COLUMN ONE : Crossing the Line: Scab or Survivor : First came Caterpillar’s surprise ultimatum--return or be replaced. The union tried to hold itself together. Its workers found that saying no to the company was hard. But for some, saying yes proved harder.

PEORIA, Ill. —  They would hate her now, she could be sure of that. Some had seen her face behind the windshield and cursed at her and yelled “Scab!” But there was no going back. The van was already inside the gantlet of picketers, creeping toward the factory gate. She glanced at the walls of people. A few had put on skeleton masks or black hoods. A hangman’s noose hung from a pole.

Only days before, Diane Roberts had been their soul mate, another striker serving up soup at the union hall. Then Caterpillar had issued its ultimatum: Return to work or be replaced. Union leaders said things would be OK if people just held together, but her fear was too great. She was not anti-union so much as pro-Diane, a single woman who could not imagine herself without her job.

It had taken Roberts eight years to get on at Cat, applying, reapplying, applying yet again. When the phone call had finally come in 1972, she was a 25-year-old divorcee with an infant to care for and a thousand bills to meet. She literally shook with joy at the news and burst into tears. The job in the foundry would pay $4.25 an hour, nearly four times what she had made while working at a dry cleaner.

She raised her son on that Caterpillar salary and watched it quadruple over 20 years. True, the United Auto Workers had a lot to do with that. But in 1992, after five months on strike, she was not about to see it all disappear. Her thoughts were turning somersaults, one truth upending another. “Can someone guarantee me I’ll still have my job?” she asked every striker she knew.

Near the deadline for a decision, Roberts went to a meeting at the union hall, hoping to discover some nugget of reasoning that might change her thinking. Outside, she ran into friends and co-workers. Not many were sympathetic when she flat-out admitted that she might cross the line. One man warned her: “Diane, something might happen to you. It’ll be out of my hands.”

The meeting room was packed. Bill Casstevens, the UAW’s lead negotiator from its Detroit headquarters, was going to speak. Roberts sat down in the front row. “But it was just a lot of rah-rah crap,” she soon concluded.

The best of the questions were drowned out by long, thunderous bursts of responsive cheerleading: We are? . . . Union! . . . We are? . . . Union!

So she crossed, knowing there would be some hell to pay but never imagining just how much--or that the hell would burn so deeply through her mind.

*

The long, gnarled roots of the war between Caterpillar and the UAW run deep, but in the year leading up to the strike they seemed to swell to the surface and break the earth between the two sides. The company was worried about global competition. The union was worried about its very survival.

The 1980s had left both badly scarred. Cat had suffered its first losses in 50 years; after painful introspection, it resolved to never again allow costs to get out of hand. A strong union was deemed a hindrance to that, and the UAW rightly sensed itself lined up in the company cross hairs. Downsizing had already thinned its ranks with all the enthusiasm of a buffalo hunt.

Each side had valid concerns, and a sensible middle ground might well have been found. But the two of them, so very different in their vision of economic reality, were identical in the willful way they staked out fixed positions. Bad blood had bubbled up from past negotiations like so much poisonous waste. Leaders disliked and distrusted each other. The chemistry was explosive.

In this atmosphere, both sides proved willing to make use of their most destructive weapons, and the result would become the textbook example of how businesses have now leaped ahead of unions in the labor-management arms race.

Against the threat of permanent replacements, the strike had become an outmoded piece of artillery, prone to backfires, a cannon melted down.

*

Jerry Brown is president of the UAW’s biggest local, the one here in Peoria. A colorfully profane man with a hound dog’s likable face, he grew up in nearby Pekin in a die-hard union family. Caterpillar had hired him in 1965 right out of high school. After an apprenticeship, he became a millwright.

People in management once thought Brown a reasonable fellow. As head of the UAW’s bargaining committee in the mid-’80s, he favored giving ground on union work rules. He even helped Cat gain a no-strike clause in its parts division.

These were hard things to sell to the members. “Some of the older guys told me the company was a bunch of lying snakes, but I said we needed to walk down the road together,” Brown recalled. Still, his own doubts tortured him. Coincidence or not, just before a key union vote, he suffered a heart attack.

Those were awful years, with three-fifths of the local, more than 12,000 workers, let go. Brown would find some of them hanging around the union hall, the fire in their eyes burning low. Many of their jobs had been “outsourced,” farmed out to smaller factories that paid their workers less.

