How local oil workers see their national strike working in these times
by David Bacon
Jim Payne is financial secretary of United Steel Workers Local 5, the union for oil workers in northern California, including the struck Tesoro Golden Eagle Refinery. Tracy Scott is a rank and file worker at the refinery, currently on leave to work for the local as a staff representative. They were recently interviewed in Martinez by David Bacon.
David: How did the strike come about and what are the issues the union is striking over?
Jim: The companies had been making economic proposals, but they weren’t addressing any of our proposals on fatigue risk management, contractor facility maintenance, or health and safety. They were also unwilling to accept our “no retrogression” clause, which has been in our contracts for years. That’ clause protects our language about successorship, safety, plant closures, layoffs and rate retention. We’re just not willing to go backwards on those things. In the last hour before the contract expired the company walked away from the table and was unwilling to continue talking. It left our national leaders no choice but to start the strike at nine locations nationwide, and this past Saturday at a couple of other locations as well.
We’re striking three Tesoro refineries on the west coast, the Shell Deer Park refinery and chemical plant are out, three Marathon plants are out, and one LyondellBasell. Now two BP plants have been added. They’re definitely the ones with all the resources. It’s been 35 years since we’ve been on strike, so we don’t take strikes lightly. But sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
It feels a lot like David and Goliath. They continue to operate their plants, although not as safely and efficiently as when our members are operating them. They’re still making money, even though our folks aren’t in there.
D: You’re a worker at the refinery here, Terry. What does it mean to be on strike?
Tracy: I’ve been an employee since 2000. I was an operator in a hydro processing unit. We basically process feed stock and take the nitrogen, sulfur and metals out of it. Then it goes to a cat cracker, which turns it into gasoline and other components.
So striking means facing all the hardships any family would expect to see without a job. As a union we tell our members to save and be prepared. We have a really young workforce though, and they’re not as much into saving as they are into living, so that concerns us. But we have a strike and defense fund that will help those who need it to get through this. We’re doing pretty well right now.
D: Is the Golden Eagle refinery operating right now?
J: Any time we serve strike notice we offer the company a safe and orderly shutdown. Tesoro here accepted the offer, so we negotiated a process and then took the plant down sequentially. The company is still operating portions of the plant as a terminal, taking product in and sending product out. But they’re not manufacturing any product.
Golden Eagle is the only one shut down this way. Tesoro Anacortes and Tesoro Carson are still operating. We made sure we were striking over unfair labor practices.
Because of that the company can’t replace our folks permanently. But they can replace us on a temporary basis, and at all the other ten locations management is continuing to operate the plants.
D: What does “no retrogression” mean, and how does it affect rank and file workers?
J: The most important agreement that’s covered in our “no retrogression” language is successorship. That means that if a facility is sold, it’s sold with a contract and the new owner has to honor it. Without that language the new owner wouldn’t have to hire the employees at that location. We’ve had a number of locations sold over the past years. I can imagine how bad it would have been if that language hadn’t been there. The Tesoro refinery itself was sold several times. The last two times it was sold with the successor language in place, so the contract went with it.
T: Having gone through three separate owners, it’s extremely important that we’re protected in those events. The fact that the companies haven’t wanted to put “no retrogression” on the table is pretty telling about where they’re coming from. Based on my own union involvement, without the protections of the successorship language chances are I wouldn’t be there.
D: In the Bay Area in the last 35 years since the last strike, we’ve seen a number of industrial accidents, some of them pretty horrifying. What does the health and safety language in the contract mean in terms of the actual safety of people on the job in the refineries and in the communities around them?
