After the strike | In June 1987, Local 14 walked out of International Paper's Jay mill. Twenty years later, the legacy of Maine's most notorious labor fight lives on.

Twenty years haven't blurred Roland Samson's memory of the day he decided to strike the Andro mill.

It was June 1987 and Local 14, the 1,250 member chapter of the United Paperworkers International Union at the International Paper mill, or Andro mill, as it's known to some here in Jay, had relocated its meeting to the town gymnasium in nearby Livermore Falls to accommodate the entire group. Samson, a burly, fourth-generation millworker who was known to coworkers for being cranky and reclusive, sat in the bleachers of the crowded gym and waited for George Lambertson, the UPIU rep assigned to Local 14, to take the mic and tell him what a strike against IP would do to his life.

Samson had worked at the Andro mill since graduating from high school in 1965, except for a two-year stint in the army, and operated the waste treatment plant. He always figured he'd work for IP mill's until his body couldn't work anymore. But lately, he didn't like what he heard about IP's new leadership — offering Local 14 a contract that ended Sunday overtime pay, eliminated the union's last remaining holiday (Christmas) and, worst of all, cut about 500 jobs. Though Samson didn't consider himself a people person, he'd be damned if he'd let the company take advantage of his coworkers.

"I wasn't about to submit to that," says Samson today. "There was no need of it, because the mill was making record profits."

But a strike is no pursuit for a loner. When Lambertson spoke, he made that clear. "He basically said that you have to realize that if you vote to go on strike the company will most likely bring in replacement workers," Samson says. "The ball's going to be in their court and they can really put the screws to you."

Ten days after that meeting, Samson walked out of the mill and into the picket line with hundreds of men and women who would in the grueling months ahead become his second family. He would never go back.

But plenty of Samson's union brothers and sisters eventually would return to Andro. After 17 months of picketing, rallies and national press attention, Local 14 called off the strike. Bruised by financial strain and pressure from their national union leadership to concede, the Jay strikers accepted all of IP's demands in October 1988. Over the next decade many of the 1,250 trickled back to work at the mill, which under federal law had to offer strikers first refusal on jobs relinquished by replacement workers. For some, this meant waiting as many as 10 years for an offer, and sometimes for a low-level job that paid a fraction of their former income.

But though the most public strike in recent Maine history was also the most unsuccessful one, it left lasting effects on labor movement tactics in Maine and beyond. "I think it's one of the most influential strikes in the past 20 years," says Julius Getman, a professor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, and the author of the 1998 book on the Jay strike, The Betrayal of Local 14. "I think that the labor movement is aware that they're in trouble. Jay was a very important factor in getting them to rethink the strike."

The Jay strike introduced unions nationwide to new tactics away from the picket line, like using the media and politicians to further labor causes. Meanwhile in Jay, where Samson and other strikers still ignore replacement workers, some continue to fight for unions.

Taking a stand
By August 1987, Local 14's strike had gained national momentum. The strikers proved to be remarkably well-organized, dividing almost immediately into committees focused on everything from food supply to media outreach. Over the next several months, Local 14 would lead massive marches in Jay and around the country against IP, generate public and union support through a roving caravan of union members (including the burgeoning public speaker Samson), and launch an all-out war in the courts and press against IP's environmental record. Maine labor experts say workers around the state watched closely as this rural papermakers' stand grew into a national labor saga. Some of what they saw wasn't pretty.

The closeknit town of Jay, a western Maine hamlet of about 4,000 residents surrounded by forest-cloaked hills, was divided by the picket line. IP brought replacement workers in by the hundreds as the strike wore on for months. Families and lifelong friends turned against each other along pro- and anti-company lines. Local 14 leadership publicly discouraged violence, but some strikers still attacked scabs and superscabs — the replacement workers and union members, respectively, who crossed the picket line — by vandalizing their homes, assaulting them and shunning them. According to Getman, kids from striker families fought against kids from scab families in the town's schools. The town government, which historically had supported the biggest company in town, began passing restrictive ordinances against IP, prompting the company to file suit with the state.

"It wasn't nice, I wouldn't want to do it again," says Bill Harlow, the current chair of Jay's board of selectmen and a rank-and-file union member who says he struck because IP "backed us against a wall and we had no choice."

Hundreds of Local 14 strikers desperate for work flooded the region's mills and manufacturing plants with job applications. Many relied on the union's food bank to feed their families. The national UPIU membership contributed monthly "strike benefits" of $55 a week to the Local 14 strikers. To fill the financial gaps, strikers took short-term work wherever they could. Many strikers cashed in their life savings or their childrens' college funds and relied on their spouse's income. Though the strike's environmental and media campaigns attracted dizzying attention from presidential hopefuls and national press, summer turned to fall, then winter, without a new contract in sight. Union members around the state began to think Local 14 was destined to fail.

Andro's legacy
On a rainy afternoon earlier this month, three former '87 strikers groused about today's labor movement over a game of pool in the Local 14 union hall. The union hall, a one-room cement building along Jay's Main Street, was the hub of activity during the strike. Today, it's run from a distance by an Augusta-based union leader who the three pool players haven't seen in months.

"Unions are in rough shape, all over the country," says a grandfatherly former papermaker as he leans his thin body forward to eye the cue ball. "Unions don't have no power no more."

Labor's influence in the private sector has steadily declined since its peak in 1957, when 35.7% of the private workforce were union members. While union affiliation in the public sector remains relatively robust at around 36% of workers in 2006, the most recent figures available, just 7.4% of private industry employees were union members in the same year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Maine, 11.9% of public- and private-sector workers are unionized compared to 15.2% in 1989, the closest date to the strike available.

In this difficult time for unions, Maine's labor leaders say lessons learned from the Jay strike, the last major resistance against the state's paper mills, guide the efforts of Maine unions in all industries.

While IP was able to bring in hundreds of replacement workers to render the picket line ineffective, Local 14's more creative efforts, spearheaded by strategist Peter Kellman, helped tarnish the company's public persona. The Maine AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for Local 14's UPIU, hired Kellman, a former civil rights activist, to help the strikers rattle IP. And rattle they did. Taking a cue from his civil rights days, Kellman encouraged the strikers to march in the country's major cities, turn their weekly meetings into rallies with guest speakers from around the country and launch a media campaign against IP's environmental infractions. The purpose was to use the inclusive methods of the civil rights movement to involve even non-union Americans in the fight. At the union level, the Local worked to convince other IP unions around the country to strike. Local 14 was also encouraged to be as top-down as it was grassroots: During and after the strike, representatives from Local 14, including leader Bill Meserve and Roland Samson, advocated for laws to protect strikers in Augusta and Washington, D.C.

"It made [the strikers] the center of attention," Kellman, author of the 2004 book Divided We Fall: The Story of the Paperworkers' Union and the Future of Labor, and the current president of the Southern Maine Central Labor Council, says of those broad tactics. "They felt they were helping to lead a struggle that would change the labor movement across the country."

But here in Maine, the strike taught unions as much about failure as about success.

Bruce Roy worked at Jay's other paper mill — the Wausau Paper Mill — during the strike and watched the battle with IP "split families and destroy friendships." He's now the president of the Maine Labor Council of the United Steelworkers Union, a coalition of 22 Maine locals representing 4,300 union members, most of whom work in the state's paper mills. Roy says the loss in Jay spooked every paper mill union in the state.

"When you have 1,200 people who are permanently replaced, it lends a different perspective to guys going out on strike," he says.

Roy and other modern Maine labor leaders agree that unions around the state more often conceded to their companies' demands after the Jay strike and other debilitating union losses, like then-president Ronald Reagan's 1981 decision to force 12,000 striking air-traffic controllers to return to work and the failed 1986 United Paperworkers strike against the Boise Cascade mill in Rumford. The unions didn't want to recreate the trauma of a doomed picket line. "It's certainly affected the Maine labor movement," says John Hanson, director emeritus of the Maine Bureau of Labor Education at the University of Maine in Orono.

"There's not too many people who were around then who don't remember what a knock-down, drag-out experience it was, not just for the labor movement but for our state. It was a gut-wrenching experience."

