of middle-class life. They bought a bigger house, and their monthly payment jumped to $1,300 a month. Now the bills were hard to meet.
The tension culminated, and their marriage dissolved during a trip to one of the most stressful places on earth: Disneyland. Carla bought a package trip to the theme park using the family credit card. Steve felt like they didn’t have the money to take a vacation, let alone a trip to California. To help cover these costs, Steve went down to the union hall and cashed out a special emergency account that he kept there—it was common back then for workers to set aside cash to cover costs if they went on strike or suffered an injury that kept them off the job. His account had accrued about $1,200 over the years, and he spent it at Disneyland. It was quite possibly the worst trip of his life, although he and Carla tried to give the girls the full Disney experience.
“It was a miserable time. Her and I didn’t speak hardly for the whole time down there—just kind of keeping it away from the kids,” Hammond said. “I was so pissed off. We didn’t have any money.”
Steve and Carla divorced not too long after that. They sold the big house, and he moved in with his mother. They juggled responsibility for the girls. He continued to work odd hours at the warehouse, and the girls figured out how to get themselves to the school bus in the mornings.
The one thing Steve Hammond didn’t have to worry about during all of this turmoil was losing his job, his health insurance, or his retirement pension. It is unclear, exactly, what Hammond would have had to do to get fired from the warehouse. The culture there would have been familiar to the unionized OCAW workers at Koch’s Pine Bend refinery in the 1970s. Workers weren’t afraid of their bosses. It wasn’t uncommon for a forklift driver to share a slug of whiskey with a manager on the warehouse floor. Everyone laughed when a driver named Kerry Alt accelerated his truck too quickly, and an oversized bottle of beer came careening off the back, where it had been stowed for safekeeping. Alt jumped out and scrambled after the bottle as it rolled across the concrete floor. The bosses looked the other way. If a supervisor had chosen to discipline Alt, he would have had to do so through the union’s grievance procedure. It wasn’t worth the trouble. In this environment, Hammond was a straight arrow, and he was promoted up the ranks through the years.
One of Hammond’s close friends was promoted even faster and left the union ranks to become a manager. He was Dennis Trimm, an imposing man standing six foot six. Trimm became foreman in the 1990s and was then promoted to supervisor, putting him in the ranks of management and cutting his ties with the Inlandboatmen’s Union. Even then, when Trimm “went company,” as the union members called it, he and Hammond remained friends. They still drank together on their time off, still joked on the warehouse floor, and still visited each other’s families. There might have been a bright line between the union workers and their supervisors, but there wasn’t animosity between them.
This began to change during the 2000s, however, and it changed dramatically in late 2005 when Koch Industries bought Georgia-Pacific and its warehouses that lined the Willamette River.
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As the warehouses and their timber mills were sold over and over again, Dennis Trimm came to know the chain of CEOs who ran the company in succession: from Crown Zellerbach, to James Goldsmith, to Fort James, and then to Georgia-Pacific. Out of all of the leadership teams, he was most impressed with Georgia-Pacific’s. The CEO, Pete Correll, often visited the warehouse to look the place over and talk with the management team. Correll was a lanky, personable man worth at least several million dollars, but also willing to talk with the local supervisors as if they were valued members of his team. Georgia-Pacific installed a special satellite system in all its facilities so they could receive quarterly broadcasts in which Correll talked about the company’s goals and strategy. Trimm and his colleagues gathered in a conference room in the warehouse in 2005 to watch one final broadcast from Correll. Their CEO informed them that they would soon have new owners.
After Koch Industries bought the warehouse, Charles Koch never visited—at least, not as far as Trimm