Private Equity to Rockford Workers: Because We're Swine, You Walk the Line
Kerry Candaele, a producer for Brave New Films, is currently interviewing workers laid off as a result of private equity takeovers for BNF's second short documentary in its "War on Greed" series at www.warongreed.org.
Rockford, Illinois, as a city, is a bit player in our national drama. The city did, for a few years in the mid 1940s, host The Peaches, a perennial champion of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, the team on which Madonna and Tom Hanks went through their antics in A League of Their Own (remember "There's no crying in baseball")? But in general America's kleig lights are focused elsewhere, on celebrity cities and celebrities themselves, where our journalists tag along after the money and the mayhem.
But Rockford deserves a second look this holiday season, as 137 men and women walk a picket line in sub-zero weather, locked out by the Accuride/Gunite Corporation recently sold by the private equity firm Kolhberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), whose CEO, Henry Kravis, is the subject of Brave New Films' new War On Greed video series.
In our brave new world of high finance, private equity firms have maintained, until recently, an aura of celebrity themselves, claiming the high ground of free-market orthodoxy in their breathless claims -- like a good Victorian parent to the spindly adopted orphan -- about taking undervalued and underperforming companies, building them up and selling them off in a win-win-win trifecta for workers, investment partners, and the U.S. economy as a whole. Some of the workers in the Accuride/Gunite brake drum foundry in Rockford, however, would beg to differ with KKR, Mr. Kravis, and the whole private equity model. In fact, they are calling Henry out.
David Buchanan and Rick Kardell, both active members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) with long family connections to the foundry, stood around a metal drum filled with firewood outside the Gunite front gate on Rockford's east side where I visited with them this week. Gloved hands outstretched in iconic fashion over the flames, snow on the ground on all sides, David and Rick spoke with bitterness about the realities of KKR's buy out of Accuride/Gunite in 2005. "KKR came in with an aggressive new management that changed the whole nature of the workplace," Kardel points out. "For years we felt like a family, a unit, I mean it was a two way street. We would give when we had to, and they would give when they had to, but that's gone completely. It's not there anymore. There's no relationship between the union and the company, and they're trying to get rid of that even more. They're trying to take the voice out of the workplace right now for us. But that has been since KKR has come in and done this."
Things have changed at the Rockford foundry. The new Accuride/Gunite is home to numerous OSHA violations (including a collapsed floor that left workers hanging in the air, waiting to be rescued by the local fire department), and a drain on investment in this profitable company. Buchanan, a man with charisma to burn whose family has given over 50 years to the company, sums up the KKR culture with a story that is the sine qua non of their efficient, lean and mean management style.
Wrapped in several layers and wearing one of those floppy-ear hats that make him look 200 pounds to the wrong side of healthy living, David's words vaporize as they leave his mouth: "One of the employees' brothers had a heart attack and the employee left work and went to see his brother. Well, his brother died. He ended up dying. When the guy came back to work management disciplined this man for the day that he left when his brother had the heart attack. They said the reason why you're being written up is because your brother didn't die that day. HE DIDN'T DIE THAT DAY! This is what kind of company that we're dealing with. This was a model employee. This was somebody who didn't miss work, worked 60, 70 hours a week, was there all the time. He was a good employee, and he had no write-ups prior to that. And they disciplined him for missing that day because his brother did not die on that day. Sad."
For those who prefer their stories less Bob Cratchity and more of a Scroogist counting-of-the-pennies, one internal study shows that KKR, which sold Accuride/Gunite in May, 2007 for less money than the purchase price, still made a profit in fees worth millions and the writing off of "carried interest," a tax loophole that even Warren Buffet thinks should be eliminated. KKR, by one estimate, extracted over $191 million and over $16 million in fees.
Henry Kravis made over $50,000 an hour (that is not a typo), every hour of every day last year. David Buchanan makes roughly $22 an hour in each inelegant forty-hour week.
Indeed, there is no crying in baseball, but there ought to be a howl of outrage -- in Congress, in the business press, in the country at large -- at the worst of the private equity aces who have now no doubt flown south "to winter" in St. Kitts or shoosh about in the Dolomites, while the comrades at Gunite bide their time on the line and, for the moment, bite the bullet.
