disillusioned with the union leadership. The union seemed weak. Grievance filings went nowhere. Pay and benefits were lagging. Bucknum had a stubborn streak—he complained so much to his union leadership that he’d earned the nickname “Gary the Anarchist” among the IBU workers. In spite of his militant nickname, Bucknum didn’t look like a union thug. He was thin and had large, round eyes and thick glasses. He would not look out of place at a comic book convention. His union militancy seemed almost fussy—like the stubborn refusal of an accountant to accept a spreadsheet where the numbers didn’t add up. Fair was fair. The rules were the rules. When the IBU didn’t back the rules aggressively enough for Bucknum, he made a choice. “Rather than sit there and complain about it, you put yourself out there to try and do something.”
By 2009, Hammond and Bucknum were working side by side. The IBU, while technically independent, rented the office space from the Longshoremen after the two unions became affiliated. A bright-blue IBU flag hung on the wall outside the office door. Just inside that door, there was a small meeting room with a table and chairs, some filing cabinets, and a coffee urn. On the other side of that was the cramped office where Bucknum and Hammond sat at a broad table with two computers. The big window behind them offered a sweeping view of Portland’s industrial underside: an electrical substation, a gravel parking lot pitted with large puddles, and a view of passing freight trains. This would be the IBU’s command post for a prolonged battle with Koch Industries.
The battle began in 2010, when it was time to renegotiate the labor contract for Koch Industries’ two largest distribution centers on the Willamette River, the so-called Front Avenue warehouse and the Rivergate warehouse farther downriver. These were the locations where Hammond had worked since the 1980s. This was the place that he wanted so much to change. The contract negotiation would give him the chance to finally do it.
The size of the task was monumental. The decline of working conditions for IBU employees was even more severe than many of them understood. This degradation was illustrated by an analysis of labor contracts at the warehouse complexes going back to the 1970s. The analysis shows that the warehouse workers became more productive every year, moving more containers with less labor. But even as they did so, they were growing poorer. In 1975, for example, warehouse workers like Hammond earned $6.90 an hour. By 2005, they were making $19.74 an hour, which sounded like a large increase. But when adjusted for inflation, the warehouse workers were actually earning $25.77 an hour back in 1975. Over three decades, in other words, Hammond and his coworkers had taken a 23 percent pay cut. And while they were earning less, their work became more onerous. The LMS didn’t give them time to talk or blow off steam. They logged the minutes they spent in the bathroom, had to explain the minutes they spent telling a joke.
This economic stagnation wasn’t unique to the Georgia-Pacific warehouse workers. Between 1948 and 1973, American workers’ productivity rose steadily, and their wages rose with it. But in the early 1970s, as the age of volatility shook apart the New Deal policy infrastructure, the rise in productivity broke free from the wages that were paid for it. Productivity rose 74.4 percent from 1973 until 2013. Wages rose only 9.2 percent.
Hammond and Bucknum were elected to somehow reverse the downward slide of the IBU workers. Their work began a few months before the labor contract officially expired in March of 2010. They had a matter of weeks to prepare before the official negotiations began. They didn’t know what to expect from Koch, but they knew that the IBU rank and file was prepared to hold out for a new and better deal.
* * *
Abel Winn closely scrutinized the data he developed at the MBM Center at Wichita State. Some clear patterns emerged early on in the experiment. In some ways, the data was discouraging—it seemed at first as if there was no easy way to overcome the holdout. The master box computer ran its various simulations, and, in case after case, it revealed that holdouts were hard to beat. One stubborn landowner could get a lot of money for their property—if they chose to stand firm.
Over time, however, one promising strategy emerged from the tests. One simulation showed that a pipeline company might