COLUMN ONE : Lost in America: Jobs, Trust : When boardroom math shuttered a West Virginia plant, its 800 workers were cast off into a painful re-accounting of their own worth. Anger at being broadsided, though, led to a surprising response.

In an earlier America, with different notions about corporate virtue, loyalty to a company used to be the ticket to lifetime employment and not the sucker’s bet that it is today. That was the America that Elston Rickard grew up in, and he was a company man through and through. His job was to speed small parts from the stockroom to the assembly line, and he did it without running his mouth. “Go along, get along” was the advice he liked to give.

When the rumor mill whirred full-tilt with stories that the factory here might close, Rickard told his co-workers to pay it no mind. The company was making lots of money, he said. And besides, he knew the big bosses personally and they had promised him it was not so, a reassuring arm firmly around his shoulders. “You’re not listening to that silly gossip, are you Elston?”

No, he wasn’t. After 34 years in one place, Elston Rickard’s faith in the company could be likened to his belief in God almighty. He would not expect the Lord to cast him aside for worshipers elsewhere, and he did not think that Dixie-Narco Corp., America’s biggest maker of vending machines, would eye pastures any greener than these gentle hills of eastern West Virginia.

This was a great trust greatly misplaced. The factory here would soon lose out to a newly refurbished one in Williston, S.C., where hourly wages were $6 less. In the months leading up to the plant closing, the company’s public statements would retreat along a path from “never” to “it all depends” and “probably so,” but Rickard was blind to this slow-moving about-face.

Capsized into a rough sea of unfamiliar emotions, he did not fully accept the momentous facts until a notice went up on the wall and the equipment was being unbolted and crated. By then, a few workers were already talking about suing the company. “They can’t get away with this, can they?” they asked each other. And though their lawsuit would one day yield a remarkable result, back then it seemed only the longest of long shots. Elston did not want to hear about it.

He was too gut-shot depressed to be thinking about lawyers. By his last day on the job, during the week before Christmas in 1991, he had already begun to feel “half-dead, as if my soul was gone.” There was no severance check. He went home and bawled like a baby, collapsed on the light brown carpeting in the dining room, his knees cradled in his arms. “What am I going to do now?” he repeated to himself as he rocked. “What will I do?”

Americans like to imagine themselves as self-reliant and big-shouldered, ready to confront hard times as though they were Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” Once that had been Elston Rickard’s self-image. His mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, and he had grown up living the country life in a three-room shack, with pigs and chickens in the back yard and a river full of fish out front.

But now he realized that the years had tamed him. His job was the rock he had built his life upon, and his identity was all bound up with it. “Our machines were the best in the world, and I had helped make it that way; it was mine.” In 1986, Dixie-Narco had become part of the giant Maytag Corp. All the better, he had thought. He was safe inside a big, nourishing corporate womb.

As the years went by, Rickard had won prizes for perfect attendance and had gotten promotions for dependable work. In his mind, a job was now something owed to him, the way a homesteader took deed on settled land. His pay was $15 an hour. That is what his household budget was based on and that is how he saw himself, a $15-an-hour man, his value reliably accrued over time like a Treasury bond.

Now all at once a substitute reality was washing over him. At 56, he had been tossed into the ebb tides of life, angry and adrift and used up. What jobs would he be able to get? In a glutted market, he had a revised worth. He was marked-down merchandise, his labor for sale at flea-market prices.

Before, whenever someone said they were depressed, he’d think, ‘Aw c’mon, that’s just an excuse.’ But now he felt himself unraveling. He cried at odd moments. It was hard to go outside. He lost weight. Sleep was a problem, and he began to look at his future through the refracted glass of a wine bottle.

Worse than anything, he grew mean around his live-in girlfriend and their two boys. “I didn’t feel like I could be the man of the house,” he said. “I felt worthless because that’s what I was, worthless.” He and his girlfriend agreed to split up until he could right himself and recover what he had lost inside.

But it was terribly hard. Rickard was grieving. He felt the ache of a great betrayal. The pain grew so ravenous it was difficult to explain to others. Finally, a phrase came into mind that seemed to describe things just right.

“They cut off my balls,” is what Elston Rickard said.

‘Employment at Will’

Those few workers talking about a lawsuit were lit with rage. They figured they would need proof the company had lied to them. In the weeks before the plant closed, they began to go through discarded office files, rooting around for evidence. But not only did these impromptu scavengings prove futile, the workers could not even find a lawyer willing to take up the cause.

