Kochland Page 9
The picket line was not able to stop every truck. Paulson’s workers from Texas and Oklahoma passed in and out of the refinery. Even some of the local nonunion truck drivers began to break the picket line, delivering and gathering fuel.
Ernie Tromberg, an OCAW employee who worked in one of the fractionating towers, watched the anger boil over among his coworkers as “scab” drivers approached. The union men stood in front of the trucks and waved their placards. But the scab trucks inched forward slowly, haltingly, heading into the refinery. Tromberg saw his coworkers assemble “jacks,” thorny balls made of outward-facing metal spikes and nails, and throw them on the ground in front of approaching trucks. Paulson estimates that Koch spent $100,000 (or about $593,000 when adjusted for inflation in 2018), to replace truck tires in the first few months of the strike alone.
Koch Refinery hired a private company called Wackenhut to police the gates, and the private guards looked like teenagers with rented badges. They only made the picketers angrier. Tromberg was standing near a truck as it passed when he heard the unmistakable tink of a jack being thrown into the truck’s wheel well. A young Wackenhut guard approached Tromberg from behind and accused him of throwing the jack. The guard escorted Tromberg over to a state police trooper, but the officer said there was nothing he could do because he hadn’t witnessed the event. Tromberg saw that the Wackenhut guards were helpless to do much of anything, and the picketers realized it.
An atmosphere of lawlessness began to surround the picket line. When scab drivers edged closer to the gates, the union men jumped up on the running boards of the trucks and pounded on the windows. When that didn’t stop the trucks, they grew more violent. “We had some pretty tough guys working there. They would open the doors and pull out drivers,” recalled Lowell Payton, a unionized worker who picketed outside the gates.
When the workers got violent, Paulson seized on their mistake. He went to court and filed a motion that would bar the OCAW from picketing in front of the refinery. Paulson’s lawyers argued that the OCAW’s property destruction and violence went far beyond the scope of legal union activity. A local district court judge agreed with the company and handed down a temporary restraining order against the union. The restraining order didn’t bar picketing outright, but it greatly limited what the union could do. The judge said the union must now be limited to having four men stand with picket signs at the refinery, where there had been dozens before. These four men would be prohibited from doing anything intimidating or violent. The unionized police officers at the site couldn’t stand back and remain neutral: they had a judge’s injunction to enforce. The judge’s order smothered the picketing.
As the third week passed and then the fourth week, the reality of the strike began to sink in. The men at the plant still had mortgages to pay and kids to support. They sought out part-time jobs in secret, and many of them found work, but it didn’t pay what the refinery had paid. As the strike dragged on, the OCAW members began to see just how easy it might be for them to fall from the middle class. They saw how easy it might be to lose their home, lose their car, endanger the economic future of their kids. And they knew who was responsible for this danger. They blamed Bernard Paulson. Many of the men began to hate Paulson and his Texas cowboy boots and his superior bearing. The men gathered at the Coates bar and drank and talked about what they might do. And their anger boiled over.
On Friday night, February 23, more than thirty union men gathered outside the refinery. Paulson and his employees had been camped inside the gates for about six weeks, and they couldn’t stay inside forever. The union men knew this, and they were waiting outside when a caravan of Paulson’s employees, packed inside a row of cars, drove out through the refinery gates. The union men pounded on hoods, broke car windows, and screamed at the workers inside. The picketers had been practicing a technique to tip the cars over by gathering in groups and rocking the cars from side to side. They tried this technique on the cars that passed. Someone fired gunshots into the refinery during the melee. No one was hit, and no one was able to determine who fired the gun.
Around this time, Bernard Paulson’s wife was alone at the couple’s home, taking care of their six children. One night a man called her house and asked if Paulson was there. She said he wasn’t and asked if she could take a message. The caller said she could, and he told her the message was that soon Mr. Paulson would not be breathing anymore. Then the caller hung up, leaving Mrs. Paulson alone with her thoughts and six sleeping children.
Bernard Paulson did not bend. He kept working, sleeping on the cot in his office. He was not going to quit; he was not going to back down in the face of threats.
Whenever Paulson needed encouragement, he picked up the phone and called Wichita.
“I worked directly for Charles, and we consulted several times a day. It was with his backing,” Paulson recalled. “He knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.”
On the night of March 15, Paulson went to his office, laid down on his cot, and pulled up the covers before drifting off to sleep. He was exhausted, and he slept soundly. While he slept, someone carried out a plan that might have killed him and every employee to whom he had just said good night.
A set of railroad tracks ran along the west side of the refinery. The tracks carried tanker cars of crude oil and ran right into the middle of the refinery complex where the trains could load and unload fuel. At night, the tanker cars and diesel engines were often parked in a small depot outside the refinery, waiting for the next day’s delivery. It was common practice for railroad companies to leave the diesel engines idling throughout the night because it takes a lot of fuel to start the vehicles. Some of the refinery employees would have known this because a handful of them had once worked for the railroad. These men knew how the trains worked and knew where they were parked.
