teamsters strike in Minneapolis, the Longshore strike in San Francisco, the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, and—yes—the Hormel strike of 1933.

And it's the lesson of Local 26 of the Hotel Workers in Boston, who beat back the threat of scabs in 1982 and 1985, and have pledged to do it again in December if the bosses try to break the line.

What's the Corporate Campaign?

The Corporate Campaign is supposed to be a way to defeat union-busting companies by cutting off their power base at the banks, holding companies, and other industries that have a financial interest in the struck company.

This is done through boycotts (like the "Cram the Spam" campaign of P-9) and through informational picketing designed to "embarrass" the company into fair treatment of its workers.

In the case of the Jay strike, the Corporate Campaign had a number of components. It became a campaign against IP's board of directors, one of whom also was a director of the Bank of Boston. So Local 14 called for a boycott of the Bank and all of its subsidiaries unless they severed ties with the director and IP-which of course never happened. It also became a boycott of Avon Products, which also shares a director with IP.

The Corporate Campaign does have a positive side. It served as an outreach to unions throughout New England. It served to rally support in many industries and scores of unions. But the negative side is overwhelming.

The Campaign tells workers that "you can't win a strike on a picket line anymore." But picket lines are a very powerful thing. They preserve the integrity of a worker's job. When you're on the line protecting your own job, and a scab tries to cross, it's like someone breaking down the front door of your house and coming for (continued on page 10)

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TRIKE liz Green/impact