Narrator: Bob Cochrane
Interviewer: Laurie Mercier
Date: June 9, 2000
Place: Camas, Washington
[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 2]
LM: This is Laurie Mercier and I am in Camas, Washington interviewing Bob Cochrane about the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers and the date today is June 9, 2000, and this interview is for the Columbia River Basin Project on Columbia communities for the Center for Columbia River History, and Bob, why don’t we start by you saying something about your background and how you came to Camas and how you came to work at the mill.
BC: Well, I grew up in Yacolt, which is about forty miles or so from here. Worked for Weyerhaeuser in the summertime a couple of years like ’59, ’60 and when I got out of school in ’61 I went to work for Weyerhaeuser full-time as a forestry technician and I learned to test sample plots for rehab, reforestation, some running property lines and using aerial photos for pinpointing section corners and quarter corners and some timber cruising, and Weyerhaeuser went on strike, this was in 1961, Weyerhaeuser went on strike in ’61 so I left that job and went to work for the Forest Service as a forestry tech and did the same type of work, sample plotting around reforestation, laying out clearcuts, cruising timber, and [indistinguishable] property lines and so forth, and I did that from ’61 to ‘3 and in 1963 the Forest Service decided to eliminate their fire fighting brigade, they used to have a big fire fighting contingent that they kept year round, more in the summertime, but they kept a pretty big sized crew year round and they decided to eliminate that portion of their work force and all these guys came to work over in forestry and I had to start training them to become forestry technicians, well they had a lot more time in than I did in the Forest Service and I seen the handwriting on the wall and I kept trying to get my ranger to upgrade me from a GS5 to a GS7 and all I got was a lot of lip service, so in 1964 I quit, and did a little bit of flat work in concrete, foundations and garage floors, and driveways and stuff like that, and sold fire alarms for a brief period of time, and then one day I was talking to a guy and I was outta work and he says, “Why don’t you go down to the mill and apply?” I never had thought of doing that, so I drove into Camas, first time I’d ever in town, went down and put in an application and I went to work the next day.
LM: Growing up in Yacolt, did you… I imagine at that time it was a forest town, or timber town, and so was that kind of a natural entry into the timber industry?
BC: Yeah. My dad was a logger and had been all his life, I never planned on becoming a logger so…
LM: You said you had not ever thought about working at the mill, were you not just not even much aware of it existing?
BC: Yeah, that’s true ’cause I’m from Yacolt, I was kind of a “country bumpkin.” That’s how I got here and I been here ever since.
LM: What kind of work did you start out doing?
BC: Started out my very first job was on number five paper machine and it was, they ran a grade paper of called IBM, which was tab cards, the old tab cards they used to make for the IMB computers and you did spotting for defects, you sit there on graveyard shift trying to stay awake watching this paper go [indistinguishable]. Then I did a few other jobs and I ended up at he converting plant area for a while, and one day I just decided, I looked at the labor agreement and I was talking to one of the operators I worked with for sometime, he’d been there about thirty-some years, and his rate a pay was about the same as a fourth in on the paper machines, and so based ion that I decided I wasn’t gonna spend thirty-five years and be making what a fourth hand was making on the paper machines so I left that department and got up on the paper machines, and I been there since ’66.
LM: When did you become involved in the union?
BC: About 1969.
LM: I was assuming it was a closed shop and so that you would join right away.
BC: Yes. Oh yeah, it was closed.
LM: And that was ’65 when that started?
BC: Yeah, yes.
LM: But in terms of becoming active, that was a little late.
BC: About ’69.
LM: And what [indistinguishable] did you [indistinguishable] to become one?
BC: I was on the paper machines and their scheduling practices up there was pretty selective. OK? I was noticing on a seniority list that was posted that there was three guys that were ahead of me on that seniority list that I knew I had been in the department longer than they had and I couldn’t get anybody interested in my case, so I did the research on my own and I got verification that I was senior to ’em and I took it to the company and got my seniority straightened around, and basically with the thought that if that had happened to me that it must be happening to somebody else so that’s when I started getting involved.
LM: What were things like at that time, in terms of participation, and..
BC: Oh, the only thing back on those times, the company and the union, we talked OK, but they were management and we were the union, there was really a wall between us, that wall was a real firm wall and everything was pretty adversarial, we fought over a lot of things. For example, back in those days the union would have somewhere around a hundred and eighty to a hundred and ninety some grievances a year in various, of course there was about twenty-six hundred people that worked here then. Now we have maybe twenty some grievances a year, and I got elected… I was a shopster starting in about ’69 and I been a shopster every year since 1969 until this year, and the reason I’m not this year is I didn’t run, I wanted to let some of the younger folks do it.
LM: What about your position as an officer, I was interested to find out that presidents cannot serve more than two years in a term, and maybe that’s true for other officers.
BC: Vice president, president only. There’s a history behind that, that’s the way our bylaws were drafted from the beginning and the history was the people in Camas were used to kind of a private club as they seen it, and that was because they were young in union activity and they didn’t want to have the same people doing the job all the time, they wanted to make sure there was gonna be different people involved in the hierarchy of they union, so there was a “good ol’ boys club.” So they arranged our bylaws that you can only hold it two consecutive years then you had to take a year off.
LM: So this is in the Camas bylaws, not with AWPP?
BC: Right, this is just local 5, we’re the only one that has that.
LM: Backing up a bit, and I don’t know how much you know about some of that history in the ’60s, or how much you were aware of what was going on in Camas, but I know that at least when AWPPW formed in ’64?
BC: Yes.
LM: That there was some resistance in the Camas local, which I found interesting that of the forty-nine west coast locals, all were enthusiastic of a new union that would separate itself from the old one…
BC: Paperworkers.