Back then, global competition was breathing down the company’s neck, and emergency measures had seemed necessary to cope with emergency times. But by 1990, Cat was well into a long run of profits, and Brown had turned into a skeptic. Why was Caterpillar still trying to do away with union jobs?

In its latest move, Cat wanted to replace its UAW janitors with outside crews. Sure, that meant it wouldn’t have to pay a $17-an-hour union wage. But being a janitor was a good job for older UAW people with health problems.

Brown could see similar things going on all over America. That anxious talk about a global economy now seemed like a never-ending set of corporate excuses for sticking it to the worker: wave after wave of layoffs, one person doing the work of two, outsourcing as a way of life, tiny raises or none at all.

Downsizing was for a crisis. It wasn’t supposed to be an obsession.

*

In 1990, Caterpillar had a new CEO in Don Fites, a tall man with a well-creased face often likened to that of actor Gene Hackman. Fites was another in a long line of up-through-the-ranks company executives who had made it to the top. The Peoria local gathered intelligence about him by pumping their buddies or relatives who had jobs over at company headquarters. The reports coming back gave Jerry Brown the jitters.

He had never met Fites, but he managed to despise him anyway. “He’s a pee-bringin’ s.o.b., like a drill sergeant I had in the Army who could make you wet your pants,” Brown said. “That’s Don Fites. And he came in here with an ego as big as a bus and a new company attitude: Let’s get rid of the union.”

Brown required little more proof beyond Fites’ choice of Jerry Brust as head of labor relations. Years before, the UAW had lobbied to get Brust kicked aside, and they thought they had succeeded when he was moved to personnel.

Now he was back, with a promotion no less. “Brust is the world champion of all liars,” Brown said. “He’s one guy who puts me over the top. After a few minutes, I just want to choke the son of a bitch and bash his face in.”

*

Jerry Brust was once an Army officer, and there remains a military air about him. His words are exact, his command of facts astonishing. After 27 years at Cat, he is known within management as bulldog tough and a thorough, dot-the-i’s kind of guy. The notion of him taking on the UAW had a certain wry appeal. “He ticks people off just by coming into the room,” said one plant manager.

Brust’s formidable mission was to free the company from pattern bargaining, the hallowed union practice of getting all U.S. firms in one industry to pay roughly the same wages and benefits. In the heavy-equipment business, if Deere & Co. signed a contract for such-and-such, Cat was expected to follow.

“One size fits all,” is how company officials described it. To them, it made no sense. These days, Caterpillar was a globe-trotting giant, No. 45 in the Fortune 500, with half of its sales going abroad. Its major competitors were not U.S. manufacturers but Komatsu of Japan and other foreign companies.

By Cat’s accounting, these rivals not only had slightly lower labor costs, they were not so tied up by a mile-long cord of union work rules. The global economy required Caterpillar to be quicker to move and slower to spend.

Those emergency measures of the ‘80s were now permanent ground rules. After all, the company’s business was cyclical; bad times were always just around the corner. Costs had to be kept in line--and pattern contracts had to go.

But could those warhorses at the UAW be brought around to the new thinking? Brust himself was unsure. Like most American business executives, he had a dubious regard for unions. “The service they sell to employees for their two hours pay per month is: You need us to deal with the big, bad company,” he said. Unions had no purpose unless they had battles to fight.

Companies with an “enlightened” management simply did not need them.

*

Brust’s idea for dealing with the UAW was to try to be direct. The UAW’s contract still had a year to run, but in September, 1990, 100 union leaders were invited to Peoria for an all-day meeting. The morning was filled with presentations by one corporate vice president after another.

Brust wanted the union to see all the numbers: “more information than we’d ever shared before” about business plans, forecasts, competitor analyses. The company was not pleading poverty, he said; actually, it was strong. But to stay that way it needed a labor contract tailored to its own long-term plans and not a “cookie cutter” pact that followed someone else’s wage pattern.

As the morning went on, Brust noticed that his guests were “ominously quiet.” The presentations had provoked no give-and-take. Finally, near the end of the session, someone from the UAW’s international headquarters spoke up.

“Have you decided about outsourcing the janitors?” he wanted to know. “Yes, we’re going ahead,” Brust answered.

