Cat Summons White-Collar Crews to Battle Stations : Jobs: Briefcases are traded for toolboxes. Aided by line-crossers, the company profited as the strike foundered.

Like militia called out to stave off corporate disaster, they came to run the factories: salesmen, secretaries, bookkeepers, engineers, the bean counters in purchasing and the record keepers from employee benefits.

Suddenly, they no longer sat at desks in a quiet labyrinth of partitioned offices. They were on their feet in buildings the size of shopping malls. Giant tractors--100 tons of iron bulk--rolled their way down the assembly line under a crosshatch of girders and snaking cable. Sparks flew from welding torches. Metal clanged against metal. The smell of oil sat heavy in the air.

Caterpillar Inc. had sounded a call to battle stations. Last June, when the United Auto Workers went on strike for the second time in three years, the company was determined to do what no major manufacturer had ever done before: to run its plants at full-speed with its biggest union out on the street. Once and for all, the UAW would be taught who was indispensable and who was not.

Later in the summer, Americans would fix their gaze on a baseball strike, but in the sanctums of business and labor, the struggle at Caterpillar was the event of consuming interest. If the company succeeded in breaking the union’s will, it would lay out a lesson plan for CEOs all over the nation and supply the scariest of omens for every union worker who had ever turned a wrench.

At the start, Cat desperately needed bodies, and most any body would do, old and young, fat and thin, the eager and the grudging. Some knew their way around a toolbox and some did not. More than a third of the company’s 17,000 U.S.-based managers and office workers were pressed into service.

Teresa Bart, a secretary who usually spent her days typing, was assigned to an assembly line and taught how to drill the holes into crankshafts. The work surprised her. It was not that demanding. The factories had undergone a $1.8-billion revamping, and many automated machines did not require much brawn or skill. Hoists did the heavy lifting. Computers guided the actual drilling.

With so many people pitching in, the work was fun. “All the teamwork and camaraderie, you just wanted to bottle it up and take it with you,” she said. Most office workers felt they were doing someone else’s job in order to save their own, protecting their company from a catastrophic attack. Bart did not understand what the strikers were upset about. Filling in for them, she was earning their $18.05 hourly pay, almost twice what she regularly took home.

Jim Steider, who usually ran a department that sold truck engines, found himself constructing them instead, putting on the flywheels. At 59, with patches of white in his hair, he endured the strain of being on his feet all day. The worst part was the repetition. “It’s really boring work,” he said.

But the challenge kept him going. “There wasn’t any doubt we could run the factories,” Steider said. “The only question was at what pace.” He and the rest would high-five each other after the company tallied the daily count.

Other plants were much slower to gear up, but the engine works raced up to speed in just three days and then sustained that rate and even set records over the long haul.

Dave McKie, a general manager, was keen to gloat about the quality of his white-collar conscripts. They possessed something the union workers did not.

Attitude, he said. Superior attitude.

*

Hard to imagine this now, but during strikes in the old days, UAW reps were allowed to stroll about the plants to make sure nothing was going on. In fact, Cat had never built anything during a walkout until 1982, when supervisors shipped a small amount of product by rail. Even then, railroad officials were afraid that the trains might be attacked. Armed guards watched over the cargo.

Back then, executives worried that efforts to break a strike might start a blood bath. Still, a few plant managers were hot to try. Before contract talks in 1988, they urged their bosses to let the UAW take a walk and to go ahead and run the factories without them. “They came down on us like a ton of bricks,” said Clyde Cotton. “I was told if I brought it up again, I’d be fired.”

Hard-line tactics only came into favor when Donald V. Fites took over Caterpillar in 1990. But it was not just a matter of a new CEO’s tough hide; the company was in a much stronger position too. Modernization had cut its UAW payroll--and so had its vastly multiplied use of outside suppliers.