In the dark hours just after midnight on March 15, someone snuck between the train cars and engines near the refinery. The saboteur jumped up to the doorway of one of the diesel engines and climbed inside. It is unknown whether it was one person or a group of people who did this, but whoever went inside the engine knew how to operate it. They knew where to find the throttle and how to engage it. They pushed the throttle forward and leapt out of the train as it began to chug forward.
The diesel engine picked up momentum as it traveled down the track. The cab was empty, and there were no employees at the depot to spot the engine as it headed over empty cropland and gathered speed. At roughly one in the morning, the train was speeding directly toward the refinery. The tracks it rode led directly to the center of the plant, into a nest of pipes and silos and towers filled with flammable fuel.
Bernard Paulson woke up in his office to the phone ringing. He answered it and heard an employee shouting on the other end. Paulson was half asleep and trying to make sense of what he was hearing. There had been some kind of accident. A train crash. Paulson quickly dressed and ran out of his office. There were men shouting outside, and he ran toward them.
Then he saw a surreal thing. A diesel engine, lying on its side, in the middle of the refinery grounds. The giant train engine was still running.
* * *
When the train engine came hurtling through the refinery, it had been heading straight toward a large refining tower. But there were mechanisms set into the train tracks, called derailers, that acted as a safety stop to prevent damage from runaway trains. The engine hit the derailers at a high speed and the mechanisms did their job, flipping the steel engine onto its side and off the track, sending it skidding over the refinery grounds.
If the derailers had not been in place, if the train had kept going, it would have crashed directly into a series of gasoline lines, pumps and pipes. It is likely that an inferno would have engulfed the refinery and killed many of the men who were working there. Paulson could have been burned alive in his office. The wreck was roughly two hundred feet from where he’d been sleeping.
Paulson tried to absorb what he was see
ing as he circled the diesel engine. One of his employees on shift at the time had worked on train lines before, and he climbed into the fallen engine and shut it off. Paulson stared at the wreckage and thought of all the people who had just narrowly avoided death. And he thought to himself: Who could do something like that? The wreck sent a clear message. If Koch aimed to destroy the OCAW, the OCAW would destroy Koch.
* * *
The union’s violence was driven in part by anger. But it was also driven by fear. The union men might have had strength in numbers, but, in many important ways, the union was not as powerful as it once had been.
The strength of modern American unions rested largely on one significant piece of New Deal legislation passed in 1935, called the Wagner Act. The law gave workers the legal right to join a union and legally obligated companies to bargain with them. The act also created a federal agency to oversee union disputes, called the National Labor Relations Board. With these new legal protections, the ranks of union membership swelled. By the 1950s, labor unions were an accepted, almost inevitable part of mainstream American life, with more than one-third of US workers belonging to a union. The impact of the unions was felt even by workers who didn’t belong to them—the very presence of unions affected nonunion companies. These companies knew that their wages and working conditions had to be generous enough to ward off the threat that their employees would defect or start a union of their own. This system started to corrode during the 1960s, however, and it corroded partly from within.
Unions were formed to protect the little guy, but by the late 1960s, many unions had become bloated power structures that lost the sympathy of their own members. Union leaders became union “bosses,” many of them overpaid and corrupt. Violence and thuggery became all too common hallmarks of organized labor campaigns. Public approval of unions began to plummet, according to opinion polls. At the same time, companies in heavily unionized states began to move their factories down to southern, nonunion states. Rather than negotiate with unions, these companies started sneaking out the back door.
In spite of their militancy and their arrogance, union leaders like Joe Hammerschmidt were losing their power by the early 1970s. This added an element of toxicity to their efforts and a level of desperation to their actions.
Koch Refining Co., on the other hand, acted methodically and patiently. The actions reflected the thinking of the man in charge.
* * *
Charles Koch traveled to Pine Bend, and when he arrived, he entered the refinery compound quietly. The media did not report his presence, and it appears that none of the picketers outside knew he was there.
Koch walked the grounds with Bernard Paulson and saw for himself the toll that the strike had taken. The refinery looked like a disaster site. Equipment was being run far past the required time for maintenance. The staff was minimal. Provisions were sparse. And the OCAW was not going to give up its fight.
It might have seemed unreasonable for Koch to ask Paulson to continue this fight. Paulson and his team were risking their lives each night of the strike. The refinery’s previous owners, including Fred Koch, would almost certainly have surrendered and headed back to the negotiating table.
But Paulson didn’t want to back down. And Paulson saw that Charles Koch didn’t want to back down, either. Koch and Paulson retired to Paulson’s office, which now resembled the quarters of a field general. Near Paulson’s desk was the cot where he slept most nights, the telephone always nearby. The two men sat down, and together they worked through a new budget for the refinery. With pen and paper, they sketched out new projections of revenue and production for the year.
* * *
After the crash, Bernard Paulson went back to the negotiating table with the OCAW. His position had not softened, but the union’s had. When Paulson sat down at the table, there was somebody missing: Hammerschmidt had been replaced by the OCAW’s new local president, a man named John Kujawa. Paulson felt that Kujawa was more reasonable than Hammerschmidt had been; he was less militant, more likely to listen to Paulson’s demands.
