Standing in the frigid midnight air outside Caterpillar`s showcase assembly plant, Jimmie Toothman was more surprised than defiant.
Only a day before, Toothman had been certain there would be no strike by his United Auto Workers. There was too much at stake for the company and for the union.
Yet there Toothman was, rubbing his hands together to keep warm, drinking coffee supplied by a local radio station, chatting with the 30 or so union brothers and sisters who, like him, had hustled to the gate in East Peoria that night.
At 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 4, 1991, a handful of UAW members working the third shift in Caterpillar`s Building SS walked out to join Toothman on the picket line. The strike had officially begun.
Toothman saw nothing remarkable about the moment.
There was little tension, no violence.
There was nothing to indicate that this strike would be different from the three others he had been through, or the nine strikes the UAW had waged against Caterpillar since 1948.
It didn`t take long for the union strike crews to cart the 55-gallon metal drums to the picket lines, or to get the fires roaring orange and hot inside.
Toothman and his fellow union members knew the game. They were used to toting the strike signs, stoking the fires, taking on Big Yellow.
But they had no idea that the picket line fires would burn almost nonstop from that frigid November night until a balmy day in April, when they were stoked not for warmth, but out of habit.
Those who had thought they knew the game back in November didn`t realize that the rules were about to change.
The nature of work itself had been changing all over the world-a world in which products like bulldozers were being made and sold on the basis of cost- efficiency, not nationality.
Suddenly the Jimmie Toothmans of America, men and women with good manufacturing jobs at good pay, were at risk. There were no more guarantees-of a union contract, of a union-scale job, of a secure place in the middle class. Against Caterpillar, the UAW miscalculated. It thought its long-trusted weapon, a strike, would pressure the company into signing a contract the union liked. But it failed to anticipate the lengths to which the company would go. Worse yet, it failed to realize how public sympathy had deserted organized labor by the autumn of 1991. Many in Peoria, and across America, were struggling to get by, working long, hard days for half the $17 an hour UAW members were earning. The idea of hiring ”scabs,” or replacement workers, was no longer roundly condemned.
When they stepped into the frosty air that November night, Toothman and his fellow workers planned on fighting for a better contract. They would wind up fighting for their jobs.
But who could have blamed them for being confident?
They belonged to the United Auto Workers. This was the union that once brought General Motors to its knees by perfecting the sitdown strike and went on to beat Henry Ford`s strikebreakers at their own bloody game.
This was the union that, under Walter Reuther`s leadership in the late 1940s and `50s, pioneered concepts like cost-of-living increases, early retirement packages, health benefits, annual pay increases and raises based on productivity.
It was a union that lifted the standard of living for entire communities in which its members lived. UAW-scale paychecks rippled across Main Street America, watering appliance stores and doctor`s offices, movie theaters and parish fundraisers.
But lately, it was also a union that had been battered by the upheaval taking place in American manufacturing. And now, on this November night, it was galloping toward a challenge not from the powerhouses in Detroit, but from a Peoria company that employed less than 2 percent of its membership.
Caterpillar Inc.`s challenge to the UAW could not have come at a worse time for the once-proud and innovative union, or for the troubled U.S. labor movement. For more than a decade the union had suffered steep membership losses, and the attrition had drained its energies and narrowed its vision.
”It is very hard for them to figure out what works and what is the right strategy,” said Harry Katz, a Cornell University labor professor and an expert on the UAW. ”It is much harder for them than it was in the 1940s.”
Actually, it wasn`t so easy back then, either.
UAW organizers weren`t welcomed when they showed up in Peoria in 1945. Caterpillar didn`t want them around, and neither did the FE-the Farm Equipment workers union, already established in the company`s plants.
Pat Greathouse got his welcome while handing out UAW leaflets by Caterpillar`s red brick headquarters, which sat modestly amid the factories in East Peoria.
”Hey, can I have one of those?” someone shouted, and as Greathouse leaned forward, pamphlet in hand, an FE man hit him square on. He lost two front teeth.
A patient man with a down-home manner, Greathouse led the UAW`s charge in Peoria. He knew first-hand the hard work and brutal factory conditions that gave rise to unions in America.
In 1935, at age 19, Greathouse was hired to build rear axles on the chassis line at Henry Ford`s Torrence Avenue plant in Chicago. He worked 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, and got paid $30.
Greathouse had thought little about unions or politics before, but like many workers in the mid-1930s, his job and the Depression taught him a brand of progressivism.
Seven months after Greathouse started in Chicago, about 200 workers gathered in the Ft. Shelby Hotel in downtown Detroit for the founding convention of the United Automobile Workers of America.
It was in the middle of a tough year for unions-500 locals collapsed in 1935 alone-but the UAW had grit. In its first year the union had 35,000 members. Two years later it had 10 times more.
One by one, the UAW brought nearly all of the automakers and major parts suppliers under its wings. Six years later, when Ford Motor Co. signed a contract, Greathouse became a member of the UAW committee at Local 551.
Greathouse joined the UAW staff in Chicago in 1943 and became regional director in 1947. He spearheaded the union`s efforts to organize large Midwest farm machine and construction equipment firms like International Harvester, John Deere and Caterpillar.
