Splitting shifts: splitting families.

The first major union battle to take up the American Catholic bishops' call for "Putting Children and Families First" (Origins, November 28, 1991) may be at the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company in Decatur, Illinois. Decatur is surrounded by miles of corn fields, and the Staley plant processes corn into a variety of chemicals and sweeteners for industry.

The 730 workers at the plant are members of the Amalgamated Industrial Workers, Local 837. Their dispute with management is not about wages, but about being a part of their families and communities. Staley spokesman, J. Patrick Mohan, agrees that the dispute is not about wages. He says it is about competitiveness and corporate consistency.

Danny Wirges, AIW regional director, argues that the company isolated workers from their families when it radically restructured the work week" in March, shifting it from regular eight-hour shifts to twelve-hour shifts at straight time, three days on and three days off, with a rotation from days to nights every thirty days. Wirges says that means workers do not have the same days off each week. They are always out of sync with their families and the rest of the community. He claims the company also swept away seniority rights, rights which serve to limit managers' favoritism and arbitrariness, and gutted employee fights to union representation to settle grievances.

Staley is a subsidiary of the British conglomerate, Tate & Lyle. Mohan, who is also executive vice-president, says the company merely eliminated "antiquated work rules," which enabled it to replace the old agreement of 160 pages with a "modern agreement" of 17 pages. He says management's offer merely applied the "norm in the continual processing industry" - industrial plants that work around the clock - to the Decatur facility so that it could be "competitive."

Union consultant Ray Rogers, however, says Staley was already competitive, providing Tate & Lyle with one-third of its $400 million profit in 1991. Professor Laurie Clements of the University of Iowa, who has surveyed the union officers at other corn wet-milling plants in the United States, says the Staley offer was anything but the norm. "They were horrified," he says. "It is a major, major step backward for workers in the industry." The new work schedule, in particular, was one of the worst aspects of the Staley offer.

But Mohan says the schedule is not a problem because management gave each worker a personal schedule for a full year: "I know one guy who carries his schedule around in his pocket so he knows when he's off," he says.

That's not how Henry Kramer, a worker with over twenty years' seniority, sees it. His schedule is a problem: "When I'm working, I can see my kids one hour a day. My boy plays basketball. I can't see any of his games. My daughter is on the drill team. I can't see her perform. She's a senior this year, and I have to work on her graduation night." Kramer adds that having three days off in a row "is not worth it. On the first day, I sleep until 4 p.m. When I get up, I'm a zombie and I don't have much patience with the kids. On the second day I'm all right, but on the third day, I have to get my schedule into swing with work. So I really only have one day with my family." The worst stress, Kramer finds, is with his children. He says they are getting professional counseling to try to cope with the stress the new work schedule places on the family.

Denton Larimore also pans the six-day week. "There's no consistency to my days off," he complains. "I can't have a consistent part in my family's life." Larimore coached Little League, but his new workweek forced him to stop. "I can't be involved in church activities, scouting, or even bowling league. I can't be involved in anything outside of work," he says. "It's like we're tools the company uses and then stores in a toolbox when it doesn't need us."

Bill and Nancy Hanna are married and both work at Staley. Their children are grown, but the Hannas say management still found a way to interfere with their family life - it separated the couple and forced them onto different shifts so that they do not share the same days off. The Hannas say every other married couple they know of at Staley likewise was separated by management.

Mohan denies there is a policy to separate married couples. He acknowledges that management knows who are married couples, but he blames the union for these scheduling problems because it refused to help the company implement its final offer. He says that twelve-hour shifts are actually better for workers: they increase leisure time because workers "only work one-half the days of the year."

Professor Clements, however, notes that Staley's twelve-hour shifts actually decrease leisure time because employees work a hundred hours a year more than they did with a five-day, forty-hour week. Historically, companies used overtime as a way of cutting the costs of employing more people," he says. "This is an alternative way of doing that."

On April 4, officials of seven unions representing Tate & Lyle workers in the United States and Canada met for the first time. Their meeting indicated that there would be further resistance to management's would-be norms. Workers from a Brooklyn, New York, plant told of a failed strike against a contract similar to the one Staley wants in Decatur. Joe Dwyer, a Teamster leader from Tate & Lyle's Westem Sugar plant in Billings, Montana, and president of the ad-hoc council, announced that the various unions supported the AIW's fight in Decatur. Leaders of Tate & Lyle's Australian unions telegraphed a message of solidarity, while union leaders from a Tate & Lyle plant in Silvertown, England, spoke by telephone to the meeting and explained their struggle against a proposal virtually identical to the one in Decatur.

For the time being, workers at the Decatur plant are doing only what they are told by the company. AIW Local 837 President Dave Watts says "management wants to run the plant their way, so we're letting them do it." As a result, "production has suffered." Mohan acknowledges that production has dropped by almost one-third. With the AIW calling for a boycott of Tate & Lyle's Domino, GW, and Redpath sugars, their sales may show a drop as well. For some families trying to adjust to the new work rules, that would seem like the company was getting its just deserts.