LM: Paperworkers or Pulp and Sulfide Workers, the AFL unions, and that there was this western contingent that was much more militant, or at least wanted its autonomy and separation from the internationals. Do you know why the Camas local was not so enthusiastic about splitting and why it was the only one of these forty-eight west coast locals to resist?
BC: Well, Camas, the papermaker portion of the Camas Mill was really strong in international union. They were very, very happy with their portion of the International Paperworkers Union, OK? The Pulp and Sulfite people were the ones in Camas that were the rebels that broke away. So in ’64 when the split happened, it split the mill, papermakers stayed in the mill and kept working and everybody else walked out and so the papermakers, they kept working, um, it split families, brother against brother, father against son, and there was a lot of real bad blood because people would be walking the picket line and their brother or their father would be going to work, and we were raided, after we were successful in the vote in becoming represented by the AWPPW, at the Camas Mill, the papermakers’ union, the United Brotherhood of Paperworkers I believe it was, they raided this Camas Mill twice more, they raided us in sixty-seven I believe and then sixty-nine, and what I mean by raided us is they tried to get in and get enough votes to take over the mill and every time that they did that it brought back the bad blood between the families all over again.
LM: Now this is not between families but among families, and you’d have different family members who would side with the different…
BC: Two different factions, yes.
LM: Do you know much about why those divisions existed? Did papermakers see themselves as more as an elite, skilled group?
BC: Yes, well, and they were always higher paid and the other people didn’t get the kind of recognition they thought they should have been getting for their skills.
LM: So it’s kind of a classic division between industrial workers and skilled craftsworkers.
BC: Well, they’re all industrial, but papermakers basically, even today, like to think of themselves, that if you can’t run a paper machine nothing else really matters, and it was really bad back then, I mean the machine tenders back in those days were considered by the company the top of the pile, and they thought they were top of the pile. When I first went to work at one of the paper machines, the first time we were raided in ’67 I was up there, and I was a rebel, bad treatment, let me tell you, and when a machine tender hollered at you back n those days you had to respond, you had to respond very, very effectively or you were out of the mill. It was a real different world.
LM: So why were you drawn to the rebels?
BC: Don’t really know, I’ve thought about that a couple times and I really don’t have an answer. The reason that we broke away was because of the east coast domination, that they didn’t give us a chance for a voice in our destiny, I guess I’ve always been wanted to have the opportunity to participate in my destiny and I don’t tolerate people not letting me at least share my thoughts or enthusiasm, whichever way you want to say it. So I guess it was more my kind of life, but I’ve got a lot of friends that belong to the old papermakers and they’re still my friends today even when they we’d have a few words during the two times that they raided us, but I worked side by side with them so it was kinda hard not to just let it go and forget about it.
LM: Well when you came on in the later ’60s you mentioned that there was still this bad blood. How did that represent itself in the day-to-day work and the way people interacted, or even socialized?
BC: Yeah, it was just a different, I guess in the ’60s besides the union issues I guess there was a culture change coming on also because the people in my age group that were coming up on the machines weren’t going to take the kind of treatment that people were used to up there. I mean, they used to walk up and kick you and smack you in areas where it hurt, make you clean up real nasty paces.
LM: Who was doing that, foreman or…
BC: Machine tenders, or foremen, which foremen, most of the foremen came up from the ranks, they were old International Papermakers so it was an interesting time.
LM: So how did you all resolve that tension?
BC: I guess time actually is the biggest factor in resolving it, and also you had to be a good worker to where they didn’t mind having you on the job or appreciated having you on the job, so those kinds of differences just kind of went away, and besides that I started becoming active and I became their representative, interacted for them with he company and they started electing me, so it just kind of evolved.
LM: Looking at this breakaway in ’64 and the creation of the Western Pulp and Paper Workers, there are some other examples in labor history like the Longshore and Warehouse Union that slip off from the east coast. Do you know, especially since you’re involved with AWPPW, what is it about the west coast, or these Western workers that makes you and them want to remain affiliated as a region?
BC: [Long pause]. It’s just a different culture out here, I mean that’s the basic. The people out here– if you go back east and you talk to folks they have a different mindset about things. I’ve been back east, I’ve been in a lot of different mills and there’re some great, great people everywhere in this country but their basic beliefs are just a little bit different than ours.
LM: Can you give me an example.
BC: Gee, I’m trying to think of something. Now we belong to the carpenters now, we’re affiliated with the carpenters, we’re really not part of their organization even though we are, but I been to one of their carpenter conventions and got to see what it’s like in a big union and in a big union when the leadership turns on the lights, they turn on the lights. I can run for the president of my union here and I could have many, many times ’cause every rank and file has a right to vote or run for any position in our union, where in the bigger unions there’s a harder way to get there, since you ‘re in the clique, and I think that may be part of our bylaw deal that we mentioned earlier, once you’re in that hierarchy you’re a power and I guess the west coast folks don’t mind a power but we want power that we’ve got some control over and that’s why we’ve have control here on the west coast. The east coast still looks at us almost like cowboys and Indians, at least they did back in those days, it’s that much of a separation. I can tell the president of my union, Len Roberts, I can go over any day and I can have a conversation with him and there’s nothing he can do to me ’cause I’m a rank and file… it’s just autonomy, I guess autonomy is the real key factor. We are independent and we’re autonomous and don’t mind being part of the bigger picture, but want that independence.
LM: I was wondering if because the West has this tradition of natural resource based industries and more industrial unions, like Timberworkers and [indistinguishable] workers…
BC: You look at a steel industry, all that big industry and then you go back to what happened back in the south in like the Virginia area where the coal miners and what they went through, the textile industry back there, so there’s a lot of real history about the labor movement back there in the east and they’ve had a hard life also. We’re probably spoiled because they didn’t go through what they did, we had our own problems but there’s a video, there’s a video we have that we show to our new hires that talks a little bit about the Washington area, the history of there unions, just a little bit.
