The Inside Strategy: Less Work and More Play at Cat : Union: Workers stung by strike’s bitter end try tactic of T-shirts, balloons and antics. Bosses answer with firings.

Beyond the hum and squeal of the great machines, the factory was all at once a meeting place and a holding pen, a spot where the workers could feel at home and a place where each day they gave up their freedom. It was the Church of the Steady Paycheck and the Curse of the Monumental Boredom. It was food on the table and shoes for the kids. It was also that steady ache in the shoulders and a deep regret in the gut: Where had all the years disappeared?

At Caterpillar, most factory workers were well into their third decade with the company, close to the payoff of a full pension; “30 and out” was the inspirational thought that lifted many people out of bed each morning. In the sour air of 1992, the idea of retirement had never seemed more appealing.

Workers were laboring under an imposed contract, humbled after a 163-day strike. Caterpillar, the giant manufacturer of earthmoving equipment, had brought the United Auto Workers to its knees by threatening to hire permanent replacements. Against that bludgeon, the strike was only a saber made of tin, and unions all across America were in search of alternative tactics.

The UAW decided to try something known as an “in-plant campaign,” a way to strike that was not quite a strike, guerrilla war instead of a frontal assault. It asked workers to slow things down and screw them up--go a little brain dead. Maybe Cat would be ready to bargain after it realized who really controlled the shop floor.

The campaign’s main element was “work-to-rule.” Workers were supposed to wait for orders, correct no mistakes, follow every cockamamie company rule to the letter. If parts were getting low, let them run out. If a machine was unplugged, call a repairman. If the boss said to work round-the-clock, go stand by the clock.

This continuation of the struggle was pure adrenaline for about 5 or 10% of the rank-and-file. They were gung-ho union and saw work in terms of we-they, us-them, the put-upon workers against the pinheads in white shirts.

Gary Romans, who worked on a crew that made tractor undercarriages, thought “a cancer of anti-unionism” was spreading across America. He was happy to allow his line to follow any obvious error on a mistaken work order: “If the company wants to treat me like horse flesh, then that’s how I’ll act.”

Blaine Arendt ran a machine complex as big as a basketball court, making lift arms for the buckets on tractors. “Ordinarily, I know what to do, but instead I waited for my boss,” he said with pride. “Sometimes it took a long time to find him. And if a fuse needed replacing, that took a long time too.”

But most workers thought the union’s new strategy was impractical or too risky or just plain silly. It might work, if everyone did it. But that was never going to happen. A pattern of fouling up would sooner or later get a worker into trouble. How was the UAW going to protect him then?

Ed Brandon was pro-union all the way. He operated a furnace and could burn your ear off complaining about the damned company. “But it’s in my nature to run quality,” he said. “I’m not going to purposely ruin a pile of iron.”

Certainly, everyone goofed off a little. For some people, it was the only way to stay sane. They stole minutes after a lunch break or wandered off to gab or simply sat in the can. No one at Caterpillar was there to set any production records. Other folks may have careers or callings; they had jobs.

In fact, that beaten-down attitude was the big problem with work-to-rule. It took too much effort. Most people put their mind on automatic pilot when they got to work and did their job by rote. It would demand more exertion to do things wrong than to do them right. Time would pass more slowly.

The entire in-plant campaign might have fizzled out over time except for another part of it: the wearing of anti-Caterpillar T-shirts and buttons.

This bit of theater had the bosses fuming. They began to go after people.

And that, finally, would bring the workers back together.

Firebrand Unionism

A union’s strength rests in its numbers, the pooled destiny of its members. But unlike a company, the union has little power to make people do things. It cannot fire them or dock their pay. It cannot even force them to attend a meeting. In a labor dispute, home field advantage always goes to management.

The UAW workers at Caterpillar were used to the concept of a strike; it was stop or go, on or off. But an in-plant campaign was a more complicated idea. It required people to be active instead of passive, to volunteer in a militia.

For advice, the UAW turned to two labor professors who put on seminars for the leaders of the locals. In-plant campaigns were no silver bullet, the men warned. A “culture of solidarity” was needed, and that was a rare thing these days. Unions seldom asked much of their people except the paying of dues.

