Strike’s Bitter Legacy : Strangers in Their Own Hometown

Here on the banks of the Androscoggin River, in the dense woods of western Maine, David battled Goliath and lost. The fight was for more than jobs. It was for the soul of an old mill town and for the right of a hired hand to set a value on his own labor.

The battle ended quietly and unexpectedly the other day with no concessions and no consensus. But if there is one point on which everyone agrees, it is that the long, bitter strike at the International Paper Co.’s Androscoggin Mill changed the character of this once-neighborly little town, where friends now pass without speaking and strangers remain strangers.

What stunned everyone in Jay was how quickly the town divided and how easily decent men accepted violence as a natural expression of frustration. Strikebreakers’ homes were defaced with ugly words, windows were broken, car tires slashed.

Began Locking Doors

Those who did not support the strike were taunted with curses, and men whose closest brush with the law had been no more than a parking ticket started carrying guns and baseball bats in their vehicles. For the first time, the people of Jay began locking their doors at night.

“I don’t think there ever will be a Jay like the Jay that was,” said the town manager, Charles Noonan, who, like others, remembers this town of 5,000 residents as a warm and trusting place that knew no such thing as a bad neighbor. “We’ve seen the end of an era.”

Like many of the river communities in the nation’s most heavily forested state, Jay is a company town, living in the shadow of a giant paper mill, and into the mill, generation after generation for nearly a hundred years, sons followed their fathers and grandfathers to take their place alongside the big paper machines, as though there were no other jobs on earth.

Pride in Jobs

Many were graduated from high school on a Thursday and pulled their first shift on Friday. Papermaking, they would say, was an art form, a profession mastered over a lifetime of experience, and they spoke of their jobs with pride.

That era in Jay’s history came to an end at 7 one recent Monday morning, when the phone started ringing in the paper workers’ union hall that had once been a Chinese restaurant. It had been 481 days since 1,250 workers had walked off the job at the mill in rejection of a new contract offered by the International Paper Co., the world’s biggest paper company and the nation’s largest private landholder. John Chouinard cradled the phone in one hand, a cup of black coffee in the other.

“Local 14,” he said. “ . . . Yeah, it’s true. The strike’s over. . . . No, we didn’t lose it. They lost it for us. The international did. It’s an unconditional offer to return to work. Sixteen months down the tube. . . . What’d we get? Nothing. We don’t know the details but it looks like we lost it all.”

The word spread like wildfire through Jay, and in the McDonald’s and in Mario’s Cafe, men put down their coffee and rushed to the union hall, numb with confusion. Whaddaya mean? they demanded. The union surrendered? They sold us down the river? Is that true? What about our jobs? Is the company taking us back? We lost . . . everything ?

They had indeed. They had left jobs that, with overtime and shift compensation, paid an average of $37,000--more than twice the median pay for hourly workers in Maine. Never again will they earn that much money in this poor rural state. And they had thought the mill couldn’t operate without their expertise.

But the company, fulfilling a vow made before the strike, had hired out-of-town replacement workers, trained them and made them permanent. Within months Androscoggin was back making quality paper at near-capacity production. By the time the union surrendered Oct. 9, offering to return to work unconditionally, the Jay mill had a full complement of workers and no vacancies.

“How’d I survive?” mused Gerry Ouelette, who now talks vaguely of moving to California. “Well, the strike benefits were $55 a week, but what’s that buy today? Then I had an IRA for $11,000 and that’s gone now. I’m 51 years old and I can tell you, you don’t get a new job in Maine when you’re 51.”

The men milled about the union hall on that fateful morning, talking in groups not of money or perks but of pride and dignity and unity, of how close they had come to winning. “It’s like tripping a few yards from the finish line,” Roland Sampson said. Brave words, but in reality the finish line was never even in sight. The members of Local 14--though encouraged by the United Paperworkers International Union (UPIU) to continue their strike right up to the 11th hour--were fighting a losing battle from the start.

Other Industries

Workers had struck the Boise Cascade mill in nearby Rumford in 1986 and in the process had lost 342 jobs to replacement workers and had to settle for wage reductions. In the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of loggers, squeezed by their companies, had broken with the union and gone to work as independents. Air-traffic controllers, professional football players, interstate bus drivers and newspaper printers had all learned in today’s world what the Jay strikers chose to ignore--that once the picket lines go up, management increasingly is able to hire replacement workers and sustain production.

“I applied for a warehouse job in Auburn during the strike,” said Bruce Stevens, who would like to return to school if it weren’t for the expense of raising a family, “but no one wants to train you. They say: ‘I can’t pay you what you’re earning at the mill and as soon as the strike is over, you’ll go back to Jay.’ ”

Those who chose the company’s side bore burdens of another sort.

“My wife and I talked until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning before I came over and took the job, “ said Jay Clement, a one-time carpenter who hired on during the strike and now has one of the top-paying mill jobs, at $20 an hour. “They threw a 2-by-4 through my windshield the first day I drove my truck into the mill, but it’s been worth it. My wife’s behind me 100% and the kids think it’s great. I can buy them things I could never afford before. You know, in any other field, you’d be lucky to make $7 an hour. A lot of people in Maine are making $5.”

