their jacks beneath the wheels. Thanks to this arrangement, the Teamsters did business with Koch without technically violating the picket line. The oil was flowing in, the gasoline was flowing out, and support for the OCAW was ebbing away by the day.
* * *
John Kujawa, the OCAW president, did not talk about work when he got home. His wife, Martha Ann, knew very little about the negotiations he was leading with Koch Refining. John often spent the weekends and evenings drinking with his friends. When he was home, he was silent.
But Martha Ann could see the tension building in him. He was in turmoil inside. His drinking was intense.
Kujawa was in an impossible position. If he pushed for an agreement to end the strike, he would be labeled a traitor or a sellout. If he failed to meet Koch’s demands, or at least some of them, the employees he represented might never get their jobs back.
Then Bernard Paulson dropped a bombshell on Kujawa during their negotiations. Paulson said that he was prepared to break an unwritten agreement that refinery owners had long honored: he was prepared to hire in nonunion replacement workers. It was exceedingly rare for any company to make such a move, which violated all principles of collective bargaining. Doing so would alienate Koch Refining from any unionized worker it dealt with in Minnesota. And it would effectively destroy the OCAW local 6-662.
As August turned to September, Kujawa began pressing his union to end the strike. But working with his own union members was almost as difficult as working with Paulson. Martha Ann Kujawa said internal tensions were so heated that she believed her husband might be in danger. John never confided in her what was going on, but she saw things that concerned her.
“I was looking out the window of the duplex that we lived in and he was being followed home by somebody. And they were threatening him. He was walking on the sidewalk and he started speeding up and came to the house quickly. And I thought that was strange,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t even be a bit surprised if his life was in danger.”
By September 15, Kujawa had helped the union come to a tentative agreement with Koch. The agreement caved to many of Koch’s demands, but the union leaders argued that it was the best deal the members could get after nine months of being on strike.
On the evening of September 17, the OCAW workers gathered in a junior high school near the oil refinery. They were presented with the contract that Kujawa had negotiated. It was time for them to vote on it, time to decide whether they were willing to end the strike and move on. Kujawa pointed out that pay and benefits were not even the primary issues in the negotiations. The main dispute was over how much control Koch’s management would have over the employees. The members voted to reject the contract, 149 to 103.
* * *
After the vote, Paulson gave the Teamsters an ultimatum: “Either you guys start coming across [the picket line], or we are going to go nonunion with all of our deliveries. Even after this strike is over,” he remembers telling them. The Teamsters came around to Paulson’s rationale. In mid-September they drove across the picket line. In doing so, they broke the back of the OCAW. Even decades later, feelings were raw about that betrayal. Lowell Payton, an OCAW man who stood for months out on the picket line, was still bitter decades later when he recalled watching the Teamster-driven trucks roll past the picket line. “Teamsters are no better than an egg-sucking dog,” Payton said.
On the evening of September 23, the OCAW gathered again at the junior high school to vote on the contract. They voted this time to accept the contract, by at least 140 to 100.I The contract would last sixteen months, only seven months longer than the strike itself.
Paulson felt that the OCAW had no choice but to agree to it. “They could see they were, you know, losing everything,” he said.
* * *
OCAW workers like Ernie Tromberg and Joe Quinn were shocked when they returned to the refinery. The place was in terrible shape. Most of the OCAW men who went back to work remember the massive overtime payments they received as they worked long days to get the refining equipment back into good working order.
But many of the employees did not come back. The bitterness ran too deep.