Workers’ Loyalty to Lever Bros. Outlasted Their Jobs

The company has moved on without them, as so many downsizing ‘90s corporations have. But workers who for decades cranked out products like Wisk, Dove and all-but-forgotten Handy Andy floor cleaner at the landmark Lever Bros. soap plant in Commerce are as dedicated as ever.

Their allegiances remain with one another and with the memory of a company that pioneered the philosophy of a family-style workplace more than a century ago. A job with Lever was touted as a job for life. But in the case of the plant that loomed over the Santa Ana Freeway for 43 years, filling passing cars with the unmistakable scent of soap, worker loyalty outlasted the factory.

More than five years after the plant abruptly was shuttered, graying Leverites still gather to swap tales of a bygone era, share tears and take up collections for those felled by stroke, cancer and the other inevitabilities of age.

“The people are all great people and that’s the truth,” said Dallas Shaver, a 74-year-old former union president and Lever Bros. mechanic who recently joined about 175 other former plant workers at their annual holiday party at Maggie’s Pub in Santa Fe Springs. At its peak, the plant employed 800, declining to 300 by the time it closed.

Shaver traveled from Blythe, Calif., to the reunion, and showed up wearing a white satin “Lever L.A.” jacket boasting “one million safe work hours.” His voice a rasp, he filled in old friends on his bout with throat cancer.

The former plant workers greeted each other with bear hugs and back slaps. Some compared expanding waistlines to measure the benefits of retirement. Others flipped through photos of more sprightly days when, as young women in canary yellow uniforms, they stuffed giveaway washcloths into boxes of Surf.

“That was me,” sighed Ruth Phillips, now 75, gazing at a photo of a dark-haired young woman in a kerchief. Phillips worked at the plant from 1952 to 1964, eventually earning a job as a “Spry girl” inspecting cans in the air-conditioned shortening department.

“It was family,” Phillips said simply.

The bonds forged by the Lever work force--and maintained years after the plant’s jarring demise--tell of a faded chapter in the nation’s labor history. Workers brought their children in for part-time summer jobs under a policy that encouraged college savings.

They bowled and boated together in company-sponsored clubs, became godparents to each other’s children, and married and divorced in a factory floor Peyton Place. Even today, they turn up by the dozens for funerals of former colleagues.

“This is like excavating the old social contract. It’s a beautiful example of old-style corporate culture,” said Warren Bennis, a management professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business who once studied the Lever plant in Commerce. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s something you’re going to see more of. . . . This is an archeological event.”

The Leverites’ recollections also trace the history of Anglo-Dutch Unilever Corp., one of the world’s largest corporations and the pioneer of a now-extinct brand of paternalistic management. Lord William Hasketh Lever founded the company with his brother James in 1885 to produce Sunlight, the world’s first packaged, branded laundry soap.

He championed the shortened work day, savings plans, libraries, health benefits, and cultural and spiritual activities for workers. He also built Port Sunlight, a tree-lined employee village outside Liverpool where he lies buried under the village church.

“It was like working for a company that cared about people,” said Jasper “Sandy” Sandoval, who toiled in the Commerce plant’s powder detergent department from 1953 to 1991 and met his wife there. Last summer, they traveled to England to pay homage to the corporation. Sandoval boasts that they were told they were the first Leverites allowed into the boardroom to peruse the portraits of past CEOs, including that of Lord Lever.

Unilever gained market dominance in many countries with its more than 1,000 brand-name food, detergent and personal-care products. In the U.S., New York-based Lever Bros. was the first to warn consumers about the afflictions of B.O., undie odor and dishpan hands. Lever became a household name, helping to mold 1950s housewife culture.

The Commerce plant opened in 1951, predating the Santa Ana Freeway, which would later cut a path beside it. It was heralded by The Times as the “materialization of a bold vision,” and touted by Bank of America’s then-Chairman A.J. Gock as “the largest industrial investment made by private business in the history of Los Angeles County.”

But the company had already lost its U.S. market dominance to Procter & Gamble. And in 1994, Unilever began to slash its global work force. With that, L.A.’s corner of the Lever universe died, at least officially. The Commerce plant closed in the spring of 1994, just days after workers were warned that it might. Virtually none of the last 300 workers were offered jobs at other Lever locations, but pensions were good and retirement packages were offered to older employees.

“We were all so young at the time that we started that we were able to go through so much together,” said Floyd “Ozzie” Osborne, 64, who joined Lever in 1957. “We saw losses, births. Everybody loved each other. When they gave notification, the walls came tumbling down. There was a lot of crying.”

Bob Hansen, 77, the former plant controller, used to hand paychecks to Lever’s union workers. Now, he organizes the plant reunions, pooling $15 from each to finance the annual holiday feast: mounds of turkey, ham, fried fish and potato salad and a 20-foot table piled with cakes served under a canopy of holiday lights in the pub’s back room.

“It’s amazing we got any soap made,” Hansen mused above the roar of chatter. “All these people do is talk!”

The party--now in its fourth year--is held at Maggie’s Pub in a typical show of Leverite loyalty. In its more modest days, the pub sat just blocks from the plant, hosting martini lunches and cashing the checks of Lever employees every Thursday morning for years. Maggie’s moved to Santa Fe Springs shortly before the Lever plant closed, and the Leverites followed with their reunion parties.

To be sure, company life was not all fun. When Jesse Enge, 79, was hired in 1953, he became Lever’s sixth African American employee. He waged the fight for equality along with workers like Nellie Armenta, 65. Women fought their share of battles too, as Midgie Hernandez can attest. Now 61, she recalled the bitter treatment she received after becoming the plant’s first female supervisor, of an all-male warehouse crew.

“The meanest one isn’t here tonight,” she said with a grin.

Still, notably absent from the festivities was bitterness against the employer that cradled them for decades, then moved on. Lever Bros. funds retiree get-togethers in parts of the country with active plants, but financing for the Los Angeles gatherings dried up with the jobs.

“What’s surprising is the company no longer wants to have anything to do with us, after all these years,” said Robert Bogosian, 70, a 32-year Lever employee. Yet he takes the snub in stride, with only a hint of sadness at changing corporate habits.

“The benefits we had were unbelievable,” he said. “They used to say, ‘Your job is secure.’ It was something that drew us here. Eventually, we learned it wasn’t so.”