Worker Displacement and Resilience in America’s Heartland: The Longest Lockout in U.S. History

• In Event: 603 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. Labor Besieged: Repression and Resistance in the Contemporary United States

Abstract

On August 22, 2008, 360 workers were locked out of Grain Processing Corporation in Muscatine, Iowa, after the company and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 86D could not reach an agreement during contract negotiations. Over the ensuing six-plus years contract negotiations between the company and the union have come to an impasse, with no end in sight to what has become the longest lockout in U.S. history. Based on a qualitative case study, including 62 in-depth interviews with locked out workers, this research explores the conditions leading up to and following the labor dispute, demonstrating the structural factors at play in the broader economy, while also emphasizing the objective and subjective experiences of worker displacement. Workers’ post-lockout trajectories, based in their own narratives, demonstrate that rather than being simply passive victims of industrial restructuring, remarkably, a majority of these workers have recovered from the lockout by restructuring their own lives, while remaining in the local community. How this was done and how workers reflect on the experience of being locked out and their current reality are fundamental insights to be drawn from this study. Moreover, this study reveals several factors that help explain the remarkable resilience of these workers and the surprisingly positive outcomes of being lockout and ultimately displaced from jobs which they assumed offered life-long employment. This study offers a greater understanding of the relationship between industrial restructuring, worker displacement, and the employment mobility and agency among manufacturing workers in the contemporary economy.

Author

• Jacqulyn (Jackie) S. Gabriel, Colorado State University