The UAW caught its break at Caterpillar in 1948 when the Farm Equipment workers union refused to sign the anti-communist loyalty pledge required by the Taft-Hartley Act, the landmark labor law that regulated the rising power of unions by imposing numerous restrictions. The company refused to bargain with the FE, and the union went on strike.
Within two months, Caterpillar recognized the UAW.
As the international UAW grew, so did its smaller wing of farm machinery workers, which became Greathouse`s domain. In 1958, after the union had lined up the major firms like Caterpillar and Deere and Harvester, it set out to make their contracts similar.
The UAW had developed this concept during bargaining with the auto industry. Whatever wages and benefits it won at one manufacturer, it sought from the next.
Companies eventually gave in to the practice, and some even quietly coordinated their bargaining. The contracts varied slightly, but the bread-and-butter issues-wages and benefits-were never far apart.
The practice became known as pattern bargaining. At its heart, it was intended to prevent competing companies from cutting workers` wages to gain an edge in costs.
The UAW`s early success at Caterpillar was stunning, but so had been its initial triumphs in Detroit.
It had begun in the 1930s with sitdown strikes in Flint, Toledo, South Bend, Cleveland and Detroit, strikes spurred when company officials refused to deal with unions.
Then in 1937 the union called its famous 44-day Flint-GM sitdown strike, demanding an end to production line speedups, to overtime work without extra pay, and to layoffs without notice. The Flint strike led to the UAW`s first contract with GM, and that accord led to agreements with the rest of the auto industry.
The union would go on to pioneer cost-of-living allowances at General Motors in 1948. The same year it worked out the first formula for annual, across-the-board raises. Next came the first pension plan, with Ford in 1949. Over time the UAW won health insurance for most of its major contracts.
By 1955 it had worked out a solution at Ford for helping workers during the industry`s downswings. The Supplemental Unemployment Benefits plan would protect workers during cyclical layoffs by guaranteeing almost all their wages through a combination of unemployment benefits and company payments.
Under the tough-minded Reuther, who, like Greathouse, was once beaten while leafleting outside a factory gate, the UAW earned a reputation as a progressive union. It didn`t reward its leaders with hefty salaries. It wasn`t tainted by corruption. And it championed civil rights when other unions closed their eyes.
Shortly before the 1970 plane crash that ended his 24-year reign over the UAW, Reuther would make the case for a 32-hour, 4-day workweek. He was convinced that automation was about to liberate American workers, freeing much of their time for cultural pursuits.
Events would prove Reuther right about the need for fewer manhours. What he didn`t foresee was a future with drastically fewer union jobs.
Nor did Greathouse, who retired from the UAW in 1980, expect that his union would one day find itself at war with Caterpillar. ”I didn`t see any changes,” he said this year. ”All the old people were there.”
The Caterpillar officials who had welcomed him into their offices and had become his friends were still in charge. When he retired, Caterpillar`s industrial relations staff held a dinner in his honor in downtown Peoria, and presented him with a toy tractor that he keeps in the den of his suburban Detroit home. Inscribed on it are the words, ”Pat Greathouse: Cat Skinner.” Eight times between 1948 and 1980, Caterpillar`s union workers went on strike, including an 80-day wildcat by East Peoria`s Local 974 in 1979. But the company continued to grow and prosper-until 1982.
By then, Caterpillar complained more than ever about foreign competition, especially Komatsu Ltd. of Japan, but the union sloughed off the company`s claims that it had to cut labor costs to compete. The union believed Caterpillar was using the Komatsu threat as a ploy.
Neither side backed off, and the strike that year was far longer and more bitter than any other in the company`s history.
Defiant as ever, the union`s bargaining committee overwhelmingly turned down the company`s final offer. The union was rebuffed, however, by a membership that voted 2-to-1 to accept a contract that froze wages for three years.
The painful strike and the rebuff of the bargaining committee wounded the local. There was grumbling about the need for a new way of dealing with Caterpillar.
The company, damaged by the recession and seeking to win workers` efforts to increase productivity, was also looking to improve its labor relations.
After the 1982-83 strike, the company gave its labor executives the charge to improve things. Lee Morgan, then Caterpillar chairman, began meeting with union members and local leaders, trying to demonstrate that the company had changed.
By the 1986 talks, the union tried to show that it had changed, too. It agreed to do away with several hundred work titles, despite the loss of some jobs. It also accepted an employee participation plan.
Leading the way for these changes in the union was Jerry Brown, current president of Local 974.
When Caterpillar sought a no-strike agreement in early 1988 for its parts workers, saying such a step would guarantee a number of jobs, Brown took up the company`s cause. It wasn`t easy. Most of the local leadership and his best friends disagreed.
He came from a die-hard union family whose home in Pekin had been burned to the ground because of feuding between union and non-union employees at the local Corn Product Co. where his father had worked.
Brown tossed the issue over in his mind for one Friday night and Saturday morning, walking the floors, realizing that the union would have to decide on Sunday. On Saturday he suffered a heart attack. Despite his absence, he had swayed the mood, and the proposal passed.
The union had sent another signal it was willing to get along with Caterpillar. But the cooperation would be short-lived.
