By Michael Koepf – Mendocino Commentary, Nov. 16, 1989
Julie Wiles is a private woman. Tall, slender, and athletic, her attractive face occasionally reveals a furtive, pixieish look that gives a fragile edge to her witty intelligence. When Julie Wiles daily retreats from her work place at the G-P mill in Fort Bragg where she works as a maintenance laborer, she often disconnects the phone in her Mendocino sanctuary, thereby protecting herself from the unwanted intrusions of the outside world. Julie Wiles is her own private person, but recently Julie Wiles’ private world was placed in handcuffs and hauled off to the Fort Bragg jail.
It’s not easy pulling an eight-hour shift in a metal-clanking, saw-buzzing environment pungent with the odors of sawdust, industrial lubricants and chemicals, as the green Mendocino biomass is rapidly converted into corporate greenbacks not enough of which Julie Wiles sees trickling down into her paycheck. At her job at the mill, Julie functions as a sort of lone Ranger janitor. Wherever a mess occurs—unwanted piles of wet bark, cans, paper or sludge that won’t budge—Julie moves in and moves the mess out as quickly as the labor of her body will allow. Julie Wiles says she “likes her job.” Apparently she has been at G-P long enough to ‘bid’ on other jobs at the mill that involve less physical labor—running heavy mechanized and computerized equipment for instance. But Julie prefers maintenance, operating most of the time as a solitary cleanup person to wherever and whatever the supervisors direct. “The hardest thing about running the most advanced machine at the mill,” Julie relates, “is not falling asleep.”
Julie Wiles is content to go singularly from mess to mess in her own private world, but there is one thing that Julie Wiles is not prepared to quietly haul away to the trash bin. That one thing, as Julie Wiles sees it, is her ‘rights’ as a good employee. And those ‘rights,’ according to Julie Wiles, not only apply to her relationship to the company for which she works, but they also apply to the Union to which she belongs—the IWA local in Fort Bragg.
Julie Wiles and her co-worker Cheryl Jones, along with other IWA members, have not been happy with the way their local IWA business agent, Don Nelson, has been supposedly looking out after their interests. Disgruntled Union members charge that Nelson has been more sympathetic to company management than he has been to the rank and file in his local IWA. They cite Nelson’s tepid fight and acceptance of G-P’s 25% wage cut in September of 1985. They allege that Nelson did little when Union woods employees lost their jobs recently, and dissident Union members additionally cite Nelson’s “company line” in the recent PCB spill at the G-P mill. Several employees directly affected by the PCB spill claim that they had to take matters into their own hands and hand-carry a petition to an OSHA hearing, stating that Nelson did not represent them.
Additionally, inter-Union opposition has voiced criticisms of Nelson’s recent lethargic negotiations for contractual wage increases in which the company only gave back 3% of what it took away in 1985. Union dissidents claim that Nelson’s method is to work closely with a small, hand-picked group of supporters on the Union executive and finance committees, and then dissuade the rank and file away from Union meetings with long-winded, meaningless, bureaucratic nothings, while the inside group, and Nelson, run the Union as they see fit. But the dissident movement within the local IWA surfaced in anger recently after being depth-charged by what they felt was Nelson’s and his committee’s latest self-serving outrage—increased union dues. Thus began the battle of the Union leaflets, with Nelson on one side with a little help from G-P, and the IWA Union rebels on the other. Private Julie Wiles was the first casualty of that battle.
Nelson fired first with a leaflet calling for, on an average, seven bucks per month increase in union dues. The leaflet, posted on bulletin boards and distributed in break rooms on mill property, claimed that “we are voting to maintain the ability of our Union to function.” Cheryl Jones, Julie Wiles, and other Union friends fired back with their own broadside urging a “No” vote on an increase of Union dues. Their first and best shot stated: “Last year Union officers’ wages plus expenses were $43,622. This year they were $68,315. That’s a whopping 69% increase! Considering our lousy 3% pay raise, how can the Union ask us for more money?” Most of these fliers were ripped down by company management.
On the afternoon of November 3rd, Julie went to the south gate of the G-P mill after coming off shift, to distribute leaflets to fellow workers—Union members—exiting the mill. Her co-worker Cheryl went to another gate to hand out fliers also. Wiles states that the parking lot had been used routinely as a site to conduct Union business, discourse (and) voting, and that she felt that in this case her quickest method of operation, one that would not provoke a confrontation with Nelson’s supporters as they exited the gate, was simply to put her material on the windshields of the members’ cars in the parking lot.