After all, what was the legal basis of their claim? West Virginia, like most other states, abides by the doctrine of “employment at will.” Absent some kind of discrimination, workers without a contract can be fired at a company’s convenience.

Each year, about 1 million Americans lose their jobs to plant or company closings, according to the Labor Department. Of all full-time workers displaced in 1991 and 1992, only 35% found other jobs with equal pay by 1994.

There is a federal plant-closing law. Passed in 1988, it was meant to cushion the shock of these ongoing blows, but all it requires of an employer is the posting of a 60-day notice before the locking of the doors.

Dixie-Narco had obeyed that law, and the irate workers found no attorney who was the least bit encouraging until they happened upon Paul G. Taylor. Young and steadfastly earnest, he sounded very different from the rest. “You’ve been lied to, and I think it’s a damned outrage,” he said.

This was a passion partly born of innocence. Taylor, then 30, had grown up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. To a factory hand, he may have seemed savvy enough, but in truth he was only six months out of the University of Richmond Law School, where his grades had been just so-so. He was still awaiting the results of his bar exam. Unable to land a job with a big-city firm, he had attached himself to a small practice in Martinsburg, W. Va.

Employment law is a difficult specialty, and Paul Taylor was far too green to know much about it. But he did recall some folk wisdom from his professors: “For a plaintiff’s attorney, it’s better to have good facts than good law.”

And the facts here made for a melodramatic tale, a woeful story that might well infuriate a sympathetic West Virginia jury. The workers said their bosses had constantly assured them the plant was in no danger. “Go out and buy your houses, buy your cars,” was a remark many remembered from a general meeting.

Month after month, the workers had voiced their frets and premonitions. Maytag, the parent company, was spending $40 million to transform an unneeded freezer plant in Williston, S.C., into a manufacturing site for vending machines. What would that mean for the codger of a factory here in Ranson?

The oft-repeated answer, as the workers recalled it, was that Ranson would remain “No. 1” and Williston would be “No. 2.” Elston Rickard believed this even as machinery was transferred to the newer plant; he helped to box up the mechanical presses. Sherry Trussell believed it even as her boss was transferred south; she brought a shrimp dip to his going-away barbecue.

Why would the company deceive its employees like that? Paul Taylor, growing more indignant all the time, surmised the corporate motives this way: “The plant closing was in the works for years, but to let the workers know too soon would have invited higher turnover, absenteeism, maybe even sabotage.

“They lied to people rather than risk a drop in production.”

‘Shred of Law’

Factories come and go, chasing profits in the global hopscotch of the big corporations or blown away by economic whirlwinds too sudden to predict. For communities that depend on a single major plant, the loss is devastating, as it was for the Ranson area when it lost its precious lodestone, Dixie-Narco.

Some localities have fought back. A few have threatened to use their powers of eminent domain to buy a plant rather than allow it to go. Others have lured factories into town with generous tax abatements, then anchored them in place with carefully worded “clawbacks” that require compensation if they leave.

Those tactics were of no use to Paul Taylor. The vending machine plant was already gone. At this point, he was after a claim of damages, and he thumbed through the texts looking for some “shred of law” that placed the company in the wrong. What he finally came up with was precariously thin. With more experience, he admits now, he “might have been too pragmatic to pursue it.”

But he was young and gung-ho--and these were the arguments he formulated: If Dixie-Narco’s managers had reneged on verbal assurances, that amounted to a breach of contract. There was more too. When employees were hired, most had received handbooks that spelled out causes for dismissal: drinking on the job and the like. Surely workers could additionally expect to be let go if the firm was in financial trouble. But wasn’t it also a breach, Taylor argued, to fire people simply so the company could “make even more money elsewhere?”

Once he started writing his complaint, one accusation piled atop another. If the workers had been knowingly misled by Dixie-Narco, there was also a question of fraud. “The company thought it was dealing with a bunch of dumb hillbillies,” Taylor said with the shoot-from-the-hip zeal that had become his style. “And it screwed them over out of plain greed.”

Shouting in the Wind

The more workers in the lawsuit, the stronger the case. About 300 of the 800 employees showed up for a Saturday morning meeting that Paul Taylor had organized at a local school. A janitor was supposed to unlock the doors so the group could get inside. When the custodian failed to arrive, the lawyer had to shout his remarks from a concrete stoop, his voice sometimes swallowed up by the wind. “How’s he gonna fight a big corporation when he can’t even get us into the damn school?” people grumbled as they struggled to hear.