When the meeting broke at noon, he invited his guests to have lunch in the cafeteria. But Brown and the other UAW people were busy muttering among themselves. What a crock, they said. How stupid do they think we are? This dog-and-pony show is just another way to make us swallow more concessions.

They skipped the free lunch and never came back.

*

The matter of the janitors, seemingly small, was symbolic of something much greater: an essential conflict about a fair wage. Should salaries float along with market forces, some going high, some low--or yield to some deeper notion of equality? The world has struggled with this for centuries.

In this case, the company would argue: Why should we pay janitors $17 an hour, $32 including benefits, when we can get the same work done by someone else for $10, including the cleaning supplies?

The union would respond: That’s easy enough for you to say; you’re not the janitor. He has to pay the same price for a loaf of bread as everyone else.

The company: If we spend too much for labor, market forces will catch up with us. And these days those forces are global.

The union: Well, when you get in trouble, we’ll talk about it then.

*

With unions in retreat, they must constantly decide when to fight and risk their lumps--and when to cut their losses. At Cat, the UAW represented 16,000 workers in York, Pa., and the Illinois cities of Peoria, Aurora, Pontiac and Decatur. But in Joliet, Ill., the plant had been organized in the 1950s by the International Assn. of Machinists. Faced with the same company pressure, the IAM reacted much differently than the UAW. It proposed concessions.

Under a revised contract, new hires would start at only half wages, $8.25 an hour, though they could steadily advance toward a full salary within five years if they were able to prove themselves at certain skill levels.

“We weren’t about to butt heads,” said Dick Hileman, an IAM official. “That’s the difference between us and the UAW. If the company’s wrong, we’ll try to show them their mistake. But you can’t dictate: Take it or leave it.”

In the horse trading, the IAM got to keep its $17-an-hour union janitors.

*

In Peoria, Jerry Brown would call the IAM “a bunch of candy asses.” Good union people did not permit a lower wage tier for new workers; that was one generation selling out the next. “Unions built the middle class in America,” he said. “If the corporations can beat down the unions, then where will we be? There’ll just be rich and poor, and people like us will be the poor.”

Cat seemed to have declared open war on the UAW. In early 1991, it began to take out newspaper ads that made pattern bargaining sound like so much prehistoric cave writing. “Everyone wins with innovative labor agreements,” read the headline in one. Brown phoned Detroit. Maybe the UAW needed its own ads, but the higher-ups said it was cowardly to fight battles in the press.

Those ads had people talking all over Peoria. The company signed an eighth of the area’s paychecks. For a factory worker, a job at Cat was the best-paying work to have, and the worst work to lose. If people were laid off, no one else wanted to hire them; employers figured that sooner or later the worker would get recalled and hurry back to Caterpillar for the better wages.

Many people actually resented the UAW workers. At Cat, they earned $40,000 a year in a city where a nice three-bedroom house sold for $70,000. They already had a pension plan and health insurance and three to five weeks of paid vacation. How much more did they want? Many UAW members, Diane Roberts among them, thought the ads made a lot of sense. Maybe the union had gotten a little too greedy.

At Caterpillar headquarters, Jerry Brust knew very well that the company had broken a taboo. In labor relations, management was not supposed to take its case directly to the union membership. But he felt justified in doing it: The workers were entitled to the information; let them decide who’s right.

Still, he could imagine all the cursing going on in Detroit: How dare they undermine the bargaining process! They’re going to pay for this! Cursing the loudest, of course, would be the “Big Dog” himself, Bill Casstevens.

*

A man of mythic toughness within the UAW ranks, Casstevens was the union’s second in command and the one who negotiated for the 36,300 members in the heavy-equipment business. In 1991, he was 63 years old and only four years from his mandatory retirement. He had already decided on the epitaph for his tombstone: He was as nice as you let him be and as nasty as you made him be.

Within Caterpillar’s management, there were indeed a few executives who had witnessed the nice side; the adjective honest also came to mind. But most considered him to be an unpredictable bully who bargained with mongoose-eyed ferocity and a guttersnipe’s tongue. To them, he represented a barnacled kind of hard-line unionism that had no place in the modern business world.