“With work-to-rule, there are always problems with participation,” said Prof. Steve Babson of Wayne State University. “It asks people to stand up to bosses who may be shouting in their face. It requires a kind of bravery.” Momentum would have to be built with rallies and meetings and word-of-mouth.

For starters, the union might try to hand out T-shirts, asking people to wear their loyalty on their sleeve. Leaders needed to be identified at strategic places on the shop floor. Teams would have to make plans for every plant. People had to organize and organize and organize some more.

This was a unionism for firebrands. And it would not be an easy thing to preach to workers looking over the rainbow toward a pension.

Divided Within

From the get-go, the UAW was divided from within. Hundreds of the 12,600 strikers had crossed the picket lines when the company threatened to hire replacements. To many who stayed out, this was an unpardonable wrong.

Line-crossers were called “scabs,” whistled and hooted at. Die-hards like Gary Romans jumped down people’s throats for speaking to them. “It was like we were in the foxhole together, and those scabs turned and ran,” he said.

In the Decatur, Ill., factory, only 10 of 1,870 union people had crossed. The decision to return to work changed Steve Vail’s life. Two shots were fired into his garage. Obscene things about his family were scrawled in the plant bathrooms. Door handles to his truck were greased. His work was sabotaged.

The odd thing was, Vail, a former UAW steward, was pro-union. “Without it, who’s going to protect you from the bosses and their ego problems?” he said. He had only crossed to pay his bills, to save his home. That first day, as he slowly drove up to the factory gate, there was a mob of picketers. They shined a spotlight into his eyes. He was in a half-daze. “I really didn’t know what I was going to do until I did it, turn right and work or left and go away.”

A Day in Court

In step with its bylaws, the union held “trials” for the line-crossers. Jerry Brown, president of the huge Peoria, Ill. local, argued that this bit of tit-for-tat was a mistake. “I was madder than hell at some scabs . . . but they were good people who just got terrified. If a worker beats up another worker, who wins? It’s the company that’s smiling.”

But his views did not win out. The punishment for “conduct unbecoming a member” was usually suspension of voting privileges for a year or more.

Only the most repentant of the accused bothered to attend their day in court. George Witt, a roly-poly lathe operator, kept apologizing so often that people joked he was less of a scab and more like a festering sore.

“The company bluffed me, like in a poker game,” he testified contritely.

He was able to soften his suspension down to six months.

T-Shirt Day

On April 29, 1993, Caterpillar CEO Don Fites sent an unusual letter to the employees. At long last, and for everyone’s good, management would no longer punish workers for wearing clothes or buttons that personally attacked him.

It had been quite a zany year, starting with “Permanently Replace Fites.” The slogan first appeared on a sign pinned to an old T-shirt. The worker wearing the garb, union steward Ken Myers, was fired, then taken back only hours later. Managers just did not know what to do about renegade apparel.

“Permanently Replace Fites” soon became something of an official UAW imprint, mass-produced on T-shirts and buttons. Zealous individuals tried out other slogans as well: “Kick the Bum Out Before Cat Goes Broke”; “All I Want for Christmas Is a New CEO”; “Happiness Is Don Fites’ Picture on a Milk Carton.” It was popular to depict the boss as a miser or a drunk.

Relatively few workers actually wore the shirts, but if the trend caught on anywhere, it was in the York, Pa., plant. Cat had said the factory was losing money and threatened to close it. Under the imposed contract, new hires into York’s parts division--or anyone recalled from layoff--earned only half pay.

In November of 1992, the York local called for a “T-Shirt Day.” About 100 of the 1,400 workers wore the now-familiar red fabric with “Permanently Replace Fites” on the front. Supervisors told them to change clothes or cover up the offensive words. The 19 who said no were immediately suspended.

The company was cracking down--and managers would not be fooled by employee tricks. Suspensions were meted out for T-shirts that used “Fights” or “Fits” in place of Fites. The parking lots were patrolled. Workers who hung the shirts in their cars were also suspended, as was a man who had sneakily penned the slogan in two places on his automobile’s sun visor.

Rallying Point

The in-plant campaign had found a rallying point. Most people may have been unwilling to put on those T-shirts or buttons, but it bothered them to see union people cut down by the company. Factory life had gotten a little wacky. Supervisors often did not know what part a worker was running on his machine, but they sure could recite what the sticker said on the same worker’s toolbox.