LM: The AWPPW was created at a time when union sin the rest of the country were becoming more centralized, so it’s kind of interesting that there’s this break off at a time when other unions are merging, you mentioned some of the ratings that happened, how long was it before the AWPPW did merge with, I guess it’s not a merger with the carpenters, but become affiliated with them?
BC: That’s only been maybe six, seven years ago.
LM: So it was in the ’90s.
BC: Yeah, yeah, and that’s because, well one of the things I was gonna show you, there’s so much to tell you but back in the early days of this union all you really had to do to be active as a union member and become a leader was to understand a labor agreement and know how to use a grievance procedure and help take care of people’s rights. In 1980 the company got a hold of me and they said that they’re considering remodeling the mill, modernizing the mill and our contract was up in ’81, so I got my people together and we sat down and we talked to ’em, and they basically drew me a picture and they said, “Here’s the potential for Camas if…” and they showed this graph “if we don’t invest in Camas” they showed a graph of maybe in ten years of the mill being shut down, or if they do invest in Camas then the mill is gonna be around for a long time, so they were looking at somewhere between $600 and $800 million, and they wanted a long-term contract. So we ended up going to the bargaining table and we successfully put together a five year contract and the company went ahead and modernize the mill and I really do believe that if we hadn’t of done what we did at that time this mill would have been in real trouble today.
LM: Now the downside to that modernization was [indistinguishable] in the workplace?
BC: Yes. They took out the bag factory, which was about three hundred fifty people, mostly women. They shut down number four paper machine, number six paper machine, number eight paper machine, and started up number twenty, and took a lot of people out of here in that modernization, which is to be expected really.
LM: Do you have a rough estimate on what that decline was?
BC: That decline was probably four hundred jobs, four hundred people, not jobs, excuse me, there’s a big difference.
LM: You say it’s a big difference because each job has several shifts?
BC: Right.
LM: So does that lead to affiliation then with the larger…
BC: No, what happened, and what I was gonna share with you is I’ve got the book here and it’s called the PPRC and it’s Pulp and Paper Workers’ Resource Council. Environmentalists started attacking our wood supply and a few folks here on the west coast, and I can give you the names, great people with a lot of foresight, went back to Washington, D.C. and talked to a few people and tried to get a handle on what was going to happen out here on the west coast, that started with the Spotted Owl OK? They got some pretty bad answers back there so they developed a west coast coalition, and started right here on the west coast, and they developed this Pulp and Paper Resource Council and they started making trips to Washington, DC and meeting with senators and representatives and getting them to listen to the union side…
[Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2]
BC: … This is some documentation and I can show you it describes– “There are three hundred mills have closed and over thirty-five thousand jobs in the wood industry have been eliminated as a result of the Endangered Species.” To show you how big this groups is now, in the western region Bob (?) was one of the original founders, Donny Beesaw from Halsey Mill was one of the original founders, Larry Reondo from (?) Mill was one of the original founders…
LM: And these are all workers, not management.
BC: Right, there’s no management involved except for a few staff people they have for technical health, but they got the Western region, the Rocky Mountain region, the Great Lakes region, that’s how big this group is now. Now when they do a fly-in at Washington, DC they take a hundred people in there and unbelievable what they do.
LM: What have been the goals of the group?
BC: For example, I actually believe it was our efforts that– there was two propositions coming out on cluster rules, Proposition A and Proposition B we’ll say, OK? The one that the industry could support and they knew it was gonna cost them a lot of money and one was a hundred times more then that and there was no good science, there wasn’t even technology to accomplish what that one was trying to– I believe that our union group was very, very instrumental in getting the lesser of the two evils enacted. We flew back to Maine, when Maine was going thorough a big clearcutting issue, it was 2A and 2B was the two resolutions and we went door-to-door, we went around and hand billed, and we talked to people and we had a meeting with the governor, I can’t remember his name, he was an independent, he wasn’t a Republican or a Democrat, and he thanked us. In every industry, Fort James, Bowater, Potlatch, IP, they’re all participating, they got people from these groups, I don’t know if it– it doesn’t really show you on all of this, [flipping through the book], the one thing I wanted to show you, these were the groups that went in on the last fly-in, there was thirteen groups, and it shows for example, group nine was a guy from Montana, Louisiana, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Maine, and this is the appointments that each group had for just February the third, they seen senator this time and they walk into senator boxer, this is all set up by these folks prior to the fly-in and they get all these meetings set up with the representatives and senators and work theses issues that are so important to our future.
LM: So the environmental changes, beginning in the 1980s, were critical for workers. Had there been, previous to this, any big movements for political participation among the union?
BC: Yes, in 1981 when the company was getting ready to spend this big pile of money here at Camas, was (?) McDonald, who was president of the local at that time, helped and we got the company sales tax, or that portion of sales tax was massaged by the state of Washington to save them a big chunk of money on that big modernization as one example. In, and I can’t tell you which year because there’s been so much happening, as cluster rules were being looked at real hard in the national level, Oregon had already issued theirs and they were pretty darn stringent, Washington state was getting ready to do the same thing, which was way beyond what the national picture was looking at. One of the guys that I worked with, his name’s John Wagner and I, and Andy (?) was the middle manager, we knew Senator Dean Sutherland from this area who set up a meeting in Olympia, we went up there and met with Don Brunell, who was the lobbyist for the manufacturers, probably still is, and Speaker of the House, we had a meeting and they initiated a bill which kind of stymied the Department of Ecology for the State of Washington and their efforts because we were working the national picture and didn’t want the state to cloud the water and we got that stopped. So we’ve been active for quite a few years now, and I guess that was the point I was trying to get to, from my early years the job has grown so much, and a good portion of the membership doesn’t have a clue, they go to work, they clock in, they do their job, their wages are there, their benefits are there, and boy it’s nice that all that happens, but they don’t have not even a concept of what has to go on daily to make this all work.