Casstevens came to his militancy from raw personal experience. He had gone to work in the textile mills of North Carolina at 14, where his father had labored before him. The older man lost his job when his hand got caught in the sharp rollers of a machine. It ground up his arm before someone shut the switch. He was left to go on without a pension or health benefits.

This oncoming showdown with Caterpillar had “Cass” in one of his furies. If the company wanted special treatment, then it should bargain for it at the table and set the industry pattern. “First dog over the fence gets a fresh whiff” is how he put it. In 1988, when Cat was the first to sign a contract, “they were happy enough then to tell me to stick it up John Deere’s rear.”

So if the company big shots had now turned so dead-set against pattern, maybe it would take the persuasiveness of a strike to straighten them out.

*

Cat made its first proposal in September, 1991. Jerry Brown paged through the document. It was 14 inches thick and full of things that offended him. “Their labor reps must have gotten together and had a wet dream,” he said.

The contract, with later sweeteners, offered 3% and 4% annual pay increases to higher-skilled employees, but nothing for the one in five workers in lower job categories. A second tier of wages, at less than half the standard $17 an hour, was introduced for newly hired or recalled employees in the parts warehouses.

At the same time, a “flextime” scheme was introduced that could force weekend work without the payment of overtime. To control health-care costs, UAW workers would have to join the same medical network used by Cat’s white-collar staff.

Instead of guaranteeing an exact number of union jobs, the company promised work to people “by name” for six years. As those workers retired, however, that meant the company could get rid of their positions if it wanted. This presented yet another threat to the union’s waning strength.

“There were dozens of take-aways, all based on a compulsion to break away from pattern bargaining,” Casstevens recalled. “For 30 years they did very well under pattern. Then it became a smoke screen for attacking the union.”

To Casstevens, the global competitiveness argument simply did not apply here. Labor costs at Komatsu and Caterpillar were not that far apart. Cat had even admitted it could afford a pattern deal; it was simply refusing to pay the freight because it thought the union was no longer strong enough to make the company do it.

But true to their tough-guy image, UAW leaders did not present the logic of their arguments in public. Much to the contrary, they refused to even admit they had read through the company’s offer.

They gruffly claimed to have returned it “unopened.”

*

Collective bargaining can be like a game of chicken, with the two sides unwilling to veer until the last minute. In this case, formal talks were only an excuse for face-to-face name-calling. Casstevens fully expected the company to change course, but he thought he first needed to “get their attention.”

He called a strike for Nov. 4, 1991, limiting it to two factories to lessen the price for his people. The company in turn showed its grit by locking out the workers at two other plants. For five months, both sides jabbed and parried. The lockout ended, more walkouts began. Talks were held, talks broke off.

A long strike is a terrible thing, like a hole through which every penny of savings is draining away. Some people lose their cars and homes. They suffer the indignity of accepting free food. Marriages are strained and broken.

In this “selective” strike, the hardships seemed especially maddening and unfair. UAW workers in some plants were on the street while those at other locations were collecting overtime. “My union brothers were out there buying sirloin at the grocery store while I was opening cans,” said Don Karch.

In the midst of things, Caterpillar announced a $404-million loss for 1991, a time of global recession. It also threatened to close down its factory in York, Pa., unless workers there accepted a separate set of wage concessions.

UAW leaders were not unhappy to hear that Cat was hurting. Maybe a wave of red ink would make it surrender. But there was a gloomy possibility too. In struck factories, management people and office workers had begun to do some of the UAW jobs. What if Caterpillar went a further step and also tried to hire permanent replacements?

It was a scary thought. “But they’re not that dumb,” Bill Casstevens recalls thinking. “They know they can’t run that place without us.”

*

The company’s size would argue against it. No firm as big as Caterpillar had ever attempted such a thing. Who would they be kidding, trying to replace 12,600 experienced workers? “That’s not a bicycle factory in there,” said Ted Johnson, an officer in the Decatur local. “When you’re building machines as big as a union hall and want them to run like a watch, that takes skill.”

But the use of permanent replacements had become a mighty temptation to an American company. In most democracies, the tactic was illegal. And even here, it had rarely been employed before 1975, the strike so widely acknowledged as a worker’s fundamental right. But by the late 1970s, employers increasingly began to turn to a new breed of “labor consultants” who encouraged the use of replacements. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan himself took the advice and replaced striking air traffic controllers. Corporations followed the leader.