With a strike likely, every division head was ordered to come up with a mobilization plan. The company did not intend to miss a single order. If necessary, some production shortfalls could be filled by Cat’s non-union plants in the United States or its factories abroad.

Managers met weekly to go over the details. The shop skills of each office worker were recorded in computer files. Contingency plans were readied: which employees would be sent where and when. A series of UAW wildcat strikes in early 1994 had actually helped the company with practice runs.

Caterpillar was rich with “boot-strappers,” office people with factory know-how who had worked their way up from the shop floor. For months, they carried work clothes in their car trunks, prepared to bolt from their desks and be at a machine within hours. Less-expert employees could then join them a bit later, ready to do the easier put-and-take jobs of assembly work.

Most important to the company’s strength, however, was the weakened state of UAW solidarity. Thousands of union workers were against hitting the bricks again after their earlier 163-day walkout had failed. Stressful times had torn open seams of disillusionment. In a few plants, management could count on as many as 40% of the UAW members to cross the line.

These line-crossers were the grease that eased Cat’s way. After the first months, some 9,400 workers were on strike, but 4,000 others were crossing. Caterpillar had begun the walkout with 6,000 management and salaried people in the plants, but within six months, 3,500 of them were able to go back to their regular jobs. They had been supplanted by more than 1,000 new permanent hires, nearly 5,000 temporaries and hundreds of retirees lured back at $25 an hour.

Dick McLaren was one of those retirees. He used to be in management, and it pleased him no end to finally see a factory running without the constraints of all the union work rules. People moved from thing to thing regardless of job classifications. If they needed a power truck, they simply went and got one:

“And there was no union steward telling you that it wasn’t your job.”

*

Even when fully staffed, the modernized factories appeared thin of people. In the Aurora, Ill., plant, an overhead monorail system ferried parts from one end of a building to another. Huge lift arms moved great slabs of iron as robots did the welding. Carts scooted across the floor without drivers.

Amid all this mechanized power, the human form could seem small and feeble. Still, some 2,000 employees were needed to make it all work. A confident Bruce Schuver was in charge of Aurora’s operations. “This company will do whatever it takes--and I mean whatever--to satisfy our customers,” he said.

Like many of the Caterpillar managers, Schuver spoke with a vocabulary that seemed to come right out of a corporate brochure. The answer to most any question involved “customer satisfaction” and “ongoing business relationships.” He did not understand the UAW’s position. “I don’t know what the union’s product is,” he said. “I don’t even know that they have one.”

If what the UAW had to offer were skilled workers, its leaders needed to realize that the union was not the only source of supply. From his experiences during the 1992 strike, Schuver was sure that the company’s managers and office workers could build top-quality tractors. The question now was: Could they satisfy customer demand at a time of high sales?

For that, Cat would also have to hire and train temporaries, and Schuver originally thought it would take six months to get the factory up to full speed with stable production. But the number of out-of-work machinists surprised him. Between employment agencies and Cat’s outside suppliers, he was able to get almost any kind of worker he wanted.

Good ones too. They learned fast. In just 2 1/2 months, the Aurora plant was turning out its full run of excavators and wheel loaders, he said. The mobilization had gone even simpler than he had expected. “I don’t have the least doubt that we could replace our entire work force,” he said.

After a while, he barely remembered that a strike was going on.

*

Enthusiasm was not so universal. There was jealousy over who got to do what in the factories. And soon there was fatigue as well. Many office workers put in a full shift at the plant only to go back to their desk job in their “spare” time. The strike was like a loyalty test, and people felt obligated to show how much “yellow paint” they would bleed for Mother Caterpillar.

Not everyone from the offices even wanted Cat to win. For them, the factory work had the quality of forced labor for an enemy power. Many of them carried resentments from past layoffs and frets of new ones. “On the company books, people may as well be listed as disposable tooling, because they use you up and throw you away,” said one woman reluctant to let her name be printed.