LM: So the affiliation with UBC, then was to get help for these much larger matters.
BC: Well, and besides that our numbers, you seen that picture I showed you of all them plants had been shut down, our numbers got so small that we were having a hard time supporting our infrastructure. That was the real kicker, and all these mills on the west coast that we started with with our union were all old, and they were old then, so you keep downsizing to the point and you run out of financial stability.
LM: So it sounds like, at least in recent decades, much of the union’s work has been in preserving jobs. Dealing with mechanization, dealing with the supply, trying to preserve the supply…
BC: Right. Trying to stop some of the export of raw materials.
LM: The first two it seems like were in cooperation with the company. Now what about export…
BC: That’s a real tough one. It’s not hard with Fort James because they don’t have any wood basket, but when we were Crown Zellerbach a little bit different story, just like Weyerhaeuser, Weyerhaeuser is a big exporter. We were successful a little bit, under state land, to get that curved, but all we ever wanted was it not go out of our country without at least being processed, and I’m not talking about being sawed clear up into lumber, but maybe you can square it up or something, just enough to maintain a few jobs ’cause this is a natural resource and the Asian market’s only buying it up, for one reason, because they don’t have it and they never will have it, and I don’t know what they’re doing with it all, there’s a lot of rumors out there, I don’t know, but logs as you’ve heard preserve a long time when they’re submerged, that article in the paper here when they found that ship that went down in the Great Lakes, that black walnut that they pulled out, stuff that had been in the water for– it was perfect. So don’t know, I’d hate to se it, I’m running it back and forth in my mind now, but I can tell you that in 1957 as a kid, young man, I was about eighth grade then, International Paper put a plywood mill out at (?) Prairie out there just between Mt. St. Helens and Yacolt and they started harvesting big timber off of Mt. St. Helens and they did that for, I’ll say ten years, and just stripped the country, just stripped it and never reforested.
LM: Who was that?
BC: International Paper. The forestry practices as a whole back in those days was bad, and I can tell you I watched it happen, watched it happen, knew it wasn’t right but that was just a way of life, didn’t know what to do about it. For example, in 1961 the state of Washington, it was either Clark County or the state of Washington, it had to be Clark County, put a tax on old growth timber, an additional tax, so what Weyerhaeuser did they had a whole area of big old growth doug fir up canyon crick, which is just not too far out of Yacolt, Weyerhaeuser contracted out and they went in there and just took it all out, they couldn’t get that tax reduced and they just took it all out.
LM: Before the tax [indistinguishable]?
BC: Yep, yeah. I watched that happen. Back in the ’60s doug fir, when they used to do sales, they do log sales by species OK, and when a timber cruiser goes ion and cruises a strip of land, they estimate the amount of merchantable lumber that they’re gonna be able to salvage out then log and they do it by species, and they’ll say like there may be two million board feet of hemlock, there may be three million board feet of Douglas fir, and there may be a million and a half board feet of cedar. So when the people are bidding on the sale, they bid [indistinguishable] in dollars a thousand board feet for each species and Doug fir back in those days was going for about forty-five dollars a thousand , hemlock was about thirty-five dollars a thousand, and cedar was somewhere around twenty dollars a thousand, and as more (?) loggers got started then everyone was bidding. The first sale that I watched happened was they bid, [indistinguishable] was pretty close on the doug fir and on the hemlock, but then they bid cedar way up, so the total cost of the sale goes to the higher bidder. Well, the person that bid the high up on the cedar they never hauled any of it out, they only pay for what goes across the scale and they busted it all up out in the woods and left it there. So there was a lot of stuff going on back in those days and there was not enough people to police it or even care about it ’cause there was so much timber.
LM: The export of logs and making sure there’s ample supply in the region have been union-wide concerns. What have been some local issues, and I’m thinking in particular some of the strikes that emerged in ’69 and ’72…
BC: ‘3.
LM: I have the wrong dates, but what were some local issues that led to that led to disputes with management here?
BC: Well in those days the ’69 strike was when we bargained independent and the problem we had then was that they’d settled with all the other Crown mills and they wouldn’t settle with us, didn’t know why, and a group from our mill went up to Port Angeles and put pickets on that mil up there and that mill went down and right after that we got a contract settled. I can’t really tell you what the issue was. Now, Dick Lindstrom could probably, if you have your interview with him, he could probably tell you what happened. Now in ’71 or ’73, I think it was ’71, Dick was probably involved in that one too, he was probably a delegate, we were bargaining in the seven mills then, all Crown mills were bargaining at the same time and so I can’t really tell you what that issue was ’cause that was a short strike, like three weeks.
LM: I heard that Crown Zellerbach locked out employees?
BC: That was that year. What happened, we went on strike and we weren’t being successful in trying to accomplish resolution to the strike, so the union strategy was “We’re just gonna go down there and we’re gonna ask the mill manager, tell him we’re ready to go to work,” there was hundreds of us, we marched down there and middle manager came out and we said “We’re ready to go to work,” and he says “We don’t have no work for you,” so that’s when it became a lockout.
LM: Now why was this the strategy?
BC: IN California, I think at that time everybody went down and applied for unemployment because we were locked out and in California you could get unemployment benefits, but you can’t in the state of Washington, and I wasn’t really part of that bigger picture back then but…
LM: That’s true of the Kaiser workers today, isn’t it, that they, because they’re locked, out able to get unemployment.
BC: Right.
LM: OK, it’s a strategy that makes sense. In those years, especially since this mill had not had any strikes at all, maybe there was one in ’34 and then the ’64 strike, then there are a couple that come after one another, I imagine during the three year contract.
BC: Yeah, there was all different terms, but yeah.
