Transcripts

LEIF ENGER: September 9, 1989, more than 500 men came to the Falls, arriving before dawn in buses and pickups, then marching through town toward the housing camp for non-union construction workers. They tore down the chain-link fence, overwhelmed the small police force, and tipped over trailer houses and set them ablaze. No one here has forgotten it.

[MEN SHOUTING]

SPEAKER 1: Get your cameras out of here.

SPEAKER 2: I woke to a phone call from a friend across the river in Canada who said, what's going on over there? There's a mushroom cloud of smoke above your town. Is the whole town on fire or what?

SPEAKER 3: It's like war. I mean, your town gets blown apart.

SPEAKER 2: That is a horrible feeling when you know that there is no law and order in your community. And the police could do nothing. Sheriff could do nothing. The governor would not send in the National Guard. And I hope that never happens. I hope my children never have to go through something like that.

LEIF ENGER: The riot, which resulted in 58 separate convictions, peaked months of resentment between Boise Cascade, which was constructing one of North America's largest paper mills, and the trade union workers who had hoped to build it. When Boise hired the non-union Atlanta firm BE&K as general contractor for the half-billion dollar project, an ugly struggle seemed inevitable. Strong labor is a tradition in Northern Minnesota. Bob Anderson was, and still is, Boise's local spokesman.

BOB ANDERSON: The expansion of the plant was going to put much needed dollars into the mill here. In addition, it was going to put a lot of our community to work. So that was the sweet part of it. The bitter part of it was that we were going to bring in persons from outside the area to do some of the construction. And that was going to probably not sit well with some of the locals.

LEIF ENGER: At the time, Boise said it was concerned there wouldn't be enough available union workers to build the plant on schedule. The late '80s saw a construction boom in the pulp and paper industry. But the building trades didn't buy that argument. Business representative Larry Baron of Machinists Local W33 says they viewed the hiring of BE&K as flagrant union busting by Boise Cascade.

LARRY BARON: People have to take a stand when they feel they're being run over. If you don't, you're going to continue to get pushed further into the ground. That's oppression, man. And that's what our country was built on-- fighting oppression. That's what we did here.

LEIF ENGER: With BE&K workers flooding into International Falls, drawing paychecks below trade scale, union members began a wildcat strike. They picketed the worksite, printed threatening newsletters, and confronted their non-union competition in local taverns. Violent crime and domestic abuse rose dramatically. The families of BE&K employees, most of them from the south, shopped surreptitiously, speaking quietly to conceal their accents. These two women, twin sisters married to non-union workers, waited in the park one afternoon for their husbands to come off shift.

SPEAKER 4: Our husbands are telling us to just keep a low profile, don't tell anybody where we're from. And if it's obvious, just like we told you, they said, tell them we're on vacation. She said the other day, she said, I feel like a Black person in the South, the way it used to be. I really did.

LEIF ENGER: Still, non-union workers and their families did shop, and they did rent, and they did go fishing on Sunday afternoons. And as their numbers swelled into the thousands, local merchants made money like never before. Near the end of the project, the handful of remaining strikers told MPR their community had betrayed them.

SPEAKER 5: This whole town would have stuck together, would have been a pretty peaceful town, union workers. Greed, that's what it is, all greed.

SPEAKER 6: They built this goddamn town with a union. Unions built it. I was fighting for what I believe is mine. Let me tell you right now, before we go, when you're talking to a bitter son of a bitch.

LEIF ENGER: The paper machine was finished two months early, against the strikers' predictions. For the most part, it's lived up to its billing. The mill is revitalized, among the most advanced and productive in the industry. It fills orders from all over the world. The jobs here seem safe for the foreseeable future.

But outside the mill, International Falls seems slack. Predictions of sustained growth, based on the hundreds of new jobs in the expanded plant, haven't panned out. Carol Dalton, a travel agent and long-time Chamber of Commerce member, says many locals still haven't forgiven businesses for cashing in on BE&K.

CAROL DALTON: There are many people that still have problems shopping within the community. They give other reasons. They might say, well, they don't have it, or the selection is better somewhere else. But they also have indicated that the support was not there for them during that time. It was a very deep hurt.

LEIF ENGER: Union business rep Larry Baron says the backlash goes beyond hurt feelings to raw economics. When Boise's in-plant unions agreed to new contracts in the spring of '89, the huge expansion still on the drawing board was the company's biggest negotiating tool.

If the unions signed, International Falls got the new paper machine. If they didn't, Boise Cascade would build elsewhere. Baron says the membership was overanxious, in its hurry, approving a bad contract. He claims the result was a pay cut amounting to millions of dollars.

LARRY BARON: The first couple of years of this contract, of course, were clouded by the influx of construction workers in our community stores. Everything was booming. After the construction workers left the community, then the feeling of that $4 million loss started showing its ugly head. And because of that, today, there is a lot of vacant lots in our downtown area. One large grocery store, IGA, is gone. Pamida is gone. It went away big time.

LEIF ENGER: Adding to union resentment is the fact that Boise, since the expansion, has continued to employ non-union workers for some jobs at the plant, sure to be an issue in the next contract talks in 1999. The paradox in the Falls is that even as Boise prospers, the community shrinks. The mill employs 400 more than a decade ago. Yet population is down from 10,000 to 8,300.

Boise Cascade is, by far, the Falls largest employer and benefactor, paying more than half the taxes collected here. Yet the company is still reviled by many union supporters. Eight years, says downtown Chamber member Dalton, just isn't long enough to forget the strike, the boom, the riot. She offers the comfort of history.

CAROL DALTON: Many years before, there was a Teamsters strike. Many people in this community have almost forgotten that. Time smooths spots over.

LEIF ENGER: Carol Dalton. This is Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.