These disgruntled voices seemed to be in the minority, however. Spirit was remarkably high in the plants, especially at the start, when hopes for a settlement seemed fresh and the tedium of factory work had yet to settle in.

Teresa Bart lost the tip of her right ring finger while loading those 150-pound crankshafts into a tub. One suddenly rolled onto her hand, and then she felt a pinch and saw the reddening in her glove. When she pulled away, the bone in her finger was exposed. “This is not going to be good,” she said.

A few weeks later, she was happy to be back in the plant. The company had given her a gold watch. One of the bosses had sent her a personal note.

“It was just so nice,” she said, “handwritten and everything.”

*

Those first months, Jim Steider worked six-day weeks in the factory. During breaks, he and the other management types would scramble for the few computers on the shop floor. He had to check his e-mail. Steider was one of those trying to keep up with his real job while also doing assembly work. Some days, he was out with customers till 1 a.m. and then back at the plant by 6.

Steider had grown up in small-town Illinois, and a few of his boyhood pals were now among the strikers. Sometimes he wondered why he had turned out so differently from them. After 33 years, he regarded himself as a “Caterpillar person,” but with the UAW guys somehow the corporate religion never took.

Steider could see it on the assembly line. The office workers put in more effort than the UAW line-crossers, arriving early and getting their materials lined up. They passed along suggestions for saving steps. They tried to work ahead. That way, if an engine had a problem, they would have time to fix it.

The UAW workers were less likely to worry about any mistakes they made. “They have a different culture,” Steider said. “The union just doesn’t have a value system of making things better for the company.”

By his way of thinking, the union workers had divided their loyalties and given the UAW the bigger share. Didn’t they see who signed the paychecks?

*

Actually, many of the line-crossers were restless about their choice. They found themselves working 60-hour weeks for Cat and some of the time secretly rooting for the union, their hands one place and their hearts another.

Pipefitter Dick McMullen was not proud to be in the plant. “I believe in unions, and I’ve been active in this one. Without unions, supervisors would harass people left and right, and wages would drop like a lead balloon.”

They had to admit it, though: The atmosphere on the shop floor had never been better. People were working hard, and Cat was rewarding them with doughnuts and lemonade. Over in Building BB, the company even put in a gas barbecue. One night, the bosses brought in rib-eye steaks for a cookout right in the plant.

Line-crossers were impressed at how well Cat was doing with its makeshift work force. It was remarkable to watch, though troubling too. They could see how easily well-paid UAW workers were replaced by $10-an-hour temporaries.

“What you have now is the way the company wants it permanently, with cheap labor doing all the put-and-take jobs, pulling parts out of a tub and putting them on a conveyor,” said Ron Williams, a repairman in the forge shop.

Caterpillar was discovering just how few union people it could get by with, and there he was, in the factory helping them do it.

*

Usually, the duration of a strike can be plotted with two lines on a graph, with X marking the spot where both sides are hurting so badly they want to settle. In this case, the workers’ pain was lessened when the UAW raised the strike pay to $300 a week, a survivable enough sum for those not too deep in hock. But how much was the company suffering? The strikers did not know.

At first, the UAW faithful snickered at the mere idea of it, Cat trying to build tractors with a bunch of starched collars from the offices. “Would you want to buy a $750,000 tractor put together by some little secretary carrying a tool kit in her purse?” asked Jim Fisher to hearty laughs all around.

The UAW thought it had an edge this time. The previous walkout had been called over economic issues, and Cat had crushed it by threatening to hire permanent replacements. This time, the strike was over unfair labor practices. By law, this barred Cat from permanently replacing its union workers.

The company would have to get by with its cobbled-together crew. Pride kept most union people from believing the substitutes were any good. “Almost every machine has a computer monitor, and you need to know how to punch in the right data,” said assembler Gary Romans. “You need to go to classes to learn.”

There was so much at stake here, and not the least of it was a worker’s necessary sense of self-worth. Could Cat really get along without them?