LM: How was the membership educated or…
BC: About the issues?
LM: About the issues to agree to go on strike?
BC: Well, we held informational meetings, sometimes we’d use the gymnasium, ’cause we didn’t have this building in, we used the cafeteria up at the school, but we held meetings, the only way the union can go on strike is if the membership vote to do it so we’d hold big explanation meetings.
LM: Apparently there was enthusiasm for the strikes, I’m just wondering if there had been a change. You mentioned earlier about this younger generation coming up if that made a difference in how people felt bolder in to challenge the company.
BC: Well, the leadership, see, technically the leadership was new too because when the AWPPW was formed we developed new leadership and they were more eager to challenge the company and get more benefits and it kind of just became a way of our union.
LM: Now what was the level of participation among workers at that time, the late ’60s, early ’70s?
BC: Level of participation meaning?
LM: If workers actually did come to meetings and if there’s been a decline in that participation or has it always been low [laughs]?
BC: [Laughs] It’s always been low, unfortunately, and I don’t know if you can say it’s because of shift work or not, but it’s always been low. There are some numbers I do remember. I was involved in the ’78 strike. We went on strike August the fifth and my first year as president was 1979, so I ran my very first union meeting, we’d been on strike since August of ’78 and held those meetings at the gymnasium in Washougal. Unbelievable, wall to wall people, but when we got a contract, and we voted like February the nineteenth, we went back to work like February the twentieth, when we voted after being off that long, of twenty, no let’s see there must have been about nineteen hundred people worked here then, I think we had eight hundred people vote.
LM: On the contract.
BC: Yeah, on the contract.
LM: That doesn’t sound like many to me.
BC: It’s not, and when we vote on the contract we hold three meetings a day for two days.
LM: SO what explains that apathy?
BC: I don’t know. If you could give me the answer to that I could be a very successful person. Yeah, it’s always been a bad turnout.
LM: Well, that ’78 strike was long, seven months, and I read that workers actually lost some benefits they had gained in earlier years.
BC: [Long pause] I don’t know what that would be. I don’t really remember losing any benefits…
LM: Well what do you remember about the strike?
BC: What I remember about that strike was that on August the fourth, it’s really hard to describe this for you, but you ever been to the Masonic Temple in Portland?
LM: I’ve never been inside, I’ve seen it.
BC: Well, it’s like a big tomb, OK, and that’s where we used to bargain with all seven mills, we always bargained there, and we’d been bargaining a long time and it was in August, as you know, and we were short-fused and the company was playing a game with us, at least in our view. For example, they have us on stand by eight o’clock in the morning, they’d come back in around two o’clock in the afternoon, say “Well, we’re still working and we still want you on standby, we’re gonna get back to you later on.” It was about seven o’clock that night, I was president of the Crown Council and what that means is that out of the seven mills all their delegates will elect their representative, somebody to chair their meetings and be the president, I was the president at that time and sat right next to the bargaining spokesman and he had the boys pretty well pumped up and that was his nature, he says “Let’s go get them,” so we marched upstairs and pounded on their door and told them to get their ass down there, we wanted to talk to ’em, and you know they’d kept us in that damn too all day long in the heat and tempers were short and the biggest problem was, and there was a lot of things that were wrong, don’t know how much of it I want to share, but I’ll share most of it. One of the problems is two of the mills were already on their way down and I didn’t even know that and that was one of the problems with our group being so big, there was no control and when the company, when we told ’em, they caucused and they came back in, this was on a Friday, I’m pretty sure it was as Friday, they came back in and they said well if we keep from shutting down and come back and meet ’em Saturday morning that they’d respond to all five of your items and we basically told them to [makes a swishing noise]. That’s what happened.
LM: So ultimately then what did happen?
BC: We shut down. We walked out and then started the process of shutting the mills down, and then it gets bad from there ’cause the first few weeks everybody’s pretty happy about being outta work, and everything’s fun, and it’s summertime, but then people do things on the picket line that causes problems and pisses the company off, so beyond having your issue you had when you walked away, more issues develop and that’s whether or not you have– the company discharges people because of strike activities. So when you start getting ready to get back together you have a worse issue to deal with then when you had when you went out, and I spent, I don’t even want to– how many months just trying to get us back to the bargaining table. We were successful in getting a meeting scheduled in September, I think it was, or October, with the company and the mill down the river 15– Longview Fiber, was at the bargaining table and they were getting ready to vote and we asked them no to vote ’til after we’d AHD our meeting with the company. We sent people from our local down there to– and they threw our people out at their union hall and they held their vote and the company canceled our meeting, so there’s been a lot of bad blood between my local and 153 for a lot of years, which we’re gotten over now, but there was for a long time.
LM: So there was a break-up of that solidarity which– caught in another issue.
BC: Yeah, but we got throughout and I can just let it go at that. We got through it and that was in ’79, but to show you how easy things change, we had a lot of health and welfare issues in ’79 between the health care providers and the people in the mills and Hal Seeds was the head of AHR here at this mill at that time and he agreed to ask me if I would travel with him to San Francisco and meet with the locals down there and health care providers and get some of these medical issues resolved and we did. Then shortly after that in ’79 the company contacted me and they wanted to meet with us on disability/retirement issues, and we met ’em, I called the Crown Council together and we met in Portland and the company flew in at our Portland office over there. We sat down, they had an interest in disability/retirement and modifying a portion of that language that we had in our contract, and we had an interest in modifying a different portion of that language and we did that during the term of that contract right after that ’78 strike.
[Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2]
LM: So how did people survive seven months with no work?