Roughly one week after the diesel train sabotage, Kujawa and Paulson began a bargaining session, overseen by a Minnesota judge who acted as a mediator. The session went on for six days. The major point of contention was not money or benefits, but work rules at the refinery. Paulson was insistent that Koch be given more control over the operations, while Kujawa and his team fought to maintain the rights the union had bargained for over the last twenty years.
At noon on March 26, the talks ended with no agreement.
* * *
On the night of April 17, an OCAW man was driving near the refinery when he pulled over to the side of the road and removed a hunting rifle from his car.
He took aim at the electrical substation of the refinery, a large patch of electrical transformers and wires that was essentially a miniature power plant that kept electricity flowing through the plant. The man opened fire. He sent several armor-piercing bullets into the substation. One of the slugs penetrated a large transformer, which began leaking oil from its punctured hull. Employees in the refinery heard the shots, and knew quickly what they were. They called police, and a witness described the parked car where they believed the shots were coming from. The rifleman got back in his car and drove away. Police soon pulled him over because he was driving erratically and appeared to be drunk. The rifle was in the backseat, and he was arrested.
* * *
On June 2, 1973, John Kujawa traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before Congress. A joint House and Senate committee was investigating national fuel shortages, and part of the inquiry examined the supply disruptions in Minnesota caused by the strike at Pine Bend. Almost six months into the strike, it appeared that Koch and the OCAW were no closer to an agreement than they were when the strike began.
Kujawa and Paulson continued to meet even though neither seemed to have faith in the process. Paulson even flew to Washington to meet with Kujawa and his team of OCAW negotiators. The two camps met at the US Department of Labor, and during their session, the US secretary of labor himself came into the room to talk with the opposing negotiators. The secretary’s message was clear: “Let’s work this thing out.”
During the negotiations, Koch’s team and the union’s team were sent to separate conference rooms. A mediator shuttled back and forth between the rooms passing demands and counterdemands back and forth. The sessions went on through the night. At one point, Paulson laid down on a conference table and fell asleep while waiting for the courier to return from the OCAW’s room.
It was useless. Even prodding from the labor secretary could not push the two sides to an agreement. The kernel of the dispute still remained the work rules at the refinery. It was a fight over control, and neither side would budge.
* * *
Koch Refining Company offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever had sent the diesel train crashing into the plant. But the money never induced anyone to come forth with information about the diesel engine sabotage. The reward was never collected, and an arrest was never made. And the picket line remained outside the refinery even as the employees entered their seventh month without a paycheck from Koch.
But Bernard Paulson and Charles Koch seemed to understand something intuitively. They understood that solidarity had its limits. The OCAW’s cohesion was unbreakable. But the OCAW would be weaker if it stood alone. In fact, it was doubtful if the OCAW would be able to stand at all if it was alone. Isolating the union would prove to be the only way to beat it. During the summer and fall of 1973, that’s exactly what happened.
At that time, Paulson needed to perform maintenance at the refinery and install new equipment. The repairs could be delayed no more. But the companies in Minnesota that could do the specialized work were largely unionized, and they would not cross the picket line to do the job. Paulson had faced this problem before, during his days in Texas. When he ran the refinery there, he often hired both union an
d nonunion companies to do maintenance work at the facility. During one project, Paulson had two companies—one unionized and the other nonunion—working at the refinery simultaneously. The unionized firm said it would walk off the job unless the nonunion firm agreed to let its workers organize. It was a high-pressure ultimatum, and Paulson responded by calling the union president personally.
“I knew him. I knew he’d come from Oklahoma. So I got him on the phone. I said, ‘You damn Oklahoma squirrel hunter,’ ” Paulson recalled. “I said: ‘Look. You go ahead with what you’re trying to do, and I will only do one of these units at a time. I will do it nonunion, and you union guys won’t even be in the plan.’ So he backed down from that.”
Now, in Minnesota, Paulson used a similar tactic. He let the local maintenance and repair companies know that he needed work to be done at Pine Bend, which was the state’s largest refinery and an important source of work. He also let the companies know that if they refused to do this work now, when he needed it, then he would never call them again. If they refused, Koch would only use nonunion maintenance companies in the future.
The outside unions buckled. They accepted the work Paulson was offering them. Paulson built a special entrance into the refinery for these companies, one far away from the main picket line out front. The work began, and the OCAW picket line was weakened that much more.
Next, Paulson put a wedge between the Teamsters union, which handled trucking and shipping at the refinery, and the OCAW. The Teamsters still refused to cross the picket line, so Paulson arranged a cunning system that allowed the Teamsters to work with Koch Refining anyway. Paulson used a small parking lot near the refinery as a transit point. The Teamsters pulled into the lot and got out of their trucks. Nonunion truck drivers who worked for Koch Oil in the South were waiting for them there, and as the Teamsters got out of their trucks, the Koch Oil drivers got in. The Koch Oil drivers then took the trucks down the road and into the refinery, past the gauntlet of the picket line where men beat on the truck windows and threw their jacks beneath the wheels. Thanks to this arrangement, the Teamsters did business with Koch without technically violating the picket line. The oil was flowing in, the gasoline was flowing out, and support for the OCAW was ebbing away by the day.