signally fail in their prime function: the prevention of coercion and violence.
—Friedrich A. Hayek, 1960
Married life ain’t hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he’s got a union wife.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union ’til the day I die.
—Lyrics of the folk song “Union Maid” by Woody Guthrie, 1940
Bernard Paulson arrived for his first day on the job at the Pine Bend refinery in 1971.
As he drove to work, Paulson traveled down two-lane country roads that passed through a sparsely populated landscape of rolling corn and soybean fields. The refinery is located near the tiny town of Rosemount, Minnesota, about twenty miles south of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Good-paying jobs were scarce in this place. The local kids were raised on farms, and when they graduated from public high school—if they graduated from high school—they didn’t have many job options other than farming. There was a smattering of industrial plants throughout the area: an ammonia plant near Rosemount and a paper plant across the river in Wisconsin, for example. But these jobs didn’t pay a lot. The best source of jobs throughout the 1960s was at the Great Northern Oil Company, which had just recently been renamed the Koch Refining Company. Jobs at the refinery were sought after. They were union jobs, with union benefits. A guy could get hired at the refinery right out of high school and soon make the kind of steady wage that supported a mortgage and a family.
The refinery played a towering role in the local economy, and it dominated the landscape as well. As Paulson drove nearer to the refinery, he would have been able to see this for himself. The refinery became visible on the horizon many miles before Paulson arrived there, and it was an arresting sight. After passing many miles of rolling hills, small farmhouses, tractors, and grain silos, the refinery came into view and looked very much like the skyline of a small city. But there was something alien, even ominous about this skyline. The towers in the skyline didn’t have any windows. They spewed clouds of white steam and gas, and some of them, on the south end of the refinery, spewed columns of flame into the sky. The gargantuan torches burned so steadily that airline pilots used them as a landmark when they approached the local airport.
To reach the refinery gates, Paulson drove along a highway that ran roughly parallel to the Mississippi River, which was hidden behind a dense stand of pine and oak trees. Great Northern was smart to locate the refinery where it did, near a big, wide spot in the Mississippi called Pine Bend. In this part of Minnesota, rivers are not scenic waterways but industrial transit tools. The river afforded passage for giant barges toting mountains of grain or coal, or, when they were loaded at Koch Refining, crude oil and asphalt. The barges took these commodities down south at a much cheaper rate than either rail or road, at least when the river wasn’t frozen over during Minnesota’s brutal winters.
Paulson pulled off the highway onto an access road that led to the refinery’s front gate. At the base of the giant towers, there was a squat office building made of beige bricks, just north of a parking lot where Paulson steered his car. This was the refinery’s main office, where Paulson would work. As he drove into the lot, he noticed that the parking spots were marked by signs with employees’ names on them. The spots were apparently reserved for individuals, and he saw that the best parking spot, the one nearest the sidewalk to the office door, had his name on it. Paulson had arrived early, as he always did, and most of the parking spots were empty. He pulled in to the best spot—the one marked with his name—and turned off his car.
Paulson walked down the sidewalk and into the double glass doors of the office building. One of the first things he told his assistant that first day was to get rid of the reserved parking spots.
“I said: ‘If you want the best spot, you get here early.’ ”
* * *
Bernard Paulson often wore cowboy boots to work. They were a parting gift from his employees back in Texas, and he wore them with pride because they reminded him how well he’d gotten along with employees in the past. He considered himself a good leader,