Taylor was eager to tell his ideas. “The company lied to you,” he said, which was a catchy beginning and a familiar tune. But then he explained that lawsuits can take years to resolve and he’d be needing everyone to ante up some money for expenses. How much? The lawyer had not thought that far ahead. He pulled a number out of the air: $300 apiece ought to do it.

He may as well have asked for $3 million. Some people were already counting up nickels like gold ingots. “If I had $300, I’d still have my truck,” a man said. Taylor was a complete stranger to them. “How do we know you’re not going to high-tail it?” a woman shouted. Half the crowd suddenly spun on their heels.

By week’s end, only 59 workers had signed on, including some who arranged to pay their fee in installments. Elston Rickard was among the last to join. What am I going to gain by suing? he asked himself. By then, in early 1992, he had been hospitalized twice for mental breakdowns. Darkness shot through him limb to limb, and the only sure antidote he could think of was suicide.

“More than anything, I wanted to die,” he said. “I’d think about walking in front of a trailer truck or using a knife. But I was raised religious, and my parents said if you take your life you’ll go to hell. So I’d think about suicide, and I’d even dream about suicide, but doing it, I just couldn’t.”

Rickard had a grown daughter, and he asked her about the lawsuit. “Daddy, the way they done you so dirty, go ahead and put up your money,” she said.

New Economic Reality

Maytag’s headquarters are in Newton, Iowa. At first, the workers’ suit barely merited a raised eyebrow from general counsel Edward Graham. He figured it a trifle, all the more so because of the rawness of its advocate, Paul Taylor. “These guys were not rocket scientists,” Graham said of the legal work. He farmed the matter out to a small firm with offices near the plant.

In Maytag’s version of events, no deliberate deception ever took place, only a prudent disclosure of decisions as they were irrevocably made. That’s the fairest way, Graham said. “The degree to which you take your employees into your confidence about the maybes of this world you can argue about.”

In 1988, the demand was brisk for vending machines. Maytag needed a way for its highly profitable subsidiary, Dixie-Narco, to turn out more product. The following year, a decision was made to renovate the Williston factory rather than add space in West Virginia. Workers in Ranson were considered top-notch, but, among other concerns, union organizers had been targeting the plant.

Cutting costs was a foremost goal, according to confidential memos later filed with court papers. “Moving south to gain cost advantage, especially labor . . . is an established practice in industry generally, as well as within Maytag,” Leonard A. Hadley, then a division head, wrote in February of 1989.

The company insists that it had originally meant for the Ranson factory to remain in operation even after Williston was built up. Only an unforeseen drop in sales raised the possibility of a shutdown. The first inkling came in 1989, but a final decision was not made until the spring of 1991.

During that time, the rumor mill churned. Local newspaper reporters asked questions. Their stories contained many contradictory statements from Dixie-Narco managers, but clearly something was up. As early as February of 1990, one article included an ominous quote about there being no plans to close “at the present.” By October, seven months before the shutdown was announced, the plant’s future was said to rest on “a day-to-day reading of the economy.”

A word to the wise might well have been sufficient, assuming the wise were not in denial. Maytag lawyer Ed Graham, for one, believes the workers knew precisely what was going on. If not, why all the rumors? “This state-of-the-art plant was sitting in South Carolina; it wasn’t sitting on the moon,” he said. There had already been layoffs in Ranson. “[But the workers] were making more here than they could elsewhere. They were going to ride that horse till it died.”

Graham said the lawsuit stems from resentment about new economic realities. The workers failed to understand that something in America has fundamentally changed--and that everyone’s job is now up for grabs even if times are good.

At age 60, Maytag’s general counsel is a big walrus of a man with a booming voice. He leaned forward impatiently to make his point. “They feel, as long as I keep my nose clean, I have a job. Well, that’s the folklore.”

Corporate Anorexia

Indeed, the American corporation is no longer the working person’s papa. In an age of downsizing and mergers and “moving south,” the ethic of paternalism has given way to a kind of corporate body-sculpting. Companies see themselves in a Darwinian struggle for revenues and market share. Even some amassing record profits want to reshape themselves into fighting trim, though by now the slimming-down can occasionally seem pathological, like anorexia.

