Redwood and Steel
by Karen Pickett

About 200 striking United Steelworkers of America and Headwaters Forest activists marched December 2 through the high-rise canyons of downtown Oakland to City Hall, shouting, "We love trees, we love steel, this alliance is for real!" The alliance exists thanks to Charles Hurwitz, whose Maxxam Corporation is the parent company of both Pacific Lumber (PL), owner of Headwaters redwood forest, and Kaiser Aluminum, where Steelworkers are striking.

Representatives from labor and environmental groups spoke at the rally. Kaiser workers visited the PL company town of Scotia, California to ask PL workers to support their strike by refusing to cross picket lines, and talked union politics to PL workers without a union since the 1930s. The groundwork for this alliance was laid by activists such as Earth First! organizer Judi Bari. Before breast cancer took her life in 1996, Bari had tirelessly connected labor and environmental issues, making the point that the common enemy is corporations such as Maxxam, which treat both the natural world and working people as expendable resources.

Screwing The Workers, Stealing The Forest
"Kaiser used to be a good company to work for," said one worker from Spokane, Washington. "We actually looked forward to contract negotiations, because we had good communications with a management that treated us fairly." Some of the issues that forced the Kaiser employees' strike in September are pension cuts, contracting out of union jobs, and loss of wage parity, all problems that PL workers began to face when Hurwitz bought that company.

Both companies were once family-owned: PL by the Murphy family, who promised to hire employees' children and provided college scholarships and generous retirement plans; and Kaiser by the Henry J. Kaiser family, who paid some of the highest wages in the industry. Its practices, including founding the Kaiser Permanente health care system for workers, earned Henry J. a reputation as one of the most progressive employers around. Former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, who once worked for Kaiser, told the December rally, "Henry J. Kaiser would turn over in his grave if he knew what these new owners were doing."

Maxxam invested $8 million in International Management Assistance Corporation (IMAC), known for strikebreaking, to provide security and scab labor to Kaiser's four plants. On-the-job injuries at Kaiser plants have skyrocketed with the influx of inexperienced replacement workers into an already hazardous work environment. Forty-five first aid cases were reported in the nine months prior to the strike at the Tacoma plant; in the three months from October 1 to January 1, during the strike, there were 180. Horror stories, such as loss of fingers and hands, are emerging through the grapevine. At this writing, the 3000 striking workers are "locked out"; a December offer to return to work under their old contract while negotiations continue was refused by management.

Making It Personal
Kaiser workers have picketed Maxxam's corporate headquarters in Houston and Hurwitz's home at the Houstonian Hotel. Hurwitz, generally a recluse, must be present at Maxxam's annual shareholders meeting in May. Several groups will propose measures to Maxxam's board and shareholders to democratize stockholder voting rules and to elect the Board of Directors annually, which would dilute Hurwitz's power within the corporation.

Lawsuits are pending against PL, including one brought by residents of the town of Stafford, where seven homes were buried in a massive mudslide from a PL clearcut. A wrongful death suit is being filed by the family of David "Gypsy" Chain, the Earth First! activist killed in September, 1998, when a PL logger felled a tree on him. Hurwitz himself has substantial claims filed against him by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), for his role in the crash of a Texas Savings and Loan that cost US taxpayers $1.6 billion. The OTS claims are being heard in an administrative law court in Texas. Activists are calling for a Debt for Nature swap as settlement.

Hurwitz and his corporate holdings will likely face more court action over the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for his northern California forest property, under intense negotiation and public comment over the past year. Approval of the HCP is a tenet of the Headwaters deal that would put nearly half a billion dollars in Hurwitz' hands for about 9000 acres of redwood forest. Once the HCP is approved, legal challenges are certain to arise because the plan will doom species it is supposed to protect, particularly the coho salmon, marbled murrelet, and northern spotted owl.

During the HCP's public comment period, United Steelworkers members submitted 1,000 comments opposing it.

In Olympia, Washington in December, 1998, Earth First!ers organized a blockade of a shipment of alumina for Kaiser's Tacoma plant from Queensland, Australia. The show included a banner: "Hurwitz Cuts Jobs Like He Cuts Trees," and a flotilla of IWW unionists, EF!ers and steelworkers blocking the ore freighter. The Longshoremen working the dock refused to unload the cargo. David Foster of USWA commented, "This notion of jobs versus the environment is a false choice. At the close of the 20th century we want an America that is founded on human values, not corporate values."

Karen Pickett is a long-time California environmental activist, writer and teacher. For more information on the Headwaters Forest issue, contact the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters (BACH), 2530 San Pablo Ave. Berkeley, CA 94702, call (510) 548-3113 or e-mail <bach@igc.org>.