After Joey Cummings, a divorced mother of two, became the first striker to resign from the union and return to work, a relative threatened to blow her head off and the words “scab” and “slut” were scrawled on her home in orange paint. Shots were fired into some homes, and Virginia Moulton tells of a pickup truck trying to run her off the road after her weekly newspaper criticized union tactics. “I thought this was a free country where you had a right to voice an opinion,” she said.

‘Own Free Will’

“Would I live in Jay? No way,” said Dave Hartman, a replacement worker who gave up long-distance truck driving for a better paying mill job. “I live outside, in another town. Still, I don’t feel I took anybody’s job. As far as I’m concerned, they gave up their jobs of their own free will.”

As with Hartman, Jay for the replacement workers is only a town you drive through on the way to work. Company management personnel and the 78 “superscabs” who crossed picket lines to return to work also find it more comfortable to avoid the accusing stares and stony silence in Jay’s bars and shops and take their business to surrounding towns.

“If I go out for a beer at night, it’s in Farmington where no one knows me,” said one strikebreaker. Many men have dropped out of their fraternal organizations, and a Little League baseball coach quit the team because the strike had divided his young players as much as it had the town.

“Barbara and I went to a graduation party for our godson,” said Peter Fredericks, a salaried mill supervisor, “and as soon as we walked in, the room fell silent. This was a crowd we’d socialized with for years. I tried to initiate conversation, but it was a very forced situation. I never felt so out of place in my life.”

Jockeyed for Support

Throughout the strike, both the union and the company jockeyed for the support of Maine. International Paper spent heavily--$20,000 a week at one point, according to the union--on full-page newspaper ads and TV spots in which professional actors played Maine citizens expressing disgust with the strike. It brought in an executive from its Texas mill to act as spokesman and guide journalists through the plant.

For its part, the union hired, then fired, a Washington public relations firm and later retained the services of Ray Rogers, a militant New York organizer. Caravans of strikers toured New England to ask for public backing. Strikers arranged for visits to Jay by presidential hopefuls Jesse Jackson and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and hosted Wayne Glenn, president of the 240,000-member UPIU, who drove to the mill, waving his clenched fist from the back seat of a convertible. Everyone cheered them on, until the Monday morning in October when they awoke and discovered that all the cheerleaders had vanished.

Little Sympathy

Because of the violence and their high salaries, Maine as a state did not offer the paper workers great sympathy. From the governor’s office in Augusta to the potato fields in Aroostook County, one hears privately that the strikers were out of touch with the realities of the ‘80s. As for the company, it was simply arrogant, many Maine people believed, and would never regain the employee loyalty it had once enjoyed.

Stood Behind Strikers

But the town of Jay--where three of the four selectmen are UPIU members--stood four-square behind the strikers (even though taxes paid by International Paper account for 83% of Jay’s $6.4 million annual budget). It passed several regulations unfavorable to International Paper and hired an independent appraiser from Connecticut to assess the mill’s value. His conclusion: The Androscoggin mill was worth $84 million more than its previous evaluation, a figure that would result in about $600,000 in additional taxes. The company cried foul and is appealing.

Making Strong Profits

The strike came at a time when International Paper was making strong profits--it earned $407 million last year on sales of $7.8 billion--and also facing increasing competition from foreign paper makers. Cost-cutting and concessions to eliminate union featherbedding, it said, were essential to remain competitive. The UPIU accused the company of union-busting and greed.

In addition to Jay’s strike--the first in 61 years here--700 workers left their jobs at the International Paper mill in Lockhaven, Pa., in a similar contract dispute, as did 300 at a mill in DePere, Wis. Another 1,200 were locked out by the company in Mobile.

Early in October, Jay’s union leaders traveled to Nashville, Tenn., to meet with the UPIU executive committee and 96 local presidents from across the country. They expected to come home with strong backing and new strategy to confront International Paper. Instead, the other locals said they were not willing to strike in support of the Jay workers, and the international’s leadership--citing decertification votes scheduled at three mills and dwindling reserves in a fund that had dispersed $15 million to strikers--said the paper makers in Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had no choice but to admit that this battle was over.

Two Openings a Week

Spokesmen at the Jay mill said the company is willing to take back strikers as vacancies open in their job specialties. Normally the mill has two or three openings a week, and at that rate it would take more than eight years to get all of the strikers back to work. So the paper makers who gathered at Local 14 that Monday morning had come to contemplate a life in Jay they had never known--a life divorced from the Androscoggin mill.

“When all is said and done,” someone mused quietly, almost to himself, “what’s the bottom line in all this? What’s the lesson to be learned?”

A man in a plaid shirt, his collar turned up against the autumn chill, thought for a moment, took a sip of coffee and said: “We’re all replaceable.”