Entire levels of workers are viewed as ungainly layers of flab, the white collars these days being shed even faster than the blue. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich says a long-honored social contract has been breached, one that presumed that if a firm was profitable, a good worker could count on his or her job. In its place is an “anxious class,” the millions “who can no longer count on having their jobs next year or next month.”

With the corporate guillotine falling so unpredictably, Americans worry as they work--and they want to know who and what to blame. The times hark back to “The Grapes of Wrath,” when Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl farmers wondered whom they ought to shoot when a man from the bank arrived to throw them off their land. After all, that man had to answer to a bank president, who in turn answered to a board of directors, who in turn answered to the stockholders.

Big Business was hopelessly complex, the farmers were told. The buck never really stopped anywhere. Banks and companies had become part of a “monster” that breathed profits and ate the interest on money. Important men had made this monster, but they could not really control it. The monster made them do things they did not like, but the monster had to be fed or the monster got sick.

Still feeding this unforgiving monster, capitalism races along with its own ruthless energy. In America, the system is practiced in one of its purest forms, the marketplace relatively clear of government controls. Many other nations sand off some of the rough edges.

Plant closings are an example. “In Europe, companies face far more social obligations before they can dislocate workers,” said Clyde Summers, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has made a comparison. In Britain, workers are entitled to large severance payments; in Germany, employers must transfer employees to available jobs and train them; in Sweden, the government operates an extensive retraining program, partly funded from employer contributions.

“This keeps employers from moving just because it’s a little cheaper somewhere else,” Summers said. “Each nation imposes its own social values into the system. It all depends on what a society feels is most important.”

Less shackled by commitments to their workers, U.S. corporations are freer to chase cost savings, freer to withstand changes in the economic weathers.

It is a more agile way to do business, and to satisfy the monster.

Feeling Like Castoffs

As months became years, Paul Taylor got to know his 59 clients. None had found jobs as good as the ones they had lost. They were recalculating their expectations. The future was not what it used to be--and it made them bitter.

Deep down, people knew they should not measure their worth by their jobs; they were more than human tools. Still, they had grown used to defining themselves by where they worked and how much they earned. Losing a spot at Dixie-Narco made each feel like just another castoff in a throwaway society.

The job search itself was humbling. With so many people looking for work, Dixie-Narco refugees would bump into each other at personnel offices. Some employers told them not to even bother filling out an application.

Nancy Fritts had been a group leader on the factory’s wiring deck. It had been 20 years since she hunted for a job. “They’d give you math tests, and I’ll be damned if I could remember any algebra from high school.” She’d go home discouraged and stuff herself with bread until a whole loaf was gone.

Work at Dixie-Narco had been demanding, and some bore wounds. Donna Smith had pulled wires down through a harness, her movements constant as a wind-up toy. Now she had carpal-tunnel syndrome, limiting the use of her wrists and hands. “I wasn’t very hireable.”

People sat at home. Time is life’s great treasure, but with too little to fill it up, it becomes too much of a good thing, indigestible and tedious.

Paul Taylor listened to his clients’ complaints and took notes. Some items repeated themselves: repossessed cars, marital problems, treatments for depression.

One of the stranger stories involved Tom Delauney, a rock-solid guy who usually knew how to keep his cool. One day he spent $40 on home repairs. When his wife scolded him, saying they couldn’t afford the expense, he was humiliated. He ran outside and had what he called those “I-ain’t-no-damn-good feelings.”

After a few minutes of self-pity, he rushed into the basement, took a rope from his camping box, strung it from the floor joists and hung himself. He had blacked out when his wife and kids found him. Neighbors helped cut him down.

“I regained consciousness on the way to the hospital. Since then, I’ve learned: I’m still somebody. I use the rope burns to remind me.”

Breach of Contract Suit

The 59 workers loved the way the lawsuit read: breach of contract. That’s what it was to them. The company had made a deal and then backed out.

Their notion of this deal was very broad, however. Many had come to believe that Dixie-Narco owed them a job until retirement. To them one day’s work equaled more than one day’s pay. It was an investment in security. They considered their job as if it were personal property, bought and paid for over time.

Wasn’t this the American way? If things had fundamentally changed, word of it had yet to sink in here in Ranson. Again and again, people spoke of the times they had come to work during ice storms, the times they had left sick children at home. Wasn’t the company obligated to them for their many sacrifices?

Well, legally no. In fact, Maytag’s attorneys thought these very expectations were the Achilles’ heel of the lawsuit. In depositions, their questions tried to elicit such assumptions about lifetime employment.

