PASADENA, Tex. -- This gritty sprawl of rust-colored pipelines, cooling towers and squat storage tanks along the 52-mile Houston Shipping Channel is the largest conglomeration of petrochemical plants and refineries in the United States and the second largest in the world.
Almost lost in this $15 billion maze is the bigger of Crown Central Petroleum Corp.'s two Texas refineries, its 100,000-barrel-a-day capacity dwarfed by most of the others.
Outside the Crown refinery's gates, a handful of union pickets appear three times a day -- a forlorn reminder that 252 of the Baltimore company's workers in central Texas remain locked out -- 31 months after being escorted off the premises and replaced by workers who are paid less.
"Crown is one of the smaller players down here," said Mickey Breaux, an international representative for the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW) and since last September the chief negotiator in the labor stalemate.
"We're not one of the biggest dogs in the woods. But it's hard to believe that people don't know workers here are still locked out of their jobs."
"We're too small in Texas and too far away from Baltimore," he said.
The union is working to span the miles and bring the fight to Crown's hometown turf, where it's better known for philanthropy, an extensive network of gas stations, pervasive radio commercials and Baltimore Oriole promotions.
That has helped escalate what began as an almost-cliche labor/management squabble about work-rule changes and layoffs into a contest that's become intensely personal as Crown battles problems on multiple fronts. Among them:
Annual losses of nearly $125 million since 1990 and a stock price languishing below $10 -- less than half its book value. Most of Wall Street has thrown in the towel: Few analysts follow the company anymore.
A sexual harassment suit, filed by hourly and salaried women and minority employees alleging that management has created and perpetuated a culture of rampant racism and sexism.
A fine of more than $1 million -- a Texas state record -- for violating air-pollution regulations. The fine resulted from complaints by a Texas citizens group which gets a small part of its funds from the oil union.
A lawsuit, filed by Crown against the union and about a dozen of its members, alleging they encouraged a campaign of sabotage the company contends could have led to a serious explosion.
Crown says all the allegations against it are false and says the union is just trying to hurt the company any way it can.
"This is really a management issue, pure and simple," said Joseph M. Coale, director of corporate communications for Crown Central in Baltimore. "They've brought the environment into it, they've brought racism into it, they've brought sexism into it, they've even brought religion into it.
"They're doing anything they can to develop concern and to keep the shots coming across the bow -- anything to get management to change its course. But management has resolved to see this through in order to save money -- substantial money."
Coale pointed out that the National Labor Relations Board, in dealing with a series of unfair labor practices allegations by the union, absolved the company of any wrongdoing in the lockout.
With the hiring of 125-130 replacement workers, once-rampant absenteeism at the Pasadena refinery has dropped, the safety record has improved, and operations are running smoothly, the company said.
Three straight losses
Even so, the savings have been eroded by costs related to the lockout, and Crown has logged three straight quarters of losses totaling more than $16 million.
The union says it won't give in because the company wants a "blank check" to fire hourly workers to make up for costly mistakes that management itself has made.
Though the oil union has at times cited the company's myriad problems in an effort to leverage its cause, its leaders are also quick to steer attention back to the main event: the lockout that began Feb. 5, 1996 when workers were escorted from the plant or called at home and told not to report to work.
There's been a human toll in this war of attrition between Crown and oil union's Local 4-227, which represents the locked-out workers.
Of the 252 originally locked out, the company says 68 have either retired or resigned -- most of them, the union says, because of financial straits that forced them to draw on their retirement accounts.
Several have come close to losing their homes and others have seen their credit ratings ruined. Workers who made more than $20 an hour now find themselves retired or working at menial jobs.
Danny Duncan, 51, who joined Crown in June 1977 after a stint in the U.S. Army, says his once pristine credit rating is destroyed, he can't support his family, and his weight has ballooned as his health deteriorates.
'I'll just cry'
"My self-esteem is all shot-to-hell," the 278-pound former soldier said recently. "I find myself sometimes sitting at home and I'll just cry. I didn't used to do that."
Don and Joyce King were a bit luckier. Before the lockout, Don worked for Crown while his wife Joyce worked as a secretary at the union hall.
The couple had dreams of retiring and buying a motor home and a trailer that could pull a motorcycle along as they toured the country. The lockout vaporized those dreams.
Don King tried several interim different jobs -- dockworker and long-distance trucker -- but finally signed the papers to get his retirement money.