*

Jerry Brown, president of the Peoria local, predicted the company would be flat on its back within a few months. “They’re making nothing but junk,” he said. Wait till October, if the strike lasted that long. Cat would have to come clean when it announced its third-quarter profits. “The stockholders are going to pluck Don Fites like a chicken and run his ass up a pole.”

The union hall rollicked with reassuring stories. A favorite tale had empty trucks leaving the crippled factories in an effort to make things seem normal, then turning around in a grocery store parking lot and heading straight back.

Some of the reports had a basis in truth. Plants did have parts shortages and safety problems, and an unusual amount of iron was ending up in the scrap heaps. But this series of woes was not adding up to a Caterpillar surrender.

The strikers were way too cheery.

During those early months, only a few of them would admit to how scary it all looked, one car after another sweeping through the factory gates. Who were all these people and how good were they? Could they weld or run a lathe or grind a part to the tightest of tolerances?

Certainly there were a lot of them. And when outraged strikers called them scabs, there were some who just laughed and flipped them the bird in reply, going in to take their jobs as casually as they might try on a new shirt.

*

Some things have turned upside-down in America. These days, it is the young who tell their elders what it means to live through hard times. “These guys on strike walked into good-paying union jobs right out of high school; well, those days are long gone,” said Robert Townshend, 22. “Try getting a job now. People are paid $6.50 an hour to do what they do at Cat for $18.”

Business was good, and Caterpillar was hiring new permanent hourly workers for the first time in almost a generation; strike or no strike, Townshend and thousands of others eagerly lined up to apply. “Union people are always arguing about job security,” he said. “Well, who is secure today? Just because you work for a corporation doesn’t mean you’re immune from insecurity. That’s life in the ‘90s.”

Mike Melley, 33, was earning $9 an hour as a pipe fitter at a metal company. He lived with his wife and three kids in a trailer park, and he said he would do just about anything to get on at Cat. “It’d double my pay in a flash, and we’d be able to have something we sure can’t afford now: a savings account.”

Melley carried a union card from the Teamsters in his wallet, but he felt no brotherhood toward the strikers at Caterpillar. “How can you be griping when you’re getting $18 an hour? You know, I stopped at a UAW rally once. In the parking lot, there were Cadillacs and Lincolns. Can you believe it?”

Free enterprise thrived right along with envy in the hearts of the lower-paid. To these workers, the market determined wages, and they considered themselves living proof that the market was down. They did not think they deserved more money so much as that the strikers merited less, as if the union had somehow hoodwinked the company to win a wage that defied all reason.

These feelings erased whatever hesitation they felt about crossing a picket line. The strike was their rare good fortune, a foot in the door. As labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan once wrote: “America is the land of opportunity. And a strike, if nothing else, creates a lot of opportunities.”

As for the hiring of temporary workers, an endless supply was only a want ad away. Welders drove up from the shipyards of Mississippi and Louisiana, where wages were $10 to $13 an hour. Cat was paying $21. “This is heaven,” said Mike Williams, 25. “In just five months, I’ve made close to a year’s pay.”

Many of the temps lived in seedy motels, cooking on hot plates when they got tired of pizza. At night, in the bars, they playfully called each other “scab.” Then, come morning, they boarded the private buses to the plant, stereo headsets on, indifferent to the picketers’ jeers.

If they thought about the strike at all, it was with a kind of lukewarm pity. “Unions are like anything else,” said Charlie Jones, 23. “They had their time and place.”

*

Such comments, when repeated, were a torment to the strikers. Without strong unions, how many companies would pay a living wage and decent benefits? Didn’t these people realize that workers had to stick together?

Day in, day out, the UAW faithful struggled with their boredom and uncertainty. What was going on in those factories? The conventional tactics of a strike had placed them on the sidelines, trying to win by withholding their labor. The company was in a mad rush; the union was cooling its heels.