Jerry Fritts, Nancy’s brother-in-law, was under oath:

Q: So you feel that you should have a job there for life because you liked it at Dixie?

A: Yes.

Q: Any other reasons?

A: I made good money.

Q: Did anyone tell you that you would have a job for life at Dixie-Narco?

A: No. That was my theory.

Q: Jerry, how did you come to that theory?

A: Well, you know, you do something, if you like it, you’re gonna stay, you’re not gonna leave.

A Game of Nerves

Back in Iowa, Edward Graham was getting jittery. During three years, the customary motions had failed to derail this lawsuit. Sometime in 1995, Maytag might well be facing a trial in West Virginia. “When you’ve got an elected trial judge and an elected Supreme Court bench--and it’s a pro-labor state--this is not a real neat place to try a case,” he said.

Scarier yet, that bumbling youngster Paul Taylor had actually managed to get the case certified as a class-action suit with all 800 former employees potentially entitled to damages. Who knew what some local jury might do? “If you took a $100-million hit on this, which was a possibility, you’d have to sell a lot of washing machines and vending machines,” Graham concluded.

Enough was enough. Maytag needed to bring in some heavy hitters, and Graham turned the case over to Jackson & Kelly, West Virginia’s biggest law firm.

But Taylor was waiting with champions of his own. Paul Sprenger and Jane Lang, husband and wife, have a thriving class-action practice in Washington.

Lang was hesitant to come in at first. “What had these people really lost? If what we’re saying is the company should have notified them sooner, then all the workers lost was a few extra months of lead time.”

But Sprenger was eager. The case was barreling toward trial and not much more preparation was required. He could sense the anxiety coming out of Iowa. Would Maytag want to roll the dice with a jury--or settle out of court?

The $3-billion company could be squeezed. “I figured it was worth a few million dollars to them just to make us walk away,” Sprenger said.

Maytag’s Memos

Trial was set for Aug. 1. With only a few months to go, Taylor himself had the jitters. In the legal process known as discovery, Maytag was required to supply any documents relevant to the suit. The paperwork had finally arrived. Would the company’s internal memoranda prove his case or blow it apart?

There were 2,000 pages to review. This wasn’t so bad. Taylor had expected to be buried in 2 million file folders, a common lawyer’s trick: It’s all there; go find it. He and his associates worked late into the nights, eating dinner at their desks, trying not to drip pizza grease onto the evidence.

Much of the lawsuit had been based on Taylor’s wild-eyed suppositions, but now, as he dug into these boxes of documents, he could not believe some of the goods he held in his hand. The lawyers were pinching each other as they passed things across the room. “Does this really say what I think it says?”

If some of the paper trail was ambiguous, with wording that could be used to support either side, other parts of it surely put Maytag on the defensive.

One memo listed seven reasons to “relocate” outside of Ranson, including the $6-an-hour advantage in wages and other first-year “savings of $1.40/hour due to not having to provide certain normal benefits, i.e., vacation, holidays, health care, worker compensation claims and statutory benefits.”

An “annual earnings plan,” dated Dec. 6, 1989, contained manufacturing “assumptions.” Production was shown to gradually rise in Williston, S.C., while it suddenly and finally dropped to zero in Ranson by May of 1991.

The first mention of Williston came in that February, 1989, memo from Len Hadley. The lawyers had been unaware of Hadley’s early role. Back then he was only a division head, but now he was the entire corporation’s CEO.

The lawyers were agog at the mere prospect of questioning him. “If we can just get hold of this guy,” they agreed, “we’ll have the key to the vault.”

Tale of the Tape

The videotaped deposition took place in a Des Moines hotel room, and the more-seasoned Paul Sprenger was the inquisitor. He had done his homework about Hadley, 61, a straight-arrow of a guy who had started a career at Maytag in 1959 as an accountant. The lawyer felt confident he knew the type.

A camcorder is not necessarily an objective piece of equipment. “A lot can be done with lighting and camera position,” Sprenger said. Hadley was seated with his back to a window before some crooked blinds. “All his bad features were darkened, accentuated. The worst of it was a permanent frown on his face. Every frame was worth a thousand words once we got it before a jury.”

The four-hour give-and-take may not have produced any knockout punch for either side, but it is truly an extraordinary social document, no less than a confrontation between the new America and the old. Hadley spoke for the blunt truths of the modern corporation; Sprenger--playing to a prospective jury--made those truths seem like the blood flow of a greedy, calloused heart.