"The goal is not a motor home anymore," Joyce King said. "We're still going to try and buy the motorcycle."
At the outset of the contract talks, the company's focus was on cutting costs. The company sought to stem the $124.6 million in losses racked up in 1991-96 due partly to ill-advised acquisitions.
At its high-water mark in 1983, Crown operated more than 800 gas station/convenience stores. The company also concedes it made mistakes in the crude-oil trading market, occasionally betting in the wrong direction on oil prices. And its costs were too high, partly because it had too many workers.
Crown went on a cost-cutting spree, closing stores -- it now has 344 -- and slashing its work force from 5,500 in 1988 to about 2,970.
As part of that cost-cutting, it halved its headquarters staff. Crown also wanted to out source some of the unionized plant maintenance jobs and proposed cutting about 90 union jobs -- from 252 to 162. It also wanted changes in some work rules.
Wages were never really the issue. Under the last proposal on the table, the average worker would make $20 an hour in wages and another $16 in benefits.
Crown says it had to lock the workers out partly because the union threatened to strike on 24 hours notice once the contract expired. That meant supervisors and other salaried workers had to be on constant alert.
Sabotage alleged
Worse, the company alleges, the workers were committing rampant acts of sabotage, some of it petty vandalism but others were more serious: "booby traps" large enough to cause explosions that would damage or destroy the refinery.
"It was getting out of hand," said Carlton Cormier, manager of the Texas refinery. "They did have it booby-trapped and they knew how to undo it. It was a real hazard to the plant and everyone in it."
Said William R. Tyler, the refinery's human resources manager: "They meant to hurt us. They really meant to hurt us."
The company says it documented more than 450 acts of sabotage, some of them serious enough to cause explosions.
But the union claims the problems stemmed from repairs the company delayed undertaking to keep costs down.
Union members also say the company called the FBI to investigate the sabotage but that no one has been charged.
When it was fined $1.1 million for pollution in late August, the company attributed some of its problems to the alleged sabotage -- a disingenuous allegation, the union says, since the citation included pollution emissions in 1997 and 1998 when the union was locked out.
With all the retirements or resignations, the two sides remain but 22 positions apart on the number of job cuts sought. But it's the alleged sabotage that's emerged as the sticking point in contract talks that last took place Sept. 10. They made no progress.
The union says the company could end this battle by ending the lockout; Crown says it wants the union to agree to some process for rooting out the alleged saboteurs.
Crown already has the right to fire those it can prove responsible for sabotage, the union says. "We won't agree to a contract until they tell us who's coming back," said the union's Breaux.
Crown sues union
Crown in January filed suit in U.S. District Court in Texas against the union local, its officers, and about a dozen of its members, alleging they conspired to use sabotage to force the company accede to their demands. The suit, which seeks at least $500,000 in actual damages and an unspecified amount in punitive damages, has yet to come to trial. But if Crown underestimated the unions' determination to outlast the company, the union may have miscalculated in launching attacks on members of management, including Chief Executive Officer Henry Rosenberg Jr.
Union members have handed out boycott leaflets to consumers near Crown gas stations, including those in Baltimore, and gotten the Baltimore City Council to pass a resolution censuring Crown.
Then, they carried the fight to the executives' houses of worship, country clubs and neighborhoods, handing out "wanted" posters with mug shots of managers over the legend "corporate greed and mismanagement."
More recently the union campaign has taken on an international flavor.
Last week leaders of the oil and chemical workers union met with Lars A. Myhre, president of the Norwegian Oil & Petrochemical Workers Trade Union, which represents the 2,500 unionized workers of Statoil Marketing & Trading Inc.
The firm is the U.S. subsidiary of Statoil, the state-owned Norwegian oil company that supplies Crown's Texas refinery with crude oil and buys some of its products.
The American oil union's argument: Why should Statoil, a unionized company, be dealing with Crown when that U.S. firm was trying to bust a sister union?
"By all means we'll put pressure on [Statoil] management" to re-examine the deal, Myhre said.
And if that doesn't work, Myhre promised to bring the union's political pressure to bear -- significant since NOPEF is part of the 20-million strong International Chemical, Energy & Miners Federation.
"We will see clearly if Statoil is siding with Crown against the OCAW," he said. If it is, "we will take action to boycott. The government owns the company. That means I own just as many shares as the chairman."
Pub Date: 9/27/98