Resilience and tragedy

Ravenswood WV was once a booming factory town. It was the home of a major Kaiser Aluminum plant, with employment in the thousands.

It wouldn't be accurate, however, to say it was a company town. Or only that. It was also a union town and a stronghold of the United Steelworkers of America.

If you're at all aware of economic trends in American since 1980, you can probably guess the trajectory of the story. The plant faced massive layoffs early in the decade and was sold in the late 1980s, morphing into the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation (RAC).

In 1990, the company ordered union members, who were working despite the expiration of their old contract, out of the factory, which had taken on the appearance of a factory, and declared them to be permanently replaced.

Thus began "the battle of Fort RAC," which lasted from the fall of 1990 to the summer of 1992. It wasn't a strike; it was a lockout.

I must admit to having fond memories of that struggle, as I've written elsewhere. Despite all odds, the members of USWA Local 5668 won their jobs back.

In 1995, the factory became Century Aluminum, which eventually closed in the Great Recession, laying off 651 workers. Century union retirees had to fight long and hard to secure promised benefits, but eventually succeeded in 2017.

Today, aluminum is still produced there by Constellium, which employs around 1,100 people, most of whom are union members.It's the largest employer in Jackson County.

It's been a tough ride, and there have been plenty of casualties, but union workers have fought hard, won some victories and showed remarkable resilience.

Today another kind of struggle is going on there, as it is all over West Virginia and much of the country. That would be the struggle of responding to the pharmaceutical crime of the opioid epidemic.

This article from The Nation tells some of that story. The title--"These kids are watching their parents die"--is stark, but it's a quote from a local nurse practitioner. It makes the good point that public school teachers are in the front lines of this fight, just as they were in the wave of teachers' strikes that have challenged failed austerity policies in several states.

 Their situation is pretty grim, but, like the Steelworkers before them, sometimes they win.

Alternatives

A recent article in The Nation about European labor practices reminded me of the Mondragon worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.

Founded by Father José Maria Arizmendiarrieta in the bitter aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Mondragon worker-owned cooperatives now employ almost 100,000 workers/owners in a variety of industries ranging from manufacturing to finance. They are by far the most successful examples of how a business organization based on worker-ownership and control can survive and compete in a global economy. I was glad to learn that Mondragon had weathered the most recent recession and was still going strong.

Cooperatives have had a pretty tough row to hoe in the US, but as Steven Hill wrote in the article cited above,

They produce an estimated 12 percent of the GDP in the European Union and involve, directly or indirectly, at least 60 percent of the population.

Last fall, the United Steelworkers of America announced a partnership with Mondragon in order to work toward making union worker cooperatives a viable alternative in the US economy. Union president Leo Gerard said that

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

At the time, Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added

“What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”

While nobody knows what seeds will grow from that effort, it is high time to consider economic alternatives that meet the needs of both workers and consumers.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH, a watchdog group is offering a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Massey Energy officials.

POTS, KETTLES. Massey CEO Don Blankenship has called critics of his organization evil, as Ry Rivard reports in the Daily Mail.

MIGHT AS WELL THROW THIS IN. This post from the AFLCIO blog argues that union mines are safer, a belief shared by lots of people.

SAD TO SAY, there was another mining death in WV yesterday. As coal Uber-Blogger Ken Ward pointed out here, this is the way most miners die: one at a time.

NOTE: This post was scheduled for publication Tuesday night as El Cabrero is on the road. If anything bad happens between now and then, let the record show that I was against it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED