meet with Kujawa and his team of OCAW negotiators. The two camps met at the US Department of Labor, and during their session, the US secretary of labor himself came into the room to talk with the opposing negotiators. The secretary’s message was clear: “Let’s work this thing out.”
During the negotiations, Koch’s team and the union’s team were sent to separate conference rooms. A mediator shuttled back and forth between the rooms passing demands and counterdemands back and forth. The sessions went on through the night. At one point, Paulson laid down on a conference table and fell asleep while waiting for the courier to return from the OCAW’s room.
It was useless. Even prodding from the labor secretary could not push the two sides to an agreement. The kernel of the dispute still remained the work rules at the refinery. It was a fight over control, and neither side would budge.
* * *
Koch Refining Company offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever had sent the diesel train crashing into the plant. But the money never induced anyone to come forth with information about the diesel engine sabotage. The reward was never collected, and an arrest was never made. And the picket line remained outside the refinery even as the employees entered their seventh month without a paycheck from Koch.
But Bernard Paulson and Charles Koch seemed to understand something intuitively. They understood that solidarity had its limits. The OCAW’s cohesion was unbreakable. But the OCAW would be weaker if it stood alone. In fact, it was doubtful if the OCAW would be able to stand at all if it was alone. Isolating the union would prove to be the only way to beat it. During the summer and fall of 1973, that’s exactly what happened.
At that time, Paulson needed to perform maintenance at the refinery and install new equipment. The repairs could be delayed no more. But the companies in Minnesota that could do the specialized work were largely unionized, and they would not cross the picket line to do the job. Paulson had faced this problem before, during his days in Texas. When he ran the refinery there, he often hired both union and nonunion companies to do maintenance work at the facility. During one project, Paulson had two companies—one unionized and the other nonunion—working at the refinery simultaneously. The unionized firm said it would walk off the job unless the nonunion firm agreed to let its workers organize. It was a high-pressure ultimatum, and Paulson responded by calling the union president personally.
“I knew him. I knew he’d come from Oklahoma. So I got him on the phone. I said, ‘You damn Oklahoma squirrel hunter,’ ” Paulson recalled. “I said: ‘Look. You go ahead with what you’re trying to do, and I will only do one of these units at a time. I will do it nonunion, and you union guys won’t even be in the plan.’ So he backed down from that.”
Now, in Minnesota, Paulson used a similar tactic. He let the local maintenance and repair companies know that he needed work to be done at Pine Bend, which was the state’s largest refinery and an important source of work. He also let the companies know that if they refused to do this work now, when he needed it, then he would never call them again. If they refused, Koch would only use nonunion maintenance companies in the future.
The outside unions buckled. They accepted the work Paulson was offering them. Paulson built a special entrance into the refinery for these companies, one far away from the main picket line out front. The work began, and the OCAW picket line was weakened that much more.
Next, Paulson put a wedge between the Teamsters union, which handled trucking and shipping at the refinery, and the OCAW. The Teamsters still refused to cross the picket line, so Paulson arranged a cunning system that allowed the Teamsters to work with Koch Refining anyway. Paulson used a small parking lot near the refinery as a transit point. The Teamsters pulled into the lot and got out of their trucks. Nonunion truck drivers who worked for Koch Oil in the South were waiting for them there, and as the Teamsters got out of their trucks, the Koch Oil drivers got in. The Koch Oil drivers then took the trucks down the road and into the refinery, past the gauntlet of the picket line where men beat on the truck windows and threw