The lawyer questioned the CEO about his own severance package. Wasn’t it true that if Hadley himself got sacked he was guaranteed a $3-million buyout? Yes, but the CEO failed to see the relevance of this. Certainly “all levels of career success and employment” were not due equal consideration.

If the workers were not owed any severance, Sprenger asked, weren’t they at least entitled to know that Maytag was thinking of closing the plant? He read from the 1989 earnings plan, with its “assumption” of zero production.

This was merely a forecast, Hadley insisted, and “forecasts are by nature speculative, and I do not feel an obligation to inform the employee group of the world as to what might happen until it has some . . . reality to it.”

Well then, when should the people have been told? Hadley was loath to answer this exactly, though when pinned down, he grudgingly admitted that by December, 1990, “the die was becoming rather clearly cast.”

So why hadn’t Hadley told them? On Oct. 26, 1990, some 400 Ranson employees had sent him a personal letter, desperately pleading for information. Are we naive to be trusting a major corporation? they asked. Hadley never responded.

Now, with Sprenger sniping away, the CEO tried to explain his cautiousness. “On this kind of an item, I follow legal advice, not my personal feelings,” he said. Besides, there were valid business reasons for holding back. “We wanted to maintain a viable production facility as long as we could.”

The two men were face-to-face, but Sprenger was self-consciously playing to that imaginary jury. A favored tactic of his was to invoke the word family . After all, corporations were always saying they regard employees as family members.

Q: Certainly, you wouldn’t treat members of your family this way, right?

A: You mean my children?

Q: Your entire family. You wouldn’t treat them this way; you wouldn’t use them to keep production going and then when you didn’t need them, just fire them even though they had done nothing wrong, correct?

A: I can’t apply the word family to unneeded employees.

Reunion in Court

Sprenger went home crowing. CEOs “usually come off gray and distinguished, but this guy looked like a Nazi war criminal,” he said. Paul Taylor chortled when he was shown the tape: “At one point, Hadley’s sitting there picking his nose,” he said gleefully. “He came across pompous, full of himself, a man with gofers to get him coffee, insulated from the people down below.”

No one from Maytag had bothered to peer into the lens finder, and Ed Graham was “appalled” by the dimly lit video. Still, he thought the CEO’s answers were satisfactory enough. Once or twice, circuitous questions may have led to a misstatement, but Hadley could correct himself when--and if --he had to testify at trial.

By this time, Graham was anxious to settle. Preliminary talks had gone on, but the ballpark figures were far apart: Maytag down low at $4 million, with the other side up in the sky boxes at $130 million. It would now be a game of chicken, both parties expecting the opening gavel to make the other swerve.

The Jefferson County Courthouse is a historic structure lent dignity by a bell tower and two white columns out front. The abolitionist John Brown was tried there in 1859 and then hanged a few blocks away. Only a third of a mile down the road is the dirty red sprawl of the former Dixie-Narco factory.

Spectators jammed into court for the first day of testimony. Elston Rickard went without sleep to attend. He had finally gotten a new job, nighttime work as a security guard for $5 an hour. But he still considered himself a broken man, possessed by a gloom that seemed to spill from the dourness of his eyes.

Rickard took a seat in one of the narrow wooden pews and looked around. He was shocked by a few of the faces. There they were, his old bosses from the plant. He had not seen them in years, and now he felt an urge to confront them and give them what for. Did they know what he’d been put through?

As he thought of what he might say to them, something stopped him, however. He felt these men had lied to him, but could they really help themselves?

“They were company men just like me,” Elston Rickard finally told himself. “And company men do what the company wants done.”

Quiet Negotiations

One after another, the workers testified about their hurts and grievances as people in the gallery sometimes raucously applauded. The judge admonished the spectators to shush. During one break, he asked the lawyers for Maytag if they’d feel more comfortable leaving the courtroom through a back door.

By the second day of trial, the crowd had decidedly thinned, which was just as well. The real action was no longer taking place on the witness stand but under a shade tree in the eerie privacy of a nearby graveyard.

Ed Graham wanted to finally settle this damned thing. He had asked Jane Lang to meet with him, but both of their rooms were full of case files and the heat outdoors was stifling. He picked her up in his big rental car, and they drove to the nearest quiet spot as the air conditioner gently hummed.

Personally, Graham had nothing against either Lang or Sprenger. Like most corporate counsels, however, he had a sneering contempt for class-action attorneys in general. They glommed onto one cause after another, jimmying big settlements out of the corporate strongbox. He felt he was amid grabby hands.