In the aftermath, the strike--the workers’ ultimate weapon--no longer carries the same blast. Not only has management’s use of permanent replacements broken up strikes, it has prevented them as well. Since 1982, the average number of major walkouts each year, those involving 1,000 or more employees, is a mere 18% of what it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

A quirk in the law, stemming from a 1938 Supreme Court opinion, has permitted this. It said that while a company could not lawfully fire strikers, it did not have to make room for their return by letting go any replacements.

With that twist of legal logic, the “right” to strike was quite a risky privilege. To reverse this, the House of Representatives in 1991 and 1993 passed bills to ban the use of permanent replacements, but the legislation did not survive Republican filibusters in the Senate. In March, President Clinton issued an executive order calling for the government to cut off federal contracts with any company that hires permanent replacements.

It is about time someone did something, Bill Casstevens said. If people could not strike for fear of losing their jobs, America was not a “totally free” country. He wished the unions had taken to the streets to get that law passed. But how long had it been since workers really stood together?

“Union people have things they didn’t have in the earlier days,” Casstevens said. “They have cars and boats and houses and all that stuff. So we’re victims of our own success, and most workers don’t realize how vulnerable they are and how quickly it could all be taken away.”

*

Caterpillar was not keen on hiring replacements. However potent a strike-buster, the tactic was poison for future labor relations. But as other ideas failed to get the union to budge, it seemed the logical step to take. Gerald Flaherty, a group president, said the move was partly done out of empathy for the strikers, giving them “a reason to rationalize coming back to work.”

Letters were sent to every home. People had a week to decide. They studied the potent words: “During this strike, we have found that we require considerably fewer employees. If you do not decide to return before required openings are filled, you may lose your place in this reduced work force.”

The ultimatum was all that people could talk about. Fear and anger flooded through them. The average UAW worker had put in 25 years at Caterpillar. Is that all they were to the company, some muscle and bone as easily exchanged as a rubber tire? They felt they had built Cat as surely as any executive in a white shirt. Is this what 25 years of sweat adds up to in modern America?

For perhaps 10% to 20%, the decision was as clear as air; there was a union tradition to uphold and they would die before they would cross. Michael Legel was third-generation, blue-collar Caterpillar. Like his dad, his granddad and his uncles, he did not trust the company even a little bit: “If they’ve got so much trouble being competitive, why don’t they cut their own salaries?”

But for most people there was no indelible line that separated right from wrong. The choice was complicated by families and mortgages and a million little laments about both the company and the UAW. Was supporting the union the more principled stand if it meant pulling your kids out of college?

Fay Vogelsang did not cross, but she considered it. “Everybody was feeling each other out,” she said. “There was a lot of wait-and-see. People didn’t want to be first, but they sure weren’t going to be the last either.”

Workers did not want to risk their job and full pension, but crossing had huge consequences too. The decision would define a person. Neighbors, the barber, the druggist: They all would know. People imagined their parents peering down from heaven, calling them cowards. Husbands and wives openly quarreled, while others did not speak at all, afraid to loose the wild panic they held inside.

The undecided collected into groups. Jim Mangan asked 25 co-workers to come over and thrash things out in his basement, starting out with a prayer. He had become sick with the tension, as if his heart had come down with the flu. “The union is ready to sacrifice my job for nothing,” he said.

Dick Owens reminded his family of what it was like to be laid off, the worrying, the want ads, the spirit-sapping humiliation. “Let somebody else be the third-shift stock boy at the grocery store,” he said.

George Witt chose not to think out loud at home. When he crossed, his wife could not believe it. “Why did you do that?” she asked sadly. What was she going to tell people at work? His sons were ashamed too. At church, a friend came up and offered Witt a few dollars.

“No, thanks,” he said sheepishly, “I crossed.”

“You’re kidding,” the man replied and turned away without another word.

Diane Roberts, still unable to make up her mind, went to the bowling alley on a Thursday night. She knew some of her co-workers would be there. “If I cross, is there any one of you I can catch a ride with?” she asked.

It was as if she had set fire to the American flag. The men just glared at her until one, taking pity, gave her a hug and said:

“Honey, you got to do what you got to do.”