BC: Well, people worked, most people found jobs, nothing that paid like what they were used to, but a lot of people found jobs, and as I mentioned to you that my first union meeting that I ever ran was in January of ’79 and I had people from out in the audience telling me that they were about ready to lose their homes and they were loosing their cars and it was pretty emotional and there was a lot of tough times. We’d worked with a lot of the banks and asked them to be lenient and most of them were really good. Barry Lutz, who used to own Coast to Coast over here was fantastic at Christmastime he donated so many gifts, we had a big Christmas party up here for the kids. So there was a lot of good things that happened, a lot of people in town, I can’t remember everybody, but I do know Barry Lutz was very, very generous during that Christmas. When we finally settled the strike and we were back to work I can remember telling the people that if they could just maintain living on what they’d been accustomed to living on, they’d all be rich in five years, but no, everybody just took off like it was day one and started spending like they had always spent.
LM: That’s the “American way.”
BC: “American way,” yes [laughs].
LM: Well that leads me to another question I wanted to ask you is about the relationship between the mill and the town of Camas, and my student in research at the history of Camas came to conclude that even in recent decades it’s become more of a bedroom community and hi-tech has moved in, that it’s still very much a mill town or that the mill continues to shape the personality or character of Camas. Could you talk a bit about that relationship, and I don’t know if you actually live in Camas…
BC: I live in Washougal.
LM: … but how much a role the community played in the mill and vice versa.
BC: Well we as far as during the strike?
LM: The strike and other times.
BC: The town suffered during the strike. You take that much payroll out of this town and it hurt every business in this town, and as I mentioned to you, during that Christmas a lot of businesses helped out for out Christmas party we had and it actually helped bond the town together with the mill, especially once we fired back up and …
LM: Do you think the sympathies of townspeople were with the workers?
BC: Yes, I do. It probably wouldn’t be that way as much today because as you mentioned we have hi-tech and we’ve got a lot of California people that moved here, you drive out by Black Lake, it used to be Black Forest, we used to drag race up there, I mean that was a straight stretch of road with timber on both sides and now it’s $400,000 to a million dollar homes. Unbelievable.
LM: What about in the earlier years, the ’60s and ’70s, what role did the mill play in the town?
BC; The mill was the big tax base. The city of Camas is always been lucky to have the mill as a tax base because the fire department and the police department has always been the top (?) in having what they wanted and the mill is a major player, and still is financially for the town, for the schools and everything.
LM: Was there any tradition of celebrations, either sponsored by the union or by the company?
BC: Nothing other then, well, we’ve had mill picnics. We have a twenty-five year picnic that anybody with twenty-five years or more gets to go to. We have a lot of departmental functions. The mill just got through going through a big May down where they shut the whole mill down for a week for maintenance work, they spent atom of money on fixing things, we got the mill back up and running and the mill here last Friday had a big barbecue where all the supervisors, all the higher people in the mill, cooked hamburgers and hot dogs and they fed all the mill employees in recognition and thanks for all the hours they spent during that down and getting the mill back up and running. Jim (?) now who’s our middle manager is very, very up on that, letting people know that he appreciates out efforts and so forth, he’s pretty sharp man.
LM: Now has there been a– are there certain watering holes around Camas where workers tend to congregate, or what kind of social life have workers carried on outside of the mill?
BC: It’s all over the map, and it’s really changed in my thirty-five years. When I started here thirty-five years ago there was four taverns in downtown Camas and one or two hard liquor places and today there’s two taverns and two hard liquor places. There’s a lot less activity than what there used to be.
LM: What explains that? Is it the decline in numbers?
BC: Nah, it’s probably the laws and then people growing up. The laws have really changed a lot, people didn’t care before, you could probably just do just about anything but nowadays .08 is a pretty minimal consideration, so that’s probably been the biggest– just like when we have functions here, you really get nervous about talking on that responsibility when there’s alcohol involved, and I would not want to be a tavern owner, that’s just too much reliability.
LM: That’s interesting. So that’s kind of changed the interaction or [indistinguishable] life of the mill workers.
BC: Yeah. I actually think there’s a change in just people growing older. The mill, for example, the average age in this mill is fifty– about right close forty-eight to fifty years of age, in the next ten years they’re gonna lose fifty percent of the people, so that’s seven hundred people who are gonna retire out here in ten yeas.
LM: So that suggests that there hadn’t been much turnover since the downsizing. People who have seniority have hung on to their jobs, there hasn’t been a lot of new, young people.
BC: Right.
LM: Have the numbers of jobs continued to shrink?
BC: A little bit, but it’s pretty stable at 1,350, pretty stable. Be pretty hard to make it much smaller than that without shutting down some major pieces of equipment.
LM: Now a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about were just some of the changes that you’ve seen take place in the last couple of decades, and certainly one has been with the company itself, the transition from Crown Zellerbach to James River, and then Fort James. Do you want to say anything about those transitions and if they brought any major changes in your mind.
BC: Well, it’s major changes because of the upper people in the corporation, Crown Zellerbach was much more people oriented I believe, I mean they were just more people oriented. When James River acquired us we weren’t really a fit for them and they really struggled with– because this mill has two separate businesses it’s communications papers, or copy paper as you know it, and the towel and tissue, and most mils are not like that and a lot of our products competed with James River so there was a lot of struggle with that and they eliminated some of our products because of it. Now with Fort James their answer seems to be eliminate bodies and that improves profit and that’s well and good as long as you are diligent about what you’re doing and there’s no diligence in their efforts, it’s strictly a numbers game, and as I mentioned to you I was with these guys yesterday, I talked to the two presidents, one in Halsey and one at (?) yesterday and …
LM: These guys are the…?
BC: Department of PPRC, they’re Larry Redondo form (?) and Donny Beesaw from Halsey and they’re both UPIU or Pace union members, remember we talked about the union we broke away from, that’s the union that they belong to.
LM: The sulfide or paperworkers?
