Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement (review)

If any historians still think that the 1990s was a period of labour quiescence, Staley should convincingly disabuse them of that notion. If any commentators still believe that the 1990s represented the period when "new voices" finally regenerated organized labour, this book will present a devastating challenge. That paradox is at the centre of this important book, which ranks alongside Richard Brisbane's A Strike Like No Other and Kate Bronfenbrenner's Ravenswood as a major contribution to the history of modern American labour. The authors have presented a compelling analysis of a decisive moment in the struggle for social democracy. Equally important, they present an astute analysis of the central conundrum facing American labour today: the tension between front-rank militancy and institutional conservatism.

Ashby and Hawking weave these themes into the analysis of a labour movement buffeted by forces that would have intimidated the likes of John L. Lewis. Staley manufactured high fructose corn syrup, the revolutionary substitute for sugar that sweetened everything from Pepsi to Pop-Tarts in the consumer-fuelled 1980s. The demand for the product was insatiable — by 1992, the company was turning a $400 million profit. But in the "greed is good" decade, profitability wasn't simply a function of demand. Hawking and Ashby outline the deliberate campaign for the restoration of corporate control that began when Chrysler demanded massive wage and benefit concessions from the uaw in 1979 and received a major stamp of approval when President Reagan liquidated the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. The era of shareholder entitlement, leveraged buyouts, corporate consolidation, and Hormel-style anti-unionism provides the background for the analysis of the Staley struggle. For example, by the time that the multinational Tate and Lyell absorbed A.E Staley in 1988, the company had already experimented in "cooperation" schemes designed to rationalize production and reduce employee control. The Tate and Lyell acquisition eliminated a competitor and made an already concentrated industry even less competitive.

The irony, of course, is that the company used the rhetoric of global competitiveness to justify demands for massive concessions. The imperative was clear: to render the whole idea of a collective agreement meaningless. Ashby and Hawking establish the political and economic context for the company's draconian demands. In the same period that Caterpillar (also in Decatur), Hormel, Greyhound, International Paper, and Staley were demanding concessions, real wages for US workers were on a steady decline. Following a four year wage freeze (!), the Staley local of the Allied Industrial Workers arrived at the bargaining table to discover that the new owners expected them to accept "rotating shifts, the deskilling of jobs, the elimination of most safety procedures, and other major concessions." (22) Wholesale firings of union-friendly managers, the elimination of one-fourth of the company's white collar employees, and the adoption of non-union contractors signaled the company's determination to restructure. Yet it is the death of employee Jim Beals in a preventable industrial accident that highlights the company malfeasance at the core of restructuring. This is never simply the numbers game that corporate reengineering gurus presented.

Discussing Local 837's remarkable outreach campaign, which saw teams of "road warriors" traversing the country to generate support and foster independent solidarity committees, the authors quote an AFL-CIO strategist commenting on its significance: "When Road Warriors go out in any campaign, they touch people in a way that union newsletters don't, magazines don't, phone calls don't, staff to staff don't, staff speaking to members don't. These Road Warriors ... touch people in their heart and soul, not just their head, and it makes a very big difference ..."(95) The sensitivity to the lived experience of workers raises the calibre of this study considerably.

Yet it's the authors' attention to how this lockout evolved into a social movement that distinguishes Staley from Stephen Franklin's Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for...