*

By the company’s count, about 1,100 of the 12,600 strikers came back to work that first week. The union’s estimate was less, but its leaders were uneasy. There were breaks in the levee and the tide was rising. Some workers were only waiting to see if the company would actually begin hiring. Cat boasted that thousands of job-seekers had been answering its help-wanted ads.

Jerry Brown could not recall a worse time. “You think you’ve felt all the pressures of life--the deaths of parents and friends and things--but this was just overwhelming,” he said. “So many people were depending on us.”

A week after the company’s deadline, a federal mediator persuaded the two sides to meet one more time. He proposed a compromise that might temporarily cool things down: The UAW would return to work; Caterpillar would stop trying to hire replacements; the two sides would withdraw their last contract offers and return to the table in 90 days. Both parties went off to consider it.

Casstevens still did not believe the company could get along without the union, but he anguished over the possibility. Was he asking people to commit “economic suicide”? He decided it was best to put everyone back to work.

A motion was made to that effect, but Brown interrupted: “We don’t need that. If that’s your call, Cass, then that’s that.”

Caterpillar’s negotiators had returned to the meeting room first. They were willing to halt the hiring of replacements, but if the UAW’s workers wanted to come back, the company would impose the terms of its latest offer.

Casstevens seemed flustered by the company’s late maneuver. “Then we are unconditionally returning to work,” he said and stormed out of the room.

Caterpillar’s Jerry Brust would always remember how his old adversary had looked during that moment of defeat. “You could see the red going up his face and neck. He was visibly shaking.”

*

Divide-and-conquer was a powerful company strategy--although, when it came to building tractors, it was not so good to have the conquered so divided.

The union’s surrender, barely a week after her own, left Diane Roberts in a lurch. To many of her union co-workers, she had become a pariah and fair game for revenge. Scabs would pay a price for their break with solidarity.

The line-crossers were largely shunned. Four men worked beside Roberts, installing tractor seats, but only one would speak to her. The others avoided eye contact. “It was as if I had some dangerous disease,” she said.

Her friends were suddenly her enemies. Only months before, she had stood with a co-worker in a funeral chapel after his dad had died. Now the same man turned his back on her and said she was “trash.”

The abuse was petty but infuriating. Things were scribbled about her and the others on the restroom walls. Errant bolts and washers sometimes flew their way from behind the racks of spare parts. Cigarette butts and dirty rags were dumped around Roberts’ work area. Things were stolen from her toolbox.

She tried to understand how these people felt. The strike had won them nothing, and it was easier to blame her than stand up to management or the union. But the mistreatment went on month after month. Would it ever stop?

At times, she needed to cry. She did not want anyone to see her, so she would huddle down inside the massive cab of one of the bigger tractors, a D9 or a D10. She ate her lunch in the women’s restroom, sitting on the floor.

Even at home, fear churned inside her. Her nerves were in knots. She would wake in tears. Her sister started to notice strange things. Roberts was sullen and forgetful and sometimes she hung up the phone in mid-sentence. They agreed she should ask her supervisors for help.

Roberts wanted to explain things calmly to her bosses, but as soon as she began to talk her voice faltered into sobs. They took her to the company doctor. She was depressed and exhausted. She still could not stop crying.

The job she had wanted so badly was now something she dreaded. Only months of stress counseling and a new work assignment would get her back to normal.

Roberts would tell the counselor how unjust this all was. The others were the lucky ones. The way things had worked out, they had not crossed--but they still had their jobs. And now they had the safety of their own numbers.

For them, the strike was over. For her, never; it just went on and on and on.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to the reporting of this series.

Next: Running the plant backward

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Strikes in Decline

There were 45 major strikes and lockouts in 1994, involving 322,000 workers, down from work stoppages numbering in the hundred during most postwar years.

1981: President Reagan fires striking air controllers.

Source: United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Unions’ Hold

Union membership as a percentage of all manufacturing workers:

Year Manufacturing workers (in thousands) % in unions 1983 19,066 27.8% 1984 20,207 26.0% 1985 20,120 24.8% 1986 20,296 24.0% 1987 20,235 23.2% 1988 20,430 22.1% 1989 20,690 21.6% 1990 20,339 20.6% 1991 19,590 20.3% 1992 19,076 19.7% 1993 18,710 19.2% 1994 19,267 18.2%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics