34

CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE Machinists Union began at 10:00 a.m. in the Ocean State Wire conference room on the floor above the office. The Company provided coffee and donuts for the Union committeemen when they convened by themselves before the scheduled meeting. That gave rise to some friendly conversation when Hanley and Ryder first entered the room. But it didn’t take long for Johnny Morelli to begin losing his temper and periodically ranting at the bargaining positions being voiced for the Company by Ryder.

Morelli knew what direction he was supposed to be moving in to arrive at a settlement. Tommy Arena had met him in a bar near the Machinists’ office building before the negotiations with Ocean State got under way. He came with a message for Morelli from Sandy Tarantino. Arena pulled a small piece of paper out of the pocket of his gray silk shirt and looked at it as he spoke. “The Company wants a wage freeze in the first year. It will go along with small increases in the second and third, but nothing over two percent. And it will agree that employee contributions to the health plan can stay where they are now.

“I’m telling you this from one fucking business agent to another,” he continued. “Tarantino said the Company’s hurting and a settlement along these lines is set in stone as far as he’s fucking concerned. He also wants you to know the Tarantino family will pull the plug and let the fucking plant close if the economics of the new contract don’t make sense. Tarantino says the rest of the issues are up to you and Hanley,” Arena told his friend. “He figures you two can trade off on some and drop the others. But that’s his fucking bottom line on the two strike makers.”

At the first meeting, when Ryder gave Morelli and his committee the package of economic information he put together with Hanley, the Machinist business agent looked it over very carefully. The Union took a long caucus to review the documents. Morelli used the time to ask the members of the committee a lot of questions about Ocean State’s operation. He was interested in finding out why many of the past customers no longer showed up as current ones. He reviewed the accuracy of monthly tonnage figures on shipments with them and inquired about the amount of overtime being worked. He also sought out information on supervisory staffing, returns of defective product, second shift efficiency and inventory problems.

When the caucus was over, Morelli told Brad Hanley he needed more information and more time to review it. Hanley bristled at the request, as if being accused of not telling the whole truth.

“Let’s hear it,” he said in a surly voice. “What do you want?”

As Morelli read off the four items on his list, Ryder jotted them down and Hanley agreed to send the data to the Union office in a day or two.

Once he was able to study all the facts and figures supplied by the Company, Morelli realized that the Tarantinos were justified in presenting the contract position he was given by Arena at their meeting. He was convinced that no one was trying to jerk him around. If anything, the Union membership at Ocean State was even getting away pretty good on the medical, he concluded. It was no secret that health insurance premiums were going up about fifteen percent a year. He knew it was costing the Company a bundle.

Morelli got his negotiating committee together at the Union hall the day before the next scheduled meeting with the Company. He explained to them that all the data they received from Hanley added up to a company in deep trouble.

“Hear me good,” he told them. “Right now, the most important thing for you to be concerned about over the next three years is keeping your jobs. Unemployment’s up more than eight percent in Rhode Island. I’m sure you all know what that means. Ocean State’s gonna have a much easier time finding permanent replacements to take your jobs if you ever go on strike.

“We ain’t gonna have no strike unless Hanley really tries to stick it to us,” he told the committee. “He ain’t gonna get no two-year freeze, no way. But we’ll let him have it for one and we’ll take whatever we can get in the second and third years. It might not be no more than two percent, but if we can push it up to that, we’ll be doing great. Him and his lawyer are pissing in the wind if they think you’re gonna pay more for your medical. We’ll hit the bricks on that one if Hanley won’t wise up and tell us to forget it.” He paused, and looked at each of the committee members sitting around the table. “Everyone here see it the same way as me?”

Morelli knew the response would be unanimous. He gave this same speech more times than he could remember. Once the other side let you know, off the record of course, what you could expect to get for a final offer at the end of the negotiations, and that they were ready to go to war if you didn’t like it, the rest was easy. You’d just use those same numbers to tell the employee committee what your side would insist on being given if the other side wanted to stay out of trouble. That way, the committee could start getting used to the idea that the new contract wasn’t going to give the bargaining unit a lot of what it wanted. At the same time, the business agent could set himself up as a hero to the employees for eventually “forcing” the company to agree to his bottom line proposal. Most of those off-the-record meetings took place over a nice dinner, with plenty to drink, in some fancy restaurant, with the company picking up the tab. You could find a quiet corner in back, or even a private room if anyone was worried about being seen socializing together. Morelli was unhappy about the fact that he didn’t get a dinner out of this one from the Tarantinos or anyone else, but he understood the circumstances.

As long as both sides in the negotiations knew pretty much where they were going in order to reach a new agreement, Morelli didn’t want to waste a lot of time getting there. He told himself that he had much better things to do, especially after five o’clock, than sit for hours on end with a guy like Hanley. He knew that Hanley hated his guts anyway because he called his bluff three years ago and came out of it with a tremendous contract. Morelli felt the same way about this stuffy asshole of a lawyer who wrote down every word that was said, talked in circles and wanted to caucus for a half hour every fifteen minutes. Ryder was handling things like he wanted to go on meeting forever, he thought.

Morelli already made major changes in the proposal he gave the Company when the bargaining first started. His demands were lowered considerably, and now, five meetings later, Ocean State was still dragging its feet. Well, he’d let Hanley and Ryder know today what he thought of their positions. Depending on what they said, he’d decide whether to get together with Tommy Arena again and send a message back to Arena’s friend on Federal Hill.

The two committees broke for lunch at one o’clock. On the way out, Morelli said that his people were sick and tired of what was going on. “The Company better show some movement in the proposals when you come back to the table.” As he opened the door to leave, he added, “Because if you don’t, the Union’s gonna have to reassess the concessions we’ve already given you.” He was throwing his opponents a signal they couldn’t fail to understand.

When he and Ryder returned to his office, Hanley told his secretary to phone out for some sandwiches. Ryder was hoping they would get out of the plant for a hot lunch, but didn’t want to push it. “Whatever you like,” he said, when Hanley asked him what he’d prefer as they walked downstairs from the conference room.

Hanley was actually pleased with the way the meeting went. “I think we’ve come that much closer to forcing the Union to strike when the contract expires. What we have to do now in our next proposal is give Morelli something to really rattle him.” His face lit up as he predicted that his nemesis would either jam all his papers into his briefcase in dramatic fashion and lead the committee out of the room, or request a short caucus.

“If they caucus,” Hanley added, “he’ll have to follow through on his threat by raising their demands, probably wiping out most of the progress we’ve made to this point.” In either case, he viewed the Company’s move as the way to send a strong signal to Morelli and the committee that he was dead serious about wanting a two-year freeze in wages and more money from the employees toward their medical plan.

Ryder was becoming concerned. There were still over three weeks left in which to reach a settlement, but he was having trouble figuring out exactly what Hanley was willing to do to get a contract. After years of negotiating on behalf of employers, Ryder took it with a grain of salt when a company’s chief executive tried to show his masculinity by expressing no fear of a strike. It was no different even when the CEO talked as if he relished one.

He was used to seeing that macho attitude go up in smoke as the last day of the contract approached. As always, he began, of necessity, to put together a strike plan for the company he was representing at the time. He knew how swiftly the bravado could disappear, especially when he stressed the need to hire expensive security personnel on an around-the-clock basis to protect the plant from overzealous strikers. And he could predict the fear he was used to seeing in the eyes of management when he urged the presence of a police detail in front of the premises twice a day.

“It’s the only way we can restrict the amount of violence we’ve got to expect when the replacement employees enter and leave the plant,” he told them. The guts of the strike plan awakened the company to the kind of fight it could be getting into.

But Hanley was different. He went into the negotiations with a vendetta. Ryder recognized it and feared that his client might not be satisfied with anything less than a contract he regarded as giving him back his manhood. Hanley was clearly looking for a victory, not a compromise. The question was how short a leash the Platts had him on and how close to that precipice called a strike they would let him venture. Ryder figured that Hanley received settlement guidelines from the Platts that he was keeping from him. Brad was probably afraid that his chief negotiator would “give away the store” once he learned how much money was available to work with. So he wasn’t going to tell him what settlement would make the Platts happy, at least not yet. It forced Ryder to conclude that a lot of what Hanley said was just bluffing.

Still, Ryder had to assert himself and make sure the negotiations didn’t go off track. He admonished Hanley on several occasions to forget what happened three years earlier and simply find the best economic solution for the Company’s present problems. His client never directly rejected that advice, but answered each time with an affirmative nod of his head. Now Ryder was wondering whether the message in those nods meant something completely different to Hanley than it did to him.

He explained all the difficulties contained in the position Brad insisted on pushing. “It’s hard enough to get a group of employees to accept a one-year wage freeze, let alone two. But you don’t have to do it that way. If the wage increase in the second year is minimal, you accomplish essentially the same purpose,” Ryder advised. There was no sense making it doubly insulting, he said. “That’s how a freeze is regarded. I’m sure the Platts know that,” he added, hoping to get Hanley to reveal their position. Again, a nod of the head was his only reply.