I'm trying not to be mawkish here, as there is both good cheer and a bit of despair on the line in Rockford, as there have been since the first picket line took shape in front of an ancient pyramid or a half-dug ditch during the Shang Dynasty. But I'd take this sweet and sour mélange any day over the gaudy Upper East Side bliss on Park Avenue where Henry Kravis maintains his twenty-six-room townhouse mansion. For our benefit, these contrasting and contemporary images can focus the mind.
These facts pose the ultimate questions -- and they call Henry Kravis to the conversation -- about what it is we are here to do on this earth. Are we here to make billions, refine the art of the deal, to hold to the contract of mutual indifference that seems to be an increasing feature of American life? Or do we act in accordance with virtues that have more to do with thick solidarities between people who, even though unknown to one another and a thousand miles away, need to care and to connect? These questions should answer themselves, and easily; but, seemingly, they do not.
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It is amazing that folks keep electing the RepugThugs into the offices who in turn help the CEO to crack the unions so the companies can get cheap labor... So many workers in US but they are fed the same line ..& keep electing he Thugs in power.. Dont blame the RepugThugs -we elect them & keep getting shafted ..Think a bit before you elect folks like The Decider ..Nothing will change ...Amen
2 1/2 years ago, my office, The Panasonic National Diagnostic Center, closed it's doors.
Our parent company, Panasonic of North America had sold our division to ITC Group of Newtown, PA.
First they downsized us and then they told us lots of things...
In the end, when the office closed because the lease was up..
Our jobs went to MANILA without us.
75 people worked at our office. We all lost our jobs.
No politician came to our aid either!
Not here in Pennsylvania!
Just a few weeks ago, our local rag told us all that our esteemed State Rep decided to retire and not run again.
So that's what I'm going to try to do is to run for his seat!
Wish me luck...the outsourcers are not going to like me, not one little bit!
If I can get elected, I will go to bat for anyone in Pennsylvania!
The only way to deal with this is political action. Economic tools such as strikes are ineffective since they either hire scabs, sell of the factory and/or move the plant off shore. The common good is not something that the owners understand.
If political action fails, we will see blood flow. Maybe not in my lifetime but it will flow.
ALMOST ALL OF THE TIME --- A CORPORATE MILLIONAIRE OR BILLIONAIRE IS ONE BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE WHO HELPED THEM BECOME SO RICH WHO WORKS AT THE OTHER END DIDN'T EARN A LIVING WAGE.
ONCE THE POOR STOP HELPING THE RICH GET THE REPUBLICANS ELECTED---PERHAPS THEY MIGHT SEE SOME LIGHT AT THE END OF THEIR DARK TUNNEL.
GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES AND ALL THE PRAYING AND DONATING TO CLERGY ISN'T GOING TO
PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE.
Why are Americans buying their a.. off this Christmas which profits are for, China and Global Corporations. Just who economy are we supporting(?) it certainly isn't for the economy of the American citizens.
It is time for Americans to chip in together and start their own businesses and tell the Global Corporations and Foreign nations to go to h...
We have sold our land, resources and jobs to foreign countries and we are sinking very fast.
The suggestion about a website for donations is a good one. I will see what I can do. In an age when capital respects no boundaries, no national lines of demarcation, workers and unions must establish connections, cooperation, and solidarity across borders as well. Unions and working people in general can't afford to be parochial, insular, with imaginations hemmed in by national borders. If you go back and look at Gompers and the founding of the AFL, he had a very clear understanding of the importance of working class internationalism in his early years, an understanding that came from his long engagement with Marx and other socialists of the First International. His conflict and differences with the Socialist Party in the U.S. is another matter entirely. But we are a hundred and twenty years on from the founding of the AFL, and I think we might act accordingly.
Democracy, as it was taught to us as children is gone. The U.S. has been conquored from within by the corporations. America has become faso-corporate state in which profit has become GOD on earth. The red states have contributed to this scenario with hardly a peep from a rightous electorate. It is time to involvke the second amendment to the constitution as our foundling fathers warned of over 200 years ago. Death to the American corporate.