According to Ed Gorham, president of the Maine AFL-CIO, whose roughly 50,000 members include pulp and paper unions, the failure in Jay caused "an awful lot of soul searching" among union leadership in many industries in the state, not just in paper. "People thought if you went on strike, you were going to lose," he says.

Maine businesses also watched the Jay strike to see how IP's bottom line was affected by the turmoil. While the publicly traded company remained profitable throughout the ordeal, it refused to prove that the Jay mill turned a profit in 1987 and 1988. Strikers, citing secret sources within IP at the time, say the company lost millions because replacement workers were not skilled enough to maintain the Andro mill's expected level of productivity. (IP spokeswoman Amy Sawyer could not confirm those losses.)

Union pressure
Ray Pineau worked as a millwright at the mill for more than 20 years before he struck with Local 14. The strike cost Pineau $20,000 in life savings and the resentment of two of his three children. When the national union conceded to IP's demands at other striking mills, Pineau urged Local 14's president Bill Meserve to end it.

Pineau was offered his old job at Andro again in 1997, and he worked there until August 2005. The strike, he believes, is his lesson for the working people. "[The strike] would be important for them to remember," he says. "They need to know how to protect themselves in the workplace. People don't see the importance of it. They see one little job. They don't see the entire picture, the whole thing."

The paperworkers union in the Jay mill was dissolved in 1992 in an employee vote. At the time, only 90 of the 1,250 union members had accepted offers to return to the mill, according to Kellman. Most of the voters were replacement workers.

In 2000, Pineau became Jay's state representative in Augusta, filling the seat Roland Samson held from 1997 to 2000, to continue Local 14's fight. He serves, he says, "to keep the unions in. It's my way of keeping pressure on this company."

In 2006, International Paper sold the Jay mill and three other coated paper mills, including its Bucksport mill, to Memphis-based Verso Paper for $1.4 billion. IP now no longer owns paper mills in the state, though the company remains the largest paper maker in the world.

In a statement emailed to Mainebiz, IP spokeswoman Sawyer said that though the company "suffered no significant loss of business" during the strike, it "carried a high cost, not only financially, but personally for the mill leadership, the employees and the community."

According to Bill Harlow, the chair of the Jay board of selectmen and a striker who later returned to the mill, a handful of attempts to form another paperworkers' union at Andro have all stalled in the petition phase. The Verso paper mill in Jay is the only paper mill in the state without a papermakers' union, according to the Maine Pulp and Paper Association. Verso paper now stays open 365 days a year, employees are no longer paid overtime on Sundays and the mill workforce has been trimmed by several hundred.

"One of the questions that came up was, well, what are they going to do?" Verso spokesman Bill Cohen says of last year's sale. "Verso was very clear in making a commitment to do as well or better than IP."

To that end, Cohen says Verso has enhanced its benefits package and its Employee Assistance Program. He proudly confirms that the mill stays open "24-7-365." Cohen says Verso's Jay and Bucksport mills together contribute around $560 million to the Maine economy in employee wages and contract work. The Jay strike, he says, doesn't come up in conversation among the company's management.

"A lot of water has gone over the Riley Dam and a lot of tons of paper has gone out of the mill since then," Cohen says. "Even IP and certainly Verso have always been focused on what's right for employees. Those issues that came up 20 years ago are long gone."

But selectman Harlow, who still speaks gravely about the strike's dark days, believes some in the town of Jay never left the picket line. "Some people never forget, they live it," he says.

On the north side of Jay, in a den decorated with the massive mounted heads of his hunting kill, Roland Samson, his black beard now white, takes a break from traveling New England for the United Steelworkers. A couple of years after the strike, IP offered Samson a low-level job in waste treatment that paid less than his pre-strike salary. He turned it down to organize new chapters for the national union full-time. He has yet to organize a union at his old mill because, he says, the site is large and there are still a lot of replacement workers there. Samson recognizes unions face plenty of challenges now, but he believes they'll come back. Workers, he says, will always need each other. Local 14 taught him that.

"The strike was wonderful because we were doing the right thing, people were putting a lot on the line to do the right thing," he says. "All too often we go through life thinking 'What can I get out of it?' I guess everybody does that, but here was a group of people who were looking out for each other. So to be with that group, I was extremely proud."