Morelli called Hanley’s office at just after three o’clock. “How much longer do you expect to take before you’re ready?” he asked.

Brad repeated the question out loud and Ryder put up both hands to signal ten minutes. Hanley hung up the phone. “I think we ought to go back in with essentially the same proposal we gave the Union earlier,” he said.

Ryder disagreed. He felt they had to discuss the primary money issues further among themselves before risking the consequences of answering the committee with a “no change” position.

“I’ve got to analyze the numbers again, Brad. If you just go in there and offer them the same thing, these guys will march right onto the factory floor with it and production will grind to a halt.” It was the only thing he said that day that made an impression on Hanley.

When they returned to the conference room, Ryder made a short speech about the fact that the two sides were obviously having a lot of trouble coming together on the main issues. “Let’s put those aside for the time being,” he suggested, “and try and get rid of all the other stuff first. I think it will help to do it that way.”

Morelli wasn’t happy. It was clear to him that Ryder was stalling. He considered ending the meeting with another tirade, but decided he’d only be hurting himself if he did. He wanted to get the negotiations over with as soon as possible. The other issues needed to be resolved sooner or later anyway, so they might as well get started with them now. Still, he had to say something about the other stuff.

“You two seem to think that coming together means we crawl on the floor and give you everything you want just for the privilege of working here. Well, that ain’t the way we see it. Let me introduce you to reality. If you expect to get this deal wrapped up without a fight, you’d better think hard about what these guys need to live on.” Morelli dropped his pen on the table in front of him. “Give us ten minutes to talk,” he said. “Then we’ll be ready.”

When negotiations resumed, the two sides went back and forth. Each took long, relaxed caucuses over the next four hours before submitting its proposals and counterproposals. The Union withdrew a number of its demands in return for the Company taking several of its own off the table. At 7:15, just as Ryder was starting to explain the Company’s position on another matter, Morelli interrupted him.

“We’ve had enough,” he said. “These guys want to go home and eat dinner. We’ll be ready to pick up from here at ten o’clock tomorrow.”

Hanley and Ryder returned to the office area. It was deserted, except for the accountant who was working overtime to meet the deadline on all the important numbers for March. They sat down on two well-worn vinyl chairs in the room where job applicants waited when they came to the plant for interviews. Ryder remembered Fiore’s warning about guiding Hanley to an acceptable new agreement. He figured that pressure from the Platts would bring Brad in line as the expiration date got closer. At the moment, he was more concerned about appearing weak to his difficult client at this point in the negotiations. Time was still on their side. Ryder was sure there would be four to six more meetings before all the issues were resolved. And every billable hour was a godsend. But he still felt somewhat apprehensive about the completely intractable stance Hanley showed all along. He would have to bet that if Brad was calling the shots himself, he wouldn’t back down from his position on the big money items, even if the contract terminated the next day.

They talked for almost an hour. At one point Hanley left the room and returned with a bottle of vodka and two paper cups. He poured until Ryder told him to stop. When the conversation resumed, Hanley surprised him by asking, “Have any of the owners of Ocean State called to discuss the negotiations with you?”

Ryder assumed that Hanley wanted to find out whether the Platts were looking for a second opinion on how things were going. Or maybe his client wondered whether the Tarantinos had a different view from the Platts of what the ultimate settlement should be. “No, no one’s contacted me, but Doug Fiore wants me to keep him up to date on everything.” The reply pleased Hanley. He figured he had the support of the Platt brothers if their Connecticut office wasn’t ordering him to negotiate differently. He guessed that Fiore was reporting back to the Tarantinos who were most certainly keeping the Platts advised. Since no one in either camp told him to drop any of his economic demands, they must think he was doing the right thing.

Ryder interrupted his thinking. “I’m going to figure out what it would cost the Company if the freeze was limited to one year and the wage increases in the two remaining years were no more than two percent.”

“Okay,” Hanley replied. He knew it wouldn’t hurt to have the information in case any of the owners raised the question. His response was reassuring to Ryder, and made him more hopeful for the meetings still to come.

When they finished working, Brad suggested they meet for breakfast the next morning at a coffee shop located three blocks from the plant. Ryder agreed. “If the Company’s suite at the Biltmore isn’t being used tonight, I’ll stay there again,” he said. “That will give me more time to prepare for tomorrow’s session.”

“Good idea,” Hanley said. “It’s all yours.”

At last, George Ryder’s long and difficult twelve hours were at an end.