While thus engaged, Julie witnessed a security personnel removing the fliers from the windshields. When she questioned him about his activity, she was told that he was just doing his job, and that Fort Bragg police officers were on their way, if she had any questions. When the officers arrived, Wiles explained to them that she was conducting internal Union business in the parking lot—just like the Union always had. In the past, Julie pointed out, Union voting has even taken place in the parking lot. Wiles says that the police were initially courteous. She reports she cited National Labor Relations Act law to the police, wherein she had the right to conduct Union activity exactly as she was doing it. She also informed the cops that under Federal labor laws, companies cannot interfere in internal Union affairs.
Julie recalls that she was in the process of walking over to her vehicle, with the officers’ consent, to show them a copy of this law when suddenly the head of G-P security, Lee Gobel, drove up. According to Wiles, Gobel exited his vehicle, demanding that the police arrest her “for trespassing and littering, on the orders of Don Whitman,” G-P’s local General Manager. In response to this, Julie asked that Don Whitman come to the parking lot, believing that if she could speak to him they could clear up the whole misunderstanding. When called, however, Mr. Whitman refused to come. The officers informed Gobel that the only issue was an infraction of a local leafleting ordinance, having already agreed with Julie that she was free to continue distributing this information outside the parking lot gate, and that there would be no arrest in response to Gobel’s insistence on a citizen’s arrest, the officer informed her that he was under obligation to act on Whitman’s mandate. Moments later, Julie remembers, the cold chill of handcuffs clamped down on her wrists. The ultimate law in the city of Fort Bragg had apparently spoken. Julie was put in a patrol car and driven to the Fort Bragg police station and placed in a holding cell.
The cop-car haul-away of Julie Wiles may go down as one of the strangest arrests in Fort Bragg history. Fort Bragg City Administrator Gary Milliman, after checking with his police department, says that Wiles was “not booked into jail.” Milliman reports that Wiles was cited for a Fort Bragg city ordinance that prohibits the placing of handbills on motor vehicles. In other words, technically, Wiles was cited, not arrested. Julie Wiles, on the other hand, feels that being cuffed, driven away in the back of a squad car and placed in a holding cell certainly felt like being arrested. Fort Bragg police chief Thomas E. Bickell concurred with Milliman that Wiles was “cited,” not arrested. However, he further stated that under California law a peace officer confronted with a ‘citizen’s arrest’ must take the arrestee in under penalty of breaking the law himself. But Bickell also candidly admitted that he could not recall anyone ever being arrested in Fort Bragg for putting printed material on windshields. In other words—to make things perfectly clear—Wiles was arrested by Gobels for trespass-sing, on orders by an unseen Whitman, and given a cuffed cab-ride to a cell by police fearful of breaking the law themselves by not heeding Gobel. After the removal of her cuffs and release from her cell, Wiles had not ‘been arrested’; she had undergone an experience called ‘being cited’ for placing handbills on car wind-shields, a heretofore unknown crime.
In a signed statement addressed to “the concerned member-ship of IWA local 3-469” only a few days after Julie Wiles’ arrest-citation experience, Don Nelson began his missive by declaring: “Someone has been illegally (this writer’s emphasis) and anonymously putting handbills on car windows in the parking lots and around the Mill, opposing the dues increase.” It is this statement by Don Nelson, as paid Union representative, pre-judging Julie Wiles before her trial, which is due to take place on the 20th of this month, that continues to disturb Wiles and her fellow Union members. Some employees have candidly charged that Nelson may have had a hand in Wiles’ arrest, but other than Nelson’s ill-advised statement, they can offer no solid proof. If someone in the Union establishment was in collusion with the company to harass Julie and her fellow Union employees, the plot blew up in their faces. When Wiles’ fellow employees exiting the G-P mill saw her being hauled off in cuffs, it triggered a chain reaction against the proposed dues increase. On November 9th the vote to increase Union dues was soundly defeated. Julie’s ordeal in the membership effort had not been in vain.
Although Julie Wiles has not yet gone to trial, she states that what she has experienced in the past two weeks has “profoundly altered her perspective.” She still harbors uncertainties about incurring the wrath of one of the County’s heavyweight timber corporations and the politico law enforcement establishment who far too frequently appears to operate exclusively at the timber giant’s behest. She sees the loss of the dues increase issue as an indication of corporate interests having finally “pushed the peasants too far.” If Julie Wiles, the solitary cleanup woman, is to be sacrificed as yet one more small soul devoured by the timberbeast and its lackeys, then, at the very least, Julie Wiles knows that her sacrifice has not been for herself alone…