Lang, for her part, had sat through dozens of similar negotiations. General counsels were usually of two sorts, she had concluded: younger Ivy Leaguers in expensive suits who talked tough--or older, more courtly men who acted somewhat bemused by events. Graham was of the second type. He would try to schmooze with her.

Not to be outdone, Lang felt a duty to schmooze a little herself. She would later call it her “drama about how my people have suffered.” In all, the schmoozing and the dramatics lasted 30 minutes before giving way to the main business of naming numbers. Graham was willing to offer $15 million--and not a penny more. Lang was willing to take $18 million--and not a penny less.

They were both bluffing. At the last moment, after Graham drove from the cemetery and was about to drop Lang off, they agreed to split the difference. “Of course, we’ll be insisting on a prompt deposit of the money,” she said.

There was a lot of interest to earn on $16.5 million.

Splitting the Award

As with much litigation, the people happiest at the end were the lawyers. Ed Graham was rid of the bothersome case. The settlement did not call for any admission of legal wrongdoing, but he would later say that Maytag had “made a mistake” of a more strategic sort. Each employee should have been given a severance check. That’s how it’s usually done these days. Workers get a final payout and they, in turn, sign a waiver, agreeing never to sue the company.

Severance would have amounted to a pittance compared to the settlement, a good chunk of which went to the other side’s attorneys. Their fee was 30% of the money, $5 million. Paul Taylor was a bit sheepish about his share of the sudden fortune. His empathy for the workers was deeply felt, and he agreed to the deal only because the amount seemed adequate and it brought a finality to things. “There won’t be any long appeals. People need to get on with their lives.”

Sometime next year, with the court’s approval, the remaining $11.5 million will be meted out. A complicated point system has been contrived based on years of service, involvement in the lawsuit and hardships suffered; the checklist on the claim form includes insomnia, depression, eating disorders and drug abuse. The 800 workers will receive between $12,000 and $60,000, though many more will fall toward the lower end than the higher, Jane Lang said.

The money will certainly be welcome, and people are already redoing their household arithmetic with a windfall in mind. But while some are quick to claim the satisfaction of a David-against-Goliath victory, as often as not the workers speak of unhealed wounds and everlasting regret.

Tom Delauney, scarred with a faint noose of rope burns around his neck, said: “The money is nice, but I’d just as soon that Maytag take out a full-page ad in the paper. They ought to have to apologize for lying.”

Elston Rickard is not soothed by the money either. “It’s what’s inside of me that needs fixing. You know, I still dream about Dixie-Narco. Maybe, with the money, I can find a doctor who’ll straighten me out.”

In his recurring dream, he is back on the familiar assembly lines, but the bosses standing over him are giants he does not recognize. They tell him to work, but his feet are rooted in the floor, his body an immovable stalk.

He awakens in a sweat, and as he recrosses the border from the edges of sleep, he sometimes tries to convince himself that nothing bad has ever really happened to him, that in fact he has his old job back and can catch the life he once had by its fleeting wings and make it stay put forever.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Closing of a Plant

* 1986: Dixie-Narco becomes part of Maytag Corp.

* February, 1989: Leonard A. Hadley writes memo recommending renovation of plant in Williston, S.C.: “Moving south to gain cost advantage, especially labor . . . is an established practice in industry generally, as well as within Maytag.”

* Dec. 6, 1989: Annual earnings plan shows “assumptions” of production rising in Williston, S.C., while it drops to zero in Ranson by May, 1991.

* February, 1990: Dixie-Narco states in a newspaper article that there are no plans to close the Ranson plant “at the present.”

* October, 1990: Dixie-Narco reports plant’s fate rest on “a day-to-day reading of the economy.”

* Oct. 26, 1991: Ranson employees send letter to Hadley seeking information on rumors of plant closure. Hadley does not respond.

* May 10, 1991: Dixie-Narco announces closing by year’s end.

* Dec. 21, 1991: Elston Rickard’s last day on the job.

* Sept. 21, 1992: Class-action suit filed against Maytag.

* May, 1995: Paul Sprenger and Jane Lang join the case for the plaintiffs.

* Aug. 1, 1995: Trial begins.

* Aug. 2, 1995: Cemetery meeting to discuss settlement.

* Oct. 11, 1995: Hearing at Jefferson County Courthouse on settlement.