Week after week, there were confrontations. At the Mapleton, Ill., foundry, the company suspended a UAW leader for the T-shirt. The next day, more than 100 people, one in five workers, wore it in outright defiance. In the Aurora plant, people had been slicing up employee newsletters and putting photos of Fites and the other bosses in the urinals. Supervisors ordered five union stewards off their regular jobs to clean the bathrooms.

Word of every dispute skipped from plant to plant. A new militancy hung in the air. The union called rallies in the parking lots. Hot dogs were given away. People donned the T-shirts and waved banners: “No Contract, No Peace!”

Caterpillar did not want its property used in this way. Police took people away for trespassing. And that just led to bigger rallies. At one, Bill Casstevens, the UAW’s No. 2 man in Detroit, was arrested. So were dozens of husbands and wives, their arms linked together. Couples would recall that they felt like the freedom fighters of the civil rights era, rocking together in the police van and singing the union gospel, “Solidarity Forever.”

Cat in a Bind

The people in Cat’s top management were furious about the goings-on. They had an $11-billion business to run, not a high school gym class. Quality was a corporate sacrament. And now the union was defiling the holy writ, not only encouraging people to do bad work but bragging about it in public.

What were customers to think of tractors built by gripers and saboteurs? Some 75,000 people visited Caterpillar factories each year. They deserved a better show than red T-shirts and a splash of anti-company propaganda.

Jerry Brust, head of labor relations, studied up on in-plant campaigns. They were also known as “inside games” and “running the plant backward.”

The company was in an awful bind. “Our supervisors were put in the position of refereeing a class of 6-year-olds,” Brust said. He and Cat’s lawyers were always on the phone, discussing what slogans to forbid.

One major concern was protection of the line-crossers. Caterpillar would not permit a “Scab Hunter” shirt with a man peering down the cross hairs of a rifle. Nor would it allow buttons saying “UAW Member in Good Standing.”

There had to be limits, though in some ways where the line was drawn made no difference. Brust was wise to what the union was up to. Its strategy was to keep ratcheting things up “if what they did at first didn’t get your goat.”

He liked to use a basketball metaphor. The UAW would do whatever it took “to draw a foul.”

The Face Out Front

Union honchos had a bad word to say about most all the Cat top brass except for Wayne Zimmerman, vice president of the human services division. He was a 40-year man who had done nearly every job in manufacturing. UAW people thought him a decent guy, still more or less straight-up despite the corporate warp.

The company made good use of Zimmerman’s likability. It was not Don Fites who appeared regularly on TV. It was Zimmerman, his slow, friendly voice coming across as homey as maple syrup dripping down a stack of pancakes.

But even Wayne Zimmerman was seething about the in-plant campaign. The way he saw it, on every Caterpillar payroll about 95% of the employees were hard-working and honest--and the 5% who were not, “the radicals,” were now running the UAW. “They want to put this company out of business,” he said.

What made it all the more maddening was the help the union was getting from the U.S. government. The UAW had been filing claims with the National Labor Relations Board about all the firings and suspensions. The board was issuing dozens of complaints, and Cat was going to have to defend itself in hearings.

Zimmerman could not believe some of these federal complaints. An employee had been found with a hand-drawn cartoon of a line-crosser performing oral sex on a foreman. That seemed to him a firing offense if there ever was one.

“But the NLRB said that [cartoon] was protected activity,” he said, a rush of anger pulsing through that neighborly voice. “We should have run it in a front-page ad in the [newspaper]: That’s your tax dollars at work.”

Low Morale

The company’s standard-issue public statement about “work-to-rule” was one reassuring to customers: production was normal. Cat’s lawyers, on the other hand, preferred to paint a picture of factories in chaos. This made disciplinary measures seem more legitimate in legal papers filed to the NLRB.

In truth, while “work-to-rule” had only spotty results, the factories did suffer from the more general malaise of bad morale. Even more than usual, people did not want to be at work. Tension was boredom’s new companion.

Jerry Holloman managed a building in the Mossville engine division, near Peoria. Sometimes the job was becoming a pain in the butt, he said. Which buttons were OK and which ones were not? Some guy wore one that read: “Please Don’t Tell My Mother I Work at Caterpillar. She Thinks I Play Piano at a Whorehouse.”