Strikers tried to follow the news. The UAW was taking on Cat in federal hearing rooms. The National Labor Relations Board had filed well over 100 complaints against the company for unjustifiable firings and the like. The company was easy to tar-brush for its willful disregard of the labor laws.

But winning the NLRB cases was not a strategy for winning the strike. With appeals, the cases were likely to drag on for years. And even if the workers won, their awards for back pay would be little compensation for their years of anxiety and only a rap on the knuckles to a multibillion-dollar company.

Most strikers tried to busy themselves doing odd jobs. But others could think of nothing but the strike, their lives totally given over to it.

They were the ones who got up at 5 a.m. to rag the scabs on the early shift, the ones who blasted their horns in front of the homes of Cat executives, the ones who never missed any of the protests at company headquarters.

Those protests happened regularly on Thursdays at noon. The strikers wanted to catch the office workers as they came out of the building at lunch hour. “Our jobs today, your jobs tomorrow!” went the chant, a few hundred people marching in a wide circle, their breath turning to steam in the cold.

There was some chilling truth to that slogan. With the offices getting by with fewer people, managers had spotted places to cut staff. In the corporate vernacular of Jim Steider, “There were some positive gains to be made in personnel,” meaning that workers could be “excessed” from their jobs.

*

These days, big labor disputes are much like political campaigns. To win, Cat and the UAW had to reach the hearts of the workers, who would vote with their feet by going in or staying out. Both sides spent a fortune on TV ads.

A barrage of mailings was sent to every home: warnings, personal pleas, bulletins, newsletters. The company boasted of production records set by its improvised work force, and the UAW made fun of all the shiny new engine blocks piling up in the junkyard. It was hard to know what to think.

And it was hard to know what to say. “My own people are always accusing me of lying,” Jerry Brown, head of the Peoria local, complained one day. “They say, ‘Jerry, we know you gotta lie just like the company’s gotta lie. But we still like you.’ Well, I ain’t lying! Really, I’m not!”

Leaders from both sides did not ignore the truth so much as pick and choose from it, then massaging their favorite parts. They were captives of their own zeal and saw events with the same vivid simplicity of a child’s pop-up book, absent all the ambiguities of human nature and economic interpretation.

In conversation, the complicated issues that led to the strike were collapsed into simple yarns. UAW leaders spoke of unpardonable injustices: “A man fired for no more than singing on the job!” Cat executives countered with outrages of their own: “A union militant who urinated on his machine!”

Each side had an encompassing mythology, and these were virtually identical but for the man cast as the archvillain: CEO Don Fites or the UAW’s top negotiator, Bill Casstevens. The versions portrayed one or the other as thoroughly evil and possibly crazy, hellbent on their enemy’s total destruction.

In these myths, there was no room for placing any blame on one’s own inflexibility or miscalculations or bad faith.

To the contrary, a demon was definitely at work.

*

At the union’s daily information meetings, the strikers’ questions showed a deepening anxiety. People did not mean to sound disloyal, but they wanted some answers. In May, before the walkout began, there had been a giant rally in Peoria. Labor leaders from around the world had pledged their support. Where were these unions now? Why weren’t any of Cat’s foreign plants on strike?

For that matter, why were so many people from American unions doing contract work inside the factories? Their bosses sent them in--and in they went. Whatever happened to labor solidarity? Why couldn’t the UAW organize a national “blue flu” day to really put some pressure on Caterpillar?

These questions could get exasperating for Jerry Brown. One time he answered them by asking some of his own. “How much did we support other unions when they needed our help? Where were we then, huh? Where?”

*

The body count was very important. There was a trickle of nervous strikers going in, and a trickle of nervous line-crossers coming out. Union leaders liked to show off the newly penitent. These ex-crossers sometimes issued anti-company statements. While most were undoubtedly sincere, a few had the tremulous appearance of downed fliers reading from a text prepared for them by their captors.

One striker reborn to the cause was Rick Etheridge, 48, a jittery Peoria man just a few months shy of the 30 years he needed for retirement. His wife, Sue, was at his side when he explained how he had panicked, “pushed into the plant” by his fear that Caterpillar would otherwise deny him his pension.

He hated being there, he said: “A person can smile and eat the company’s doughnuts, but that don’t mean they’re happy. If you feed a dog, he’ll pretend he’s happy. But secretly he hates your guts because you got him on a chain.”

Something was off kilter about the Etheridge confession. He would admit what it was only months later, when, despite remaining on strike, he qualified for retirement anyway. Finally, he was out of Cat, out of the UAW, out of the wearying business of strikes--and he wished a pox on both their houses.

“The real reason I went on strike was we got a phone call in the middle of the night, telling me we were going to have a fire if I didn’t,” he said. “What if my 9-year-old boy had answered? Or the girl? She’s 14. It would have scared them to death. Scared hell out of me.”

Sue was with him. “We couldn’t risk all our possessions, our children,” she said. Her hands went up over her ears, like the phone was awakening her again that frightening night. “I got so tired of living like this, caught in the middle of a strike. I hated it. I just hated it.”

*

On the picket lines, the old-timers would say, “You know, one bullet in the right place and this would all be over, right quick.” Then everyone would nod. The question of violence seemed to hover in the air like particles of dust. Many strikers thought they were involved in no less than a fight for the soul of America. If that was so, what kind of force was legitimate?

It was not hard to find line-crossers who had suffered flat tires and broken windows. Someone booby-trapped Steve Trew’s driveway with nails in the middle of the night, yelling out “scab” before driving off. The next day, a mystery caller said, “We know where your daughter is baby-sitting, across from the park. And it’ll be awful dark when she walks home alone.”

Such stories added up in a fearsome cavalcade. But the strike was notable for its scarcity of violence rather than its profusion. As upset as people were, they kept their fists in their pockets and their guns on the shelves.

*

Caterpillar’s third-quarter profits for 1994 were $244 million, a third consecutive record. Sales were at all-time highs. So was Cat’s market share. The strike, the company announced, had had virtually no impact on production.

Jerry Brown and the other local presidents began to switch gears. They now talked about how “figures can lie when liars do the figuring” and said the company could not keep up the pace because of “employee burnout.” Anyway, they argued, a corporation can earn a lot of money and still lose out in the long run: Just think how much more profits would be if the UAW was working.

There was no flood to cross the line. Most strikers had made their choice and they were going to stay with it. But sometimes not working can be harder than working. Depressing thoughts tend to dawdle in an idle mind. At the information meetings, the questioning could get quite harsh: Why aren’t we negotiating? How much longer is this going to go on?

One morning, in the freezing weeks before Christmas, an electrician named Chuck Rasmussen asked if he could talk. His friend Bill Hyde had hurled himself from the world a few days before, jumping off the Cedar Street Bridge into the muddy Illinois River. No one knew for sure why Hyde had taken the fatal leap, but Rasmussen had an idea: He was fed up with the strike.

“Bill went to that big international rally we had. Those people said, ‘We’ll all be there to help you.’ This strike was going to be different. Plants everywhere in the world would shut down. You know what Bill’s comment was? ‘They’re lying. They’ll tell us anything to get us to follow along.’

“But Bill came out on strike. He was like most of us. You know, we’re not union radicals, but we’re not pro-company either. We’ve got a lot of pride, and it’s pride that makes men go out on strike together and stand together.

“You know, some of us are barely making it. When it gets to the point my house is in jeopardy, I’m going back in. And all this time I’ve been out, all this sacrifice I’ve endured, will mean nothing to you. I’ll be a traitor.”

Rasmussen looked around the hall. No one said anything. He was about to stop, but something else came to mind. His voice choked hard with it.

He said, “I feel like we’re driftwood, just hoping we come to shore.”

Next: The future of unions

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