the Koch team returned to Atlanta. Sometimes it was weeks before they could find another opening on their calendar. Nine months into the negotiations, it seemed like they’d made no progress. Yet the IBU team held tight.
Finally, a small victory. Don Barnard agreed to let the IBU retain its health plan rather than moving into the Koch plan, as long as the IBU employees were willing to pay out of pocket, for the first time, to keep the privilege. In the beginning, they would pay 20 percent out of pocket, and then 25 percent in forward years. After so many grinding hours of negotiation, the IBU took the offer.
Almost immediately after this development, however, the IBU was informed that Don Barnard no longer worked for Koch Industries. They would be getting a new negotiator to deal with. There was something disconcerting about this abrupt departure, like watching a diplomat of some hostile government get executed right in front of you for disobeying his rulers. The IBU team was convinced that Barnard was fired for letting the IBU keep its health care plan, although Barnard’s former boss insisted that this was not the case.
Regardless, Barnard’s departure sent a chill through the team. Back in his cramped office at the Longshoremen hall, Bucknum tried to figure out who Barnard’s replacement would be. Bucknum was told through back channels to the Koch negotiators that the IBU team would “sorely miss Mr. Barnard.” Bucknum said this warning turned out to be true.
* * *
When Don Barnard reported back to Atlanta, he reported to a man named Ken Harrison. Harrison was vice president of labor relations for Georgia-Pacific, overseeing the company’s negotiations with labor unions at various plants.
Harrison was a trim man in his early sixties, nearing the end of a decades-long career. His hair, once bright red, had faded to a thin and silvery gray. He wore a tightly trimmed goatee, also gray, that highlighted the severity of his high cheekbones and slender face. His face could convey a lot of feeling with even a small grimace or a half smile. Harrison measured his words with extreme care and dispatched them with a surgeon’s precision. Harrison began traveling frequently to Portland to negotiate directly with the IBU.
“You could tell that he thought this little group of a hundred people in Portland, Oregon, was beneath his pay grade. He didn’t really like to be bothered by us,” Bucknum remembered. “He didn’t look kindly at us—or the people on his side of the table.”
With Harrison in charge, the negotiations took a harder turn. Barnard had been infuriating, in his placid way, but Harrison was simply unmovable.
“I remember Ken Harrison looking across the table once and going ‘What part of “no” don’t you guys get?’ ” Hammond recalled. Hammond shook his head and widened his eyes at the recollection. The IBU team subscribed to the naïve notion that the bargaining session would be a series of compromises. Harrison disabused them of this notion.
“It just floored us all, you know?” Hammond said. “Because we just never heard anything like that. Now, bear in mind that we’re just a bunch of forklift drivers and stuff. We’re deckhands on boats, and things like that, negotiating against lawyers. The working man really didn’t have too much of a chance against those guys anyway.”
When he wasn’t at the negotiating table, Harrison had a surprisingly easy air about him. When asked how he came to be one of Georgia-Pacific’s top officials over labor unions, Harrison cracked a half smile and replied, “A drunk sailor charted my course through life.”
Harrison earned degrees in both business and law before spending his career at Georgia-Pacific. One reason Harrison was so stern at the negotiating table, so measured in his words, was that he knew loose language could create a chaotic process. If the other side didn’t believe what you said, it could upset expectations and create uncertainty and delays. That could undermine the company’s leverage.
“Full faith and credit; your word’s your bond,” Harrison said. “If it’s not, you’re going to be paying more than anybody else.”
Harrison, then, did not improvise. Like Koch’s commodity traders, Harrison based his actions on deep analysis. During every negotiating session, Harrison and his team set up a private “caucus room” where they could strategize. It was possible to do this because the negotiations had been moved from the Georgia-Pacific offices to a nearby hotel called the Red Lion, which was seen as neutral territory. The parties rented one room for their meeting,