As part of its campaign, the UAW was filing a ton of grievances and safety violations. The paperwork was aggravating. At shift changes, dozens of the UAW’s more spirited advocates would march in formation through the narrow corridors, bellowing, “We are union!” The racket was thunderous.

Holloman knew who the “troublemakers” were. By his reckoning, they were the same people who had always caused problems, excessive absenteeism and such. The UAW had long been their guardian angel. “If you’re a goldbrick and a malcontent, it’s nice to hide behind the union rules,” he said.

Two Perspectives

At Caterpillar, as at most companies, there was a rigid line between labor and management. Inevitably, the two sides saw the world from opposing angles.

There were managers who said the union could change an eager worker into a lazy slug, and union men who said the company could turn a good worker into an arrogant s.o.b. by making him a manager. Bosses complained that workers showed no pride and took no initiative, and workers complained that bosses made them ship out substandard junk in order to meet production quotas. Workers thought long years of service merited special treatment, while managers wondered about the wisdom of seniority rights: Why favor people simply because they persist?

Bosses earned their stripes by improving the output, but there was not much in it for the worker, and some of that was the union’s own doing. Factory work traditionally involved regimentation, specific tasks for specific people. To better protect workers laboring under such a system, the union over the years sought to refine the company’s rules and make them explicit. There were hard-and-fast regulations for assigning jobs, making promotions, paying wages.

In contract form, these protections for the group were won at the price of individual rewards based on merit. Union solidarity meant job security, not job competition; workers stuck together, no one trying to get ahead of the rest. Wages were the same for the fast as the slow--and a worker’s best course was often a middle one, neither shirking nor making others look bad.

Manufacturing under this restrained system, the company emphasized discipline and not independence. The workday was designed much like a school day, with a short lunch period and timed breaks instead of a recess. Student and teacher, worker and foreman: Workers made the comparison often. They joked about goofing off. They complained about those “kiss-asses” whom the plant managers called by their first name.

Caterpillar was surely doing something right to be so profitable for so long, but it was not a workplace for the disciples of W. Edwards Deming and the other gurus of the post-industrial renaissance. Many machines required computer skills, but workers were not motivated to come up with ways to make them run better. There was no single-minded devotion to innovation, no thirst for the worker’s creative input, no emphasis on labor-management cooperation.

Those things would have required mutual trust and respect.

Working Together

Oddly enough, the company and the union had begun a program for cooperation in 1986. It was called ESP, short for the Employee Satisfaction Process. Its goal was to break down that customary wall between workers and their bosses.

Experts and federal commissions have hailed such programs of mutual trust as the wave of the future in labor relations. Teamwork is in; butting heads is out. The UAW has been something of an apostle of cooperation in its auto worker agreements with Saturn and the GM-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, Calif.

At Caterpillar, the union was more skeptical. The program was voluntary, and some local leaders were opposed. Larry Solomon, now president of the Decatur, Ill., local, called it the Easily Suckered People program. He warned that it was just a sly way for Cat to sap the workers’ collective power.

“Any time you tell workers to cooperate with the company, you’re telling them it’s OK to reduce their loyalty to the union,” he said. “The company knows which employees to pat on the head while they’re peeing on their leg.”

But at the Aurora, Ill., plant, most UAW members were willing to give it a try. They went to weekly meetings with management. At first, the groups merely suggested creature comforts--soda machines and the like--but then they began coming up with ideas for every aspect of the manufacturing process.

“It changed everything; the worker had some say over his job, and he was treated like a human being and not just a number,” said Bob Ross, who was the Aurora local’s ESP chairman. “Top management was very receptive. We zeroed in on quality, anything to make the customer happy. That’s where true job security comes from, everyone pulling in the same direction to make money.”

ESP gains were touted in employee newsletters. The company estimated it had saved $10 million in Aurora alone. Managers and workers got to know each other. Absenteeism was down. Grievances in the shop fell to almost nothing.

But then, when other plants went on strike in late 1991, Cat locked the Aurora workers out. “I was shocked,” Ross said. “The relationships had been so good, and now the company suddenly seemed out to get rid of the union.”

Workers began to have regrets about ESP. They had given their bosses some valuable know-how about doing things faster and cheaper. Those ideas would later be used to train replacements--and to cut the union payroll.

The hard-liners said “I told you so.” And the program never got going again.

‘Where’s George?’

As time wore on, work-to-rule was still pretty much of a bust. UAW leaders pressured their people to get things going. George Boze, who ran a high-tech drill, was a unit chairman in one of the engine factories. He was union true-blue. His dad had been a UAW rep at Cat for 31 years before retiring. Father and son would talk about the glory days of unionism, way back in the ‘30s.

Like many of the workers, George Boze saw himself as shoulder-deep in the trenches, fighting the common man’s battle to hold on to a fair wage. The rich had declared a class war, he said, and the unions were their natural enemy. His way to take on “the big-money people” was to stand up in the plant.

Boze did not get along with a new foreman in his area, Charles Haddad, who had been transferred in to make slackers toe the line. Boze thought Haddad was shadowing him around the plant, and the two men had a huge quarrel on Nov. 10, 1993: You watch it! No, you watch it! By Haddad’s account, Boze thumped him in the chest with his finger; another supervisor backs that story up. In Boze’s version, no contact was made; a UAW steward supports him.

Caterpillar fired Boze, closing out his 21 years with the company. And as word of that raced its way through the grapevine, thousands of workers began walking off their jobs at the engine works, the foundry, the tractor lines.

Boze himself could not believe the support. The next day, he drove to the factory gate at dawn. As he topped the rise, there was a surge of color below, hundreds of workers lined up along the road. “Where’s George?” they were shouting. “I felt a sense of what the union family is all about,” he said.

After the workers had been out three days, he urged them to go back in at a giant rally. It was the first time he had ever spoken before thousands of people. His wife, Claudia, was crying and blowing kisses to the crowd.

It occurred to George Boze then: So this is what it was like in the ‘30s.

Another Firing

A week later, Caterpillar fired Ken Hite in the York plant. The union had appointed him to be a steward, replacing someone not so amenable to work-to-rule. Hite was six feet of hard living with a sassy tongue, and he was able to get his co-workers to start dragging their feet, though that is not the reason Cat gave for his dismissal. A foreman claimed he saw Hite standing inside the steward’s 8-by-10-foot machine complex, urinating into the cooling system.

It was one man’s word against another’s. The foreman said he saw Hite from the back at six paces, a stream of liquid between his legs. Hite claimed the fluid was coolant, the normal discharge from a spindle as he changed a part.

Both sides wanted conclusive proof. The machine’s bulky tank was emptied, but a lab report said there was really no way to detect the puny contents of a human bladder among 260 gallons of coolant. Hite, in his own defense, made the additional argument that he lacked motive. As the machinery whirs, it sprays coolant onto the roof of the complex, which inevitably drips on his head.

The firing nevertheless stuck, ending Hite’s 26 years at Cat. He fell into a depression. Work-to-rule had been somewhat amusing to shepherd along, but now he felt the enormity of the company’s power. He had four children at home and no income. Caterpillar challenged his claim for unemployment compensation.

“He was so miserable, laying around the house,” said his wife, Ada. “Why couldn’t the company have just said he stole something? But no, they had to say he was a hog and peed on something. They tried to take his dignity.”

A full hearing was held before a referee of the Unemployment Compensation Board of Review. When she ruled that the company’s story was simply “not credible,” Hite made photocopies of the order and handed them out at the union hall. He did not want anyone to doubt that he had told the truth.

For its part, Caterpillar stayed with its decision. There would be many more firings, but time and again the company’s top executives publicly brought up the Hite case.

It was a way to make their union adversaries seem vulgar.

Unifying Forces

The firings frightened the workers, but they also united them. Unions thrive on what the writer Richard Vigilante calls the “ethic of victimhood.” Solidarity requires alienation. It nurses grievances. It loves the underdog.

Of course, there is a comparable mental support system for management. Call it the ethic of righteousness. Power is self-validating. Managers make the tough calls. They stick by them without apology and they stick by each other.

At the start, Caterpillar and the UAW were fighting over economic issues. But as the dispute went on, those matters were overtaken by the hurts each side suffered and the reprisals they contrived. Like a blood feud between warring tribes, they had gotten caught in an irrational loop.

They were fighting because they were fighting.