My Father was "management". The corporation he founded and led for 50 years was in construction, and, therefore, dealing with many unions on every project, in a heavily union organized area of the country. I don't ever remember anything but praise for the union system from my father. He relied upon the unions for skilled workmen, knew what he was going to pay for that skill and did so as part of his cost of making a living. I worked as an unskilled union laborer on construction and appreciated the work ethic of the men beside me. Just as there have been bad Presidents, bad doctors and lawyers, bad automobiles etc. I have no doubt that there are some union officers and members who do not live up to the high standard we expect from our unions. It is not only a good system, it is a necessary system. Necessary for the worker, to prevent the excesses of a system controlled solely by management, (read some history if this draws a blank in your mind), and necessary for management who needs a ready pool of trained labor. Unfortunately, people being what they are, merely human, we need adequate and appropriate government (legal) regulation of the system to maintain its integrity. Under the current administration and government policy, labor has suffered, now management is starting to suffer as well, as will the entire country until balance is restored.
This may sound too cynical for some folks, but as long as the argument for unions is put in terms of "what it is we are here to do on this earth" and whether we should "act in accordance with virtues that have more to do with thick solidarities between people who, even though unknown to one another and a thousand miles away, need to care and to connect," the unions will continue to lose.
Unions weren't created to assist anonymous "others" far away. They were created as a means of improving the economic and working conditions of the people who created them. The fact that unions, through their organized efforts, have benefited the vast majority of us should not be confused with the reasons they were created.
A unscientific poll by the Huff Post has shown that a great many people that read, also support unions and are willing to admit this in print for the entire world to see.
I am proud to be a supporter.
Unions are not the problem,and they are not the answer either. Spending in congress, the spending of money we ain't made yet, and government ain't taken yet..We are all destined to fall into the no money scenario, Congress needs to stop earmarks,p
I was a Union member for over 25 years. I had 20,000 hrs of training, both classroom and on the job. The Union I belonged to gave me something which cannot be taken away, skill and knowledge of my trade and a way to continue learning over the entire course of my career. A contractor could call the union hall and get, for the vast majority of the time, a highly qualified person to complete their project and get laid off when it was finished. In exchange, they gave me an honest days pay and benefits such as health insurance which was taken from my pay scale, not given in addition to my wages.
I will not tell you that there were no problems or disagreements but most of the parties to our labor agreement were better off and more wealthy in the end. I thank my Lord that I had a Union to improve my life. If any of you have a chance to join, DO SO! Your life will be much better for doing so.
Look, I have a lot of sympathy for the writers' strike since I'm a writer myself, but I also very much like and admire pigs. Pigs may also be known by the Old English word "swine", but they're decent, highly intelligent, social creatures who don't deserve to be a synonym for despicable humans.
The decline of the labor movement is the decline of the society. When we dont honor labor, we all lose our rights whether we belong to a union or not. Unions raise the value of labor....a
We used to understand that a free labor movement was necesary to a free society...
Nobody cares about unions any more - it seems like too many people are willing to go to temp jobs with no benefits and gripe that the unions "have too much power" - and they consider this to be their choice!
A lot of this griping is done on weekends (thank you, unions), after 8-hour days (thank you, unions), and on holidays off (thank you, unions). The folks who do still have benefits can gripe that the benefits (thank you, unions) are decreasing. Even those temp jobs usually have decent pay (thank you, unions).
The loss of benefits, jobs, and good pay is due to unions losing power and membership in the US. Wealthy CEOs encourage everyone to denigrate unions, because the unions Make Things Cost More because union workers Make So Much Money. Nary a word about their own pay, though...
Are you tired of talking to tech support folks in India? Massive job outsourcing is one more thing that unions could have prevented, if only Americans still appreciated unions instead of falling for the corporate line of the bottom line. But no, we prefer to sit on the laurels of those who fought and died for us - not soldiers, but union members.
I will never understand how we can gobble up the BS from large companies about how they need to maximise profits by cutting jobs and benefits. Is cheap underwear that important to us? Wouldn't you rather have union-made underwear, and know that someone else's family earns enough money to be able to buy the stuff, too?
Hang in there, UAW guys! BTW - Nora Ephron's HuffPost blog today is a Charity Chain http://www
If there's a web site for sending donations to help those strikers, why not post it there? If there isn't a web site, how about starting one and publicizing it?
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