By Tom Wodetzki – Anderson Valley Advertiser, April 24, 1985
These articles are dedicated to two recently deceased Mendocino Coast socialists and trade union activists, John Lackner and Oscar Erickson.
The Louisiana-Pacific Corporation has earned itself a bad name locally with its recent herbicide spraying. Their sins against the community in this issue have been well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into that here. This type of disregard for the public well-being, though, is not new for L-P. In fact, it is this young corporation’s trademark.
The following article examines some Louisiana-Pacific practices and attitudes, focusing especially on its attempt to bust unions on the Pacific Coast and its close connections to the Reagan administration.
Twenty-two months ago, 1,700 mill workers stopped work at 18 L-P mills and began what has become possibly the longest, most bitter strike in the history of the West Coast timber industry—a strike rocked by bombings, gunfire and sporadic brawling between strikers and strike-breakers (“scabs”) at mill gates in California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
L-P, the nation’s second largest lumber products firm, has emerged from this dispute as one of the great union-busting companies of recent times, and many observers fear a successful end for L-P’s efforts would bode ill for workers throughout the timber industry.
One person losing his job is not only a serious blow to him, his family, but to the entire community. To understand what prompted 1,700 workers to walk off their jobs, we need to go back to the industry-wide contract negotiations that were held two years ago.
In February of 1983, Louisiana-Pacific’s chairman and president, Harry Merlo, proposed to the timber corporations’ labor bargaining group, the Western Wood Products’ Association, that it hit the lumber unions with demands for actual pay cuts and other concessions at the forthcoming negotiations when the existing contracts expired in June. The other “Big Seven” lumber firms—Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhauser, Boise-Cascade, Simpson Timber, Crown Zellerbach, Champion
International, and Publishers Paper—shunned Merlo’s radical rollback proposal, so the L-P chief decided to break with the industry group and go it alone.
Merlo rationalized his demands for wage cuts in his Western mills by claiming they were not competitive with mills in the Southeast. While Western union mill workers earn from $9.50 to $13.50 an hour, L-P’s mill in Eufala, Alabama, for example, pays a top wage of $5.10 an hour, and many workers, most of whom are Black, are making only the legal minimum of $3.35 an hour. Similarly, pensions, medical insurance and vacations are far less prevalent in the Southeast.
financially ailing company, as in the case of Chrysler a few years ago? Hardly. L-P has made over $200 million in profits in the past five years, allowing the company to spend $6 million for executive airplanes last year, and to pay Harry Merlo $2.4 million, thereby making him the 19th highest paid executive in the nation. No tears for poor L-P.
The fact is that Harry Merlo, a “self-made man” and ideological conservative, simply opposes unions, knowing that non-union mills mean greater profits, and therefore decided to eliminate unions from his company. When the rest of the forest products industry signed a contract with the unions two summers ago providing a modest 8.5% wage increase spread over three years, L-P demanded separately a one-year contract, termination of the union health plan, a $2-an-hour wage reduction for new employees, mandatory overtime, and tougher eligibility standards for vacation and holidays.
L-P also insisted that wages and fringes be negotiated mill-by-mill, refusing to reach a companywide labor agreement as it had in the past: These extreme demands guaranteed a strike and thus gave Merlo his chance to break the unions—the Lumber Production & Industrial Workers (LPIW) and the International Woodworkers of America (IWA).
Having consciously chosen this as the best time to break the unions, because of the high unemployment around the mills, L-P had little trouble filling its newly struck plants with workers willing to cross the picket lines. Tensions mounted quickly between union members and strikebreakers. Slashed tires and broken windshields were common at many struck plants. In Oroville, Calif., a van carrying scabs careened into rock-hurling strikers and injured several of them. Shootings, firebombings, and dynamitings were reported elsewhere.
Three months into the strike, the union attempted to break the impasse by offering unprecedented concessions, including a one-year contract, a wage freeze, and a company-proposed health plan. However, L-P countered with even tougher demands, so the unions filed a complaint of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), alleging that the company’s entire course of bargaining “reflects a desire to avoid an agreement and ultimately to break the union.”
In April of 1984 NLRB’s General Counsel, William Lubbers, concluded that L-P’s conduct “evidenced an intention to frustrate the bargaining process and avoid reaching agreement with the union.” Lubbers directed the NLRB to issue an unfair labor practices complaint against L-P.
News of this decision boosted spirits on the picket lines. Had the charges prevailed in court, none of the striking workers could have been permanently replaced by the company, no strikebreaker would have had the right to vote in the then-pending elections to decertify the union, and L-P could have been held liable for millions of dollars in back pay to the striking workers.
However, the union never got its day in court. Three days after he issued the order, Lubbers’ term expired, and President Reagan’s replacement reversed the order—the first time in NLRB history a top level decision was overturned—and cleared the company of any wrongdoing.(Reagan’s replacement for head of the US Forest Service was none other than L-P’s top lawyer. John Crowell…)
The elections at the mills to decertify (i.e., get rid of) the unions soon followed, and L-P has been able to claim solid victories at most of its mills. The unions have contested these elections to the NLRB, pointing out that holding the elections on company property discouraged striking workers from voting, and that L-P padded its employment figures and kept non-union workers on the payroll to influence the election results. The NLRB has yet to rule on this issue.
Picket lines have thinned as strikers, unable to support their families on the $100-a-week union strike pay and donated food, have taken up temporary work elsewhere, when they could find it, hoping to get their jobs back if the strike is settled.
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters, parent union of the LPIW, promises its war with L-P will continue “as long as there is one man out on the picket line.” It has undertaken the first boycott in its 100-year history by weekly Picketing of some 220 stores nationwide to encourage customers not to purchase L-P’s Waferwood panels, Pabco or Xonotite insulation, Weatherseal windows and doors, and other L-P products.
The union also recently launched a “don’t patronize” program aimed at encouraging consumers to avoid stores that sell L-P’s products (like Mendo Mill and Yaeger &. Kirk, loca1ly) and cites over 200 retail stores that have stopped selling L-P wood products as a result of this campaign. In addition, the firm’s refusal to bargain in good faith and its efforts to break the union prompted the AFL-CIO last year to add L-P to its “corporate dishonor rule.”
In Portland, Oregon, the home of L-P’s corporate head-quarters, 200 striking workers and sympathizers picketed the company-sponsored Davis Cup tennis matches last fall. The union claims it would cost L-P only slightly more than the $750,000 it spent on the tournament to have accepted the union’s final offer before it called the strike...