day, and it was going to be a long one.
During the hours-long series of lectures, Feekin walked the IBU team through the formulaic legal process of contract negotiation. There was a set of prescribed steps for the negotiations, and a set of legal pitfalls that the negotiating committee should avoid. But Feekin’s primary goal was to teach the IBU negotiators a larger lesson. She wanted to teach them how to get the best contract possible when they found themselves up against trained negotiators. Her main message to them was not to count on their silver tongues. The back-and-forth in the bargaining room was not, in fact, as important as what happened outside the room. It was the power dynamic—the balance or the imbalance of leverage between employer and employee—that ultimately determined who would win or lose in the contract negotiations.
The IBU team knew, intuitively, that these dynamics were not in their favor. Union membership in America declined virtually every year between 1975 and 2010. By the time the IBU was ready to take on Koch, only about 10 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union. This decline reversed the force of gravity in the labor market—now nonunionized workers were the most powerful force, stripping away pay and benefits from organized labor. When most of the workforce didn’t have job security or pay raises, the job security and pay raises won by unions seemed like an unfair privilege.
Other cultural changes pushed unions into retreat. Back in the 1970s, it was difficult for a company to lock out workers and replace them during a strike. This was in part due to the strength of picket lines, but also because it was seen as unethical to replace workers who were on strike. This changed in 1981 when Ronald Reagan fired federal air traffic controllers who were on strike and replaced them. Reagan didn’t change any laws; he simply set an example. Afterward, the risks of a strike were far higher for workers.
But Teninty and Feekin gave the IBU team hope. Teninty pointed out that no company wanted to face a protracted labor dispute. Teninty explained that the IBU must show Koch Industries that the union was strong and that its workers stood in solidarity.
“Your job is to convince the employer that it’s better to settle with you than to fight with you,” Teninty remembers saying. “That’s, frankly, the name of the game. That’s how unions have worked forever.” This was inspiring talk for guys like David Franzen. He had been a forklift driver his entire adult life (outside of a three-year stint in the US Navy). His bosses and the LMS directed his every move at work. Now he was in a position to speak back to them. This sense of hope and inspiration would be hard for Franzen to recall, after everything that happened next. “That was a lot of beers ago,” he said. “A lot of bad memories.”
* * *
The first negotiating meeting was held at a Georgia-Pacific warehouse, inside a conference room upstairs. Bucknum was joined by Hammond and the six negotiators from the warehouse. The Koch team included a trio of managers from the warehouses, but they didn’t do much talking. The Koch effort was led by Don Barnard, a professional labor negotiator whom Georgia-Pacific had flown in from Atlanta. Barnard was polite and inscrutable. He said his hellos and got straight to work.
Bucknum watched as Barnard set a thick three-ring binder on the negotiating table. If the IBU team had shown up ready for a fight, what they got instead was a bureaucratic process, one that was administered by the unsmiling—but utterly amiable and inoffensive—Don Barnard. He listened pleasantly as the IBU laid out its desires: The annual pay raises. The increases in health care. The IBU had even hired an outside expert to come up with new rules around the LMS software system that might make the workday a little less grinding on employees.
Barnard took it all in and consulted the three-ring binder. Then he informed the IBU team what would be possible. For starters, he said, the IBU needed to drop the health care plan that it administered for employees and put the workers into Koch Industries’ health insurance plan. It would be necessary to do this before Barnard could even think about negotiating wage increases. The union pension plan was a problem as well. Koch Industries preferred that employees entered a 401(k) plan run by the company.
Barnard agreed that changes should be