BC: The United Brotherhood of Paperworkers. They’re still with that union which is now called Pace, but we work together, especially in this organization around environmental issues and so forth and we do interact and help each other when we can in contract times too.
LM: You were talking with them about..
BC: Oh, yeah, about this downsizing and we’re considering, we’re trying to set up a meeting with Miles Marsh, the CEO of the corporation and I know he always hears it from the middle managers when they have their meetings, and they meet a lot, but we feel we won’t be doing our job if we don’t give it an effort to make sure he hears it from us, so we’re trying to set that up now.
LM: What will be your argument?
BC: My argument is going to be is I understand he’s trying to make the corporation profitable, but these mills are different from than what he may be accustomed to ’cause he came from (?), I think it was. I don’t think he understands the age of the work force, and really what this company should be doing right now, is they need to be looking really hard at how many people they got to bring on line and get trained up, because as I mentioned to you, they’re gonna lose seven hundred people outta this mil in ten years and that’s a lot of history that’s gonna walk outta here, and a lot of experience, and they’re gonna be hard pressed to get [people up to speed in time to take on those new roles, and that’s the story, that’s the issue I want to make sure that he’s– he has to hear it.
LM: It’s not just a temporary bottom line issue, you’re thinking in the long-term and so many corporations do think in the short-term, profit-driven, [indistinguishable].
BC: Yep, and that’s just the way our game is in this country at this time and it’s too bad because there’s got to be another answer, I don’t know what it is, but there has to be another answer.
LM: Well other changes that have taken place have concerned the nature of the workforce and beginning in the 1970s with equal employment opportunities for minorities and women coming on line. How would that change both life in the union and life in the workplace?
BC: Well when you get a chance to talk with Rosemarie, see, we were ahead of the game, we’ve been ahead of the game for a long time. Prior to 1969 there used to be women’s rates and men’s rates and in 1969 we eliminated that, it was job rates, and I mentioned to you that the mill’s modernization in ’81 and prior to that women weren’t allowed to progress in the bag factory above hand jobs, and in 1976, I believe it was, just about the time EEOC was being propagated, is that the right word, we met with the company and Rosmarie was a (?) steward from her work area, I was on the standing committee, which is the committee that handles all the grievances for the mail. We met with the company and worked out the seniority for the ladies as far as being able to promote up into the jobs that used to be only run by men, and started that process back in ’76, before it was mandated by the government. The only problem I have, what’s made it difficult for me, or the union, with the other portion of the laws that you talked about, and minorities and so forth, s that they hire people, Vietnamese and Cambodians and so forth, and they never have learned our language, and it’s awfully hard, I mean they’ve learned it, but they don’t learn it, you can’t communicate with them. Good workers, for the most part, some were, but the only issue we ever had is that they should have to learn our language, we work in a very noisy environment and it’s really difficult to hear when you’re speaking the same language, and not making assumptions of what somebody’s saying. So that’s my only real issue that I’ve had is the language barrier.
LM: Has that also hurt union participation?
BC: No, not really, they don’t participate, but that’s just a…
LM: A lot of other people don’t either.
BC: A lot of other people don’t either, so really the only real issue has been the language barrier.
LM: On the shop floor, the workplace.
BC: Yeah, right.
LM:: You mentioned environmental issues concerning timber supply. What about the Columbia River and dioxin pollution, I know that’s been a big issue on the Columbia, have been pulp mills and pulp mill pollution. Was that something workers got involved in?
BC: Yeah. The dioxin issue, the cluster rules was what we– we were very involved in that, and we’re involved right now in breaching the dams, we’re gonna fight it. There’s no good science. This year, as an example, is one of the biggest salmon runs we’ve had in… the dams are still here. Now what they’re looking at– how many years ago we start hearing about, what’s the warming trend in the ocean?
LM: El Nino.
BC: El Nino. Now they’re starting to look at that as, if you go back when the salmon runs started really disappearing, our whole cycle of our country was changing, so we’ve gotten wetter in the last three years, four years, we’ve already went through about a ten year dry spell, and we’re getting wetter, and if the salmon run next year is similar to this year maybe that’s the real answer. We’ve used the water from the mill for doing fish farms, I mean, granted we are stewards of the land and I’m really pleased that the company has spent the money to improve the air and the water from what they were discharging, but where we’re out today, we’re better than the city of Portland will ever be, what they do to the Willamette River every time it rains.
LM: Now how did the dams effect the mill?
BC: Two things. Hydroelectric power, cheap rates, and we don’t have floods. Now the people just don’t understand what the Columbia River would do if it wasn’t being restrained.
LM: And because the mill is right on the river that’s a big concern.
BC: Big concern.
LM: So it doesn’t have anything to do with transport of logs on the river, more flooding and…
BC: And electrical power.
LM: And of course we hear a lot about aluminum plants, but not so much about pulp plants and your demands.
BC: Oh we use lots of power. What did he say, I think and don’t quote me, but I’m almost positive he said that our power bill’s like $40 million a year.
LM: Now with not only working in the mill but Camas itself, because it sits on the Columbia, what relationship has the community had with the river in the past three or four decades. You’ve been here. Do people think much about the river? Recreated in it?
BC: Oh yeah, people use the river. Yeah, the Columbia’s our home.
LM: So what way is it…
BC: Fishing, boating, swimming even, in certain portions you can do that, if you get in the right side right off the (?) Islands…
LM: so you think a lot of people in this area do use the river?
BC: Oh yes, I know they do.
LM: Well, we were talking about the mill’s impact on the river, what about working conditions inside the mill, have you seen those change much over the past several decades?
