By Kari Lydersen
“I think [CEO] Chris [Christianson] made [company owner William] Farley a promise that if we went on strike he could guarantee 30, 35 guys working, and he needed [White] to deliver that,” says Theodore Wynn, a black striker who was also once friends with White. “[White] went to the blacks trying to get them to cross. But he didn’t go to me–he knows I’m prounion. When I started here 20 years ago there was a lot of prejudice, but then we got closer and closer, so that we were closer than our own families. Management didn’t like that. They needed to do things to keep us divided–they wanted to keep up the racial thing. And the only thing they have to keep it going now is Theodore White.”
Sam Amos, a 31-year black plant veteran who also used to be friends with White, says, “Chris needed a crutch, someone he could lean on. White was it. He wanted him for a reason. Chris has a very big smile–when he first came here he had this smile and handshake like Al Capone. He went straight for the chairman and started buddying up to him. And he succeeded. Chris wanted to get rid of the union. I heard it out of his own mouth last summer. He said, ‘It’s gonna be a showdown.’ He wanted the company to be able to do things the union didn’t want to do. What better place to go? White knew this company inside and out. He knows how to get things by, how to undermine employees. Chris would stride across the floor and give White a big hug, and they would talk and laugh while he was supposed to be working. We thought he was collaborating with Chris, and we were right. They were going to dinner and doing all these things behind union members’ backs.”
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“He fabricates things to fit with what he wants,” says Anderson, who insists none of the charges against him were true. He calls the incident “another case of the company’s favorites trying to set me up.”
The only other black union leaders–there were three–were also voted out. White claims that Marrero ran a smear campaign against him and the other black leaders in an effort to “get all the blacks out of the union” and that he made promises he couldn’t keep to union members to win their votes. “It’s politics, just like Mayor Daley and Bobby Rush,” White says. “I’ve heard the N word thrown around. It was a power play. It was racism to get what they wanted. Jose has a Napoleon complex. He’s a little guy, and he feels like he has to make up for it.”
Meanwhile relations between management and the workers were only getting worse. About a year and a half ago rumors started circulating that management wanted to destroy the union, perhaps even close the factory and move it to Detroit. Some workers claim that as part of the strategy Christianson tried to pit workers against one another. “He’d go to the black workers and say, ‘These Europeans aren’t even citizens. They don’t even speak English. They don’t deserve to be making as much money as you,’” says Wally Kulak, who was once a manager of eight soft-drink plants in his native Poland and recently found a new job. “Then he’d go to the Europeans and say, ‘These blacks are all lazy. They don’t deserve to be making as much as you.’”
