By Stephen Franklin / Chicago Tribune Staff Writer
Defeat seems to be missing from Bruce Bostick's vocabulary. Everything is a "phase," and all of the phases converge, as he explains with unblinking confidence, in a union victory.
"This is it. This will be a knife to the heart," says the muscular, middle-age worker from an Ohio steel mill as he details a union strategy.
Positive thinking is almost mandatory for Bostick, because he is manning a new front for the United Steelworkers of America in its slow-going, 2-year-old confrontation with Titan International Inc. of Quincy, Ill. It is a labor dispute as gritty as any in the United States today.
Stymied in its strike by 670 workers at Titan's major tiremaking plant in Des Moines and 500 workers at another Titan tire plant in Natchez, Miss., the union recently brought its battle with Titan to Chicago and placed it at Harris Bank's front door.
The union's rationale is that Harris, the Chicago area's third-largest bank, is the major financier for Titan -- a detail that bank officials will not confirm, citing client privacy -- and the union wants Harris to pull the plug on Titan's credit line.
But that's not likely to take place, say officials from Harris, a subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal, the 13th-largest bank in North America. "It is a situation between our customer and the steelworkers. It's between them, not between us and them," said Edward Williams, a Harris vice president.
Going after the money is not a new tactic for unions in the 30 years since they began waging so-called corporate campaigns. At first, these campaigns were just another strategy. But nowadays, they have become the secret weapons for those few unions still willing to risk a strike.
The problem is that they are costly and slow-moving. They also sometimes fail against determined employers willing to hire replacement workers or take other steps to win.
Even the few unions expert in such efforts have sometimes lost badly. The critical issue, said Bruce Nissen, a labor expert at Florida International University in Miami, is the vulnerability of the targeted company.
The steelworkers are big believers in all-out corporate campaigns, having won a number of them, including a nearly miraculous comeback to secure a settlement with Bridgestone-Firestone several years ago after the tire company had filled most of the strikers' jobs with replacement workers.
And so, the steelworkers' record and reputation is on the line in this fight.
The union came to Chicago because it struck out with Maurice "Morry" Taylor, Titan's flamboyant, straight-talking chief executive, a onetime Republican presidential candidate whose nickname is The Griz_short for Grizzly. And Taylor's fiery view of the union has only grown hotter with its campaign against Harris Bank.
"They [the union] are just trying to extort the bank to put pressure on me. Maybe I should just sue them under the racketeering laws. Maybe I should do that," Taylor said. "There are good unions and bad unions. I just happened to draw a bad set."
"They are just crazy," he added, referring to union leaders. "They belong down in Castro's Cuba."
Complaining about mandatory overtime and inadequate pay and benefit contract proposals from Taylor, the tire workers walked out in Des Moines on May 1, 1998. They were followed four months later by the Natchez workers. In both cases, Taylor staffed the factories with replacement workers.
Neither time nor the pain of the strikes has softened Taylor's claim that the union's wage and benefit proposals don't fit a small, 5,000-worker company like his, which builds tires and wheels for farm and construction equipment. The farm economy's downward spiral, he said, has only worsened the market for a business like his.
Indeed, as a result of dismal results for some time now, the company cannot rely on an financial nest egg to wave away the strike's effect. It had a net loss of $11.4 million last year, down from profits of $25.1 million in 1997 and $8.1 million in 1998.
At the factory gates in Des Moines, where it is waging its major confrontation with Taylor, the union has held its solidarity, watching only a handful of its rank and file join replacement workers.
They have waged their fight within the bounds of the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled that the strike was caused by unfair labor practices, which could guarantee strikers their jobs back. And the union has dogged the company with complaints to state agencies alleging health and safety and other violations.
After union officials met with Harris executives in March, and failed to win the bank's cooperation, the union decided to apply some heat to Harris.
That's where Bostick -- a rank-and-file union activist on loan for the last year and a half to the union from a steelworkers local in Lorain, Ohio -- comes in. His job is to lead a consumer boycott of the bank, something he began recently with teams of supporters and union members, handing out leaflets at several dozen Harris branches. It's an activity that the union vows to keep up until Harris relents.
For several months, the union had based Bostick in Quincy, hoping he could rally community support there against Taylor and his operations. His efforts, he admits coyly, produced less than an uproar.
But he is optimistic about the potential in Chicago. Here, he explains, the strategy is to link up with supporters to form a coalition. It's a strategy that only a handful of U.S. unions, long accustomed to going it alone in disputes, lately have been able to pull off.
The idea, he said, is to elevate the dispute to a higher level that draws in partners. One set of allies, as expected, has been other unions, including the United Auto Workers and the Service Employees International Union. Another is clergy, rallied by the Chicago-based Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. And yet another has been community activist groups.
In its leaflets, the union accuses Harris Bank not only of supporting Titan, but also of doing a poor job of supporting small businesses in low- to middle-income communities in the Chicago area.
Harris officials strongly defend their support for businesses and customers in low-income areas.
Union officials are unwilling to say what they will do if their Harris Bank strategy fails.
Until a year and a half ago, when Bostick became a "casual" for the union, putting out fires here and there and living out of motels, he had been a union grievance official, a stocker, trimmer, craneman and labor gang member at the old U.S. Steel plant in Lorain. He is far more experienced in lifting heavy metal than collective spirits.
And unlike professional organizers, there's no fancy edge to his thinking. It's largely a recitation of the steelworkers' resolve.
"We're committed to the fight," he said flatly. "In struggle after struggle, that's how we learned to fight.":