Wrapped in the Flag

The union, so clumsy before with public relations, in 1994 finally found a hearty image wrapped in the flag. It was “defending the American Dream.”

Workers rallied to the notion that their struggle was somehow patriotic. More and more, they began to see themselves as George Boze did, at the battlements against corporate greed. The rich wanted it all. The middle class was shrinking. The blue-collar future was without a nice home and a new car.

Caterpillar had been profitable in 1993, so much so that it began to bring back laid-off workers to its troubled parts warehouse in York. Under the imposed contract, they were only entitled to half wages of $8.50 an hour.

Sandy Koicuba was glad to get back on; she already had 17 years toward a pension, and even the lower pay was more than she was making as a waitress.

But still it riled her, doing the same work as people earning twice as much. Where was the justice in that? On paydays, she and her friend Terri Williams used to wear T-shirts that said, “Half Wages, No Benefits.”

They were an angry pair. In February, Cat announced that Don Fites’ salary package was $1.6 million. The news made the two women storm over to the plant manager. They wanted to file a grievance. About what? They did not exactly know.

It was a grievance about life and the unfairness of it all.

A Stormy Spring

In the spring of 1994, there was one wildcat strike after another, two days here, three days there. The walkouts made mayhem of production schedules.

In York, the workers walked out after paramedics took away George Erbe, a union steward with a bad heart who was complaining of chest pains. For days, supervisors had sat near Erbe’s grinding machine, timing how fast he operated. “Them evil-eyeing me like that had me all stressed out,” Erbe said.

Another strike began in Building DD at Mossville, the factory run by Jerry Holloman. Workers had tied anti-company balloons to their toolboxes, then refused to take them down. “We run a neat, clean, safe shop,” Holloman said. Balloons made the building “look like some furniture store during a fire sale.”

The issue for both sides, of course, was not really balloons. The heart of it was elsewhere. Pat Howard, a machinist and union steward, summed it up:

“It was about control, you know, who controls who.”

Divided by Balloons

Everyone could see another major strike coming. This time, because of 90 NLRB charges against Caterpillar, the UAW had the option of walking out over unfair labor practices. There was an advantage to this over striking about economic matters. By law, the company could not hire permanent replacements.

In two years, the union had rebuilt its strength after the debacle of ’92. But there was a price. To get stronger--to save itself--it had also gotten weaker, like a bear gnawing off a limb to escape the jaws of a trap.

While a majority was now ready--and even eager--to strike again, the minority who would cross the line had grown. During some of the wildcats, as many as 25% had ignored the protest and stayed at their machines.

Dick McMullen had never defied his union before, but he would not walk out over a bunch of balloons. “You just don’t do that in a workplace,” he said.

Steve Trew was another who broke with the UAW over the balloons. He had gone down to the union hall to hear what the beef was all about.

“They claimed it was their American right to fly the balloons,” he said. “Well, yes and no. I told them there was a time and place for everything.”

No Way Back

All along, the company thought the wildcat strikes were some sort of blue-collar ballet choreographed out of Detroit. Actually, the workers were making things up as they went along. The international headquarters wanted things slowed down.

In May, the leaders of the locals met with Bill Casstevens at a Holiday Inn near the Detroit airport. According to the minutes, they took turns around the table, pleading for permission to strike: What are we waiting for? Our people want it. The timing will never be better. Cat’s inventories are low.

But Casstevens, the old warhorse, was not convinced. Sometimes a strike is a sign of weakness, the lack of alternatives. The thing to do, he said, was push harder on work-to-rule, get everyone to do it so the company could not pick off the leaders. The workers had more power inside the plant than out.

This same group met again a month later. Casstevens was still wary. “A strike would be long and hard and would require the overwhelming majority to stick with it,” he said. What if Caterpillar defied the law and went ahead and hired permanent replacements? Would the workers break ranks and run?

Instead of a walkout he proposed a mail campaign directed at the company board of directors. He had some sample postcards with him.

No, no, the others grumbled. The struggle was way past the time for postcards. For two years, they had been on the front lines, leading people in a sort of hand-to-hand combat against Caterpillar foremen. They hated the enemy and had rallied the troops, and now there was no way to hold them back.

After all, they were defending the American Dream.

Next: Back on strike

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