Business

Retirees, laborers have to wait, hope
Our View: Let's hope there's a Chapter 12 for Kaiser in Spokane.
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John Webster
For the editorial board

If management alone paid the price after flying a once-great corporation into the ground, stories like the bankruptcy of Kaiser Aluminum might be easier to take. But as Enron showed, people at the top can float away on golden parachutes while laborers who did the corporation's heavy lifting go down with the plane.

Besides, business is not some simplistic morality play between Snidely Whiplash and Dudley DoRight. Bad luck, global competition, ham-handed government, economic cycles and toxic morale can hurt a company, too. The Kaiser saga fully illustrates the diverse complexity of the modern business world.

Spokane has much at stake in the announcement that Kaiser, one of our area's most valued private employers, has filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy laws.

This region needs good, family wage jobs of the kind Kaiser provides. Not everybody is cut out to write software, or change sheets. Our economy needs value-added, productive labor -- creating wealth, products and jobs from raw materials like ore.

Kaiser says that it intends to remain in business. A Chapter 11 is not an obituary. Companies can and do recover.

It is for the sake of all the people affected that our region surely hopes the reorganization saves Kaiser's local operations.

People affected include: Current and retired Kaiser employees. Employees at the many area firms that do business with Kaiser. Stores and service businesses that have dealings with Kaiser employees. School districts and other agencies whose ability to serve is affected when a big part of the tax base stops delivering tax revenue. And, not least, our interdependent community is touched in ways that are personal as well as economic.

It is to be hoped that Kaiser and the courts will do everything possible to protect the pensioners who built the company in the past. It would be unconscionable to pull the rug from under them.

How did Henry Kaiser's aluminum company get to this point?

It happened over decades. The price for global commodities like aluminum sagged as hydroelectric dams and newer factories appeared in far corners of the world where labor is cheap. This trend has made it tough for many an American industry to pay American wages and save American jobs.

Predatory, buyout capitalism took a toll, too, when Texas financier Charles Hurwitz acquired Kaiser with borrowed money that became a millstone around the company's neck.

Next came the bitter strike and lockout involving Kaiser Steelworkers.

The Bonneville Power Administration unplugged the Northwest aluminum industry's electricity to keep business plugged in along Interstate 5. Sept. 11 sent airplane manufacturing, including Boeing, a Kaiser customer, into a tailspin.

There's more. But the most important chapter lies ahead, and it is a chapter whose ending no one knows.

John Webster/For the editorial board

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