In the newest installment of her Melville House Live Book Project, Kari Lydersen discusses the the history of the WARN Act — the law the workers at the Republic Windows & Doors plant cited as justification for their take-over of the factory ….

The abandoned loading dock at Republic Windows & Doors. (Photo by Robert Thornton III)

Chicago, January 19, 2009 — In his fantastic book Three Strikes, Chicago Tribune labor reporter Stephen Franklin documents the massive layoffs and plant closings in America’s heartland from the late 1970s through the 1990s. He focuses on three strikes in the prototypical prairie town of Decatur, Ill., against machinery giant Caterpillar, corn syrup manufacturer Staley and tire-maker Firestone. The gutting of jobs, pay and benefits at these companies was emblematic of what happened across the region, as whole communities went from blue-collar, union existences that made them feel proud, stable and relatively prosperous to fear, humiliation and uncertainty as those jobs were yanked out from under them. Franklin calls it “America’s secret earthquake, unparalleled devastation that went largely unnoticed as the rest of the country daydreamed and looked the other way.” (Read more about Franklin’s book here.)

Automation meant plants needed fewer workers to profitably produce their goods. Cheaper labor in the largely non-union southern U.S. and even cheaper labor in Latin America and Asia meant plants were moving their factories elsewhere. And many large unions that had grown complacent or corrupt since their heyday of the 1930s may not have been putting up much of a fight as workers were forced to labor faster, longer and harder for less pay.

The jobs lost at Republic Windows, and even the much larger layoffs of the past few months, pale in comparison to the blood-letting of that era, though since we have fewer blue collar jobs to start with now, proportionately there is less of a chasm.

One of the first and most famous labor travesties of that era was the 1977 layoffs of 4,100 at a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio, known as “Black Monday.” In the ensuing years factories making everything from tires and textiles to washing machines and widgets were closing their doors or gutting their workforces at a rapid pace. Detroit, Milwaukee, Youngstown and Akron were particularly hard hit — “hollowed out” in Franklin’s words — as were smaller cities like Gary, Indiana, all of which went from thriving middle class enclaves to impoverished ghettoes almost overnight.

Franklin notes that in 1982, 2,700 large scale layoffs and plant closings wiped out more than 1.25 million blue collar jobs across the country. And for those who kept their jobs, things got markedly worse, with the rising tide of joblessness making employers feel even more emboldened in disrespecting workers knowing there would be plenty more pounding at the gates ready to take their places. Franklin notes that in 1975 U.S. factory workers were the third highest paid in the developed world, while by 1991 they were only 13th, with average earnings of those who had not gone to college actually falling in real dollars.

This was the atmosphere that spawned the 1989 WARN Act, the law requiring that workers get 60 days notice of a plant closing or mass layoff; or the equivalent of 60 days severance pay. Republic Windows & Doors seems to have flagrantly violated the law, providing the moral keystone for the factory occupation and ensuing victory.

But as Franklin explains, the origins of the WARN Act were not so illustrious. In the 1980s a survey by the General Accounting Office (GAO, a congressional watchdog agency) found that more than a quarter of factories closed without giving workers any warning. “The day the plant closing came, the company shut the door, and that was it,” Franklin wrote. The GAO said the average warning time for a closing was seven days. And only one in 10 union contracts required warning of closures, and only one third of factories ever gave their workers severance pay.

Midwestern unions, which as a whole had lost much of their fervor in the 1960s and 1970s, did nonetheless fight back during this period, and they were demanding laws preventing or regulating plant closings. As Franklin describes it the WARN Act was actually something of a compromise backed by Republicans and Southern Democrats who wanted northern and Midwestern plants to be able to close and send the jobs south. “The law required companies with 100 or more workers to give 60 days notice of large-scale layoffs, but it was a dubious victory,” Franklin writes. “Employers learned that they could empty a plant slowly without giving any notice, and the only recourse the workers had when a company broke the law was to take the company to court, a wait that many did not have patience for. Even then they could get paid only for the days they had gone without notice. Gains won by blood years before” – literally – “were vanishing day by day.”

As conventional and often bureaucratic union tactics were largely failing against increasingly global corporations with little accountability or loyalty to their hometowns, workers explored some more innovative and militant tactics, often without the blessing of their union officials. The 1980s saw the popularization (and vilification) of the “corporate campaign,” wherein an employer is targeted on multiple fronts including through its board of directors, shareholders, customers and contractors. The corporate campaign brings the labor struggle fully into the community, with the union reaching out for broad public support and pressuring the company through its public image and consumer base. The most famous architect of these campaigns was a scrappy, stocky, ruggedly handsome New Yorker named Roy Rogers, whose high profile entry into local struggles was often highly divisive. (The award-winning documentary American Dream tells the tale of Rogers and an ultimately unsuccessful corporate campaign by employees of Hormel meatpacking in Austin, Minnesota. Read more about it here.)

The Republic Windows workers’ success was largely thanks to their corporate campaign: since Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase had little or no legal or contractual obligation to bargain with them, the public pressure and support must be credited with the ultimate outcome, both the financing extended by the banks and the company Serious Materials’ recent offer to buy the factory.

In the past decade corporate campaigns have also become popular and often highly successful in situations and sectors not as conducive to traditional union organizing: for example by migrant farm workers and temporary laborers who usually are not unionized and don’t have one steady employer. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southern Florida has used such tactics to gain important improvements for the immigrant workers who toil picking tomatoes and other produce in the steamy state. They have forced agricultural growers to make concessions by publicly targeting their buyers including Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald’s. Similarly the movement of workers centers across the country provides a way for day laborers and temporary workers – often undocumented immigrants or transient workers – to gain higher wages and end abusive practices. As previously mentioned, Chicago’s vibrant workers center movement was key to the workers’ unionization with the UE and to nurturing the enthusiastic community that quickly rushed to the workers’ defense during the occupation. (Read more about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers here, and more about workers centers here.)

For all the efforts of Midwestern workers and their supporters in the 1970s through 1990s, the battle was largely lost. The Midwest is now tattooed with rusty scars and monuments to deindustrialization: the skeletons of decrepit and mostly dismantled steel mills, coke plants and factories; warehouses and loading docks standing empty or perhaps transformed into trendy condos and lofts; blocks upon blocks of vacant homes and weedy lots in cities devastated by deindustrialization. The luckier or more enterprising municipalities have adapted, turning instead to tourism, information technology, science or other sectors to survive. Given the breadth of the deindustrialization it is almost surprising for Chicagoans to see that any factories like Republic Windows still do remain, inconspicuously, in their midst. Maybe the Republic Windows struggle will influence the future of these last vestiges of industry in the place once famous as “the city of big shoulders.”

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