BC: Well, you mentioned the question about EEOC and women’s rights and so forth, well the one thing that those rights did is it made it better for man also, because there’s so many jobs in the mill women just could never do so they had to make equipment to make it to where women could do it and where men used to ruin their backs doing it, now women can do it and men can do it and the jobs are easier, the jobs are better, working conditions are better, a hundred times better. I talk to the young kids today that are working for me, working under me, and I Tel them “You have no idea what it was like,” and they can’t, there’s no way they could comprehend. Even though it’s not like working in a hi-tech place it is a hundred percent better than what it used to be.
LM: So what, when you came in ’65 how can you contrast that for me, just in terms of those conditions?
BC: Well, in ’65 working in converting, one of the places where I started, versus today, it’s the same equipment, same jobs, there’s more equipment now, a lot more automation, we used to pack everything by hand, now it’s packed by machine. We used to fold our cases, the cases are all folded, it’s all done with automation now, a lot of that type of work is changed. Up on the machines we run faster now but the machines run so much better because the technology helps you control the paper machines now and it just runs so much better, much more efficient, better quality.
LM: In this mill were there any dangers? Were there injuries and what did they tend to be and have those decreased?
BC: Yes. The tattoo for papermakers was missing fingers and it’s because there were so many nips and bad practices and the people just took for granted because that’s eh way they’ve been taught. Now we’re taught differently and people are still getting hurt, I ‘d like to see the day that nobody gets hurt, but we’re still hurting people, but it’s nothing like it used to be, and we work at our safety, everybody works at trying to reduce injuries.
LM: What brought about those changes? Was it the efforts of the union, federal legislation, and (?), etc.?
BC: Probably all of the above. I don’t know how you would separate it. I do believe you have to legislate a certain portion of it to make it happen., For example, hazardous chemicals, there used to be stuff in that mill you’d shutter to even think about and it was never labeled. MSDS labels that we talk about now had to almost fight the mill to make ’em use ’em, they had to just mandate it by state, but now it’s on everything, and we’ve gotten rid of a lot of chemicals because of their makeup. It’s still a very dangerous place, let me tell you We work with pressure vessels and a lot of chemicals, it’s a very dangerous place, but it’s dangerous but it’s safe, I don’t know how to say that any other way.
LM: Or safer, much more safe [indistinguishable]. Well is there anything else that you might like to say either about your work in the mill or your work in the union that we may not have touched on today?
BC: My work at the mill I guess I’m glad I came to work here in ’65, it’s been a good place to work, I enjoy my job. I don’t really care too much for shift work but I’ve been doing it for a long time, rotating shifts every week for thirty-five years is a challenge.
[Begin Side B, Tape 2 of 2]
LM: … does this company [indistinguishable] system.
BC: It’s this industry. If you do something besides rotating shifts on around the clock seven days a week, there’s very few places that run around the clock seven days a week, how would you handle that extra shift? For example, if I got to work five days of days, and then somebody else got to work five days of swing, and then somebody else got to work five days of graveyard, and I stayed on days, and they stayed on swing, and they stayed on graveyard, then somebody would have to work two days of days, two days of swing, two days of graveyard and you’d have to fill the void and I don’t know of another way to fill the void, other than doing it with four shifts. There’s a compressed work week schedule that’s out there were people work twelve hour days, but they only work two of them two nights, and then two days and they get four days off, but I’m against it, even though it may be better for me by physically, the main reason I’m against it is we spend probably more than a third of our life with the people we work with and the place that we work is probably half of our life and if you go to the compressed work week– at least when people have problems now I know who the people are, I know most of the people who work in the mill, and if you go to the compressed work week it separates you more from the people that you work with, you just don’t see each other so you lose that bonding and working relationship, the little bit that we have now, and really I believe it’s going to destroy unions because there’ll be less participation yet.
LM: Because when people don’t know their fellow workers they’re less likely to know what’s going on and to care about what’s happening.
BC: And beyond that either you’re gonna be on your days off or you’re gonna be working twelve hours, and if you’re working twelve hours you’re gonna be going home, going to bed, or going to work, and you’re not gonna be– whatever involvement you’ve got in the union I see it decreasing, and involvement with the company, it’s not just involvement with the union, I’m involved with the company. So that’s my real problem with the compressed work– and besides the other issue that I really hang on to and it’s the people before us fought for years to get it down to a eight hour work day and to go to twelve hours, I mean my day yesterday started at seven o’clock in the morning, I was down at the mill waiting for a guy from the carpenter’s union, photographer, they wanted me to help him get some pictures of people working in the mill, so I started my morning out doing that, taking this photographer from job to job to job. Then I had a one o’clock meeting that I shared with you with the PPRC from the three mills, middle management from all three mill, ’til four o’clock and at four o’clock I suited up and went to work up on the machines and the machine was down and I had to start it up, and I never got to sit down ’til nine o’clock last night. Now if I had had to work ’til four o’clock in the morning I don’t know if I could of made it, even though that’s already a lot of hours, but I’m just saying it’s not pounding on that concrete.
LM: We were talking earlier why, or wondering why, some people participate and some of them don’t. Especially when we do spend at least a third of our lives at work. What explains your commitment to union involvement?
BC: I don’t really know, I’ve been helping people for so darn many years and they always, now they just always come to me for help. Involvement, you know, when I talk about the membership I represent and the people that I work with, we’ve got people that every year they’re involved in Little League, Babe Ruth, Girl Scout groups, Boy Scout groups, The people are active in civic activities, so they have me do the union part and they’re doing that part, which I don’t do, and that’s the way we talk. So it’s kind of a sharing I guess, and there’s a lot of people that aren’t involved in union that if I really called on ’em would be there, even though I’d like to see a couple hundred people at union meeting every time we have one.
LM: How many people typically show up?
BC: Sixty.
LM: Better than thirty [laughs].
BC: Yeah [laughs].
LM: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Bob, it’s been very enlightening and if you think of anything else that we didn’t cover…
BC: Yeah, just if you get a chance to talk to those two other folks….
[Tape cuts off]
