The birth of the cement industry in Alpena was humble and premature during a time when wood was America's infrastructure "king." This northeast Michigan town at the mouth of the Thunder Bay River on Great Lake Huron, throbbed to the cadence of broad-axes and cross-cut saws as armies of lumberjacks hacked away at the seemingly inexhaustible tracts of cedar, hardwood, and white and red pine. The town's workers, merchants and leaders took little notice of the ocean of shale and limestone that lay beneath the stumps and roots of the resultant wasteland.
Even before the turn of the century, when this generous wilderness surrendered it's last stick of lumber, there were those who knew that it was time to search for a new monarch. One of those was Alpena grocer John Monaghan.
In 1899, Monaghan used his cookstove to experiment with recipes of minerals indigenous to the region. Using a patented European concoction for "portland" cement, refined by Englishman Joseph Aspdin in 1824, Monaghan came up with a mixture of blue-shale and limestone that would one day become the "Cadillac" of cements in North America.
The collapse of the lumber industry left the lumber barons vulnerable and Monaghan easily convinced a few of them to invest $300,000 in his recipe. In 1901, a new king, Alpena Portland Cement Company was born. By 1903 the company had already expanded once and seemed destined for success, but after a tragic fire in 1907, the company soon fell on hard times and shut down operations.
About that same time, a new cement firm, Huron Portland, was formed in Detroit. An offspring of the Michigan Alkali Company that was earning mega-bucks supplying the Plate-glass magnates in Pittsburgh with soda-ash, Huron Portland zeroed in on the abandoned quarries "up north" on the shores of Thunder Bay in Alpena. With a handful of investors, more land was added for the mining operation, along with $130,000 worth of equipment, including three engines, five boilers, six kilns, six driers and three clinker coolers.
A new king, Huron Portland Cement, was now sitting firmly on the throne.
The first lab was set up in an old boarding house on the plant property. The six kilns were hauled to the site by locomotive, then rolled by hand up wood piling ramps and set into place. Besides hiring the men who'd lost their jobs with the ill-fated Alpena Portland Cement Company after the fire of 1907, it drew itinerant "cement tramps" from all over the country who moved from place to place doing the same dirty, dusty work.
This clumsy, primitive operation produced 2000 barrels of cement in it's first year. By 1910, after the reworking of production lines, and rearranging the machinery to make gravity do as much of the work as possible, 900,000 barrels of cement had been made. That year Huron Portland Cement paid the first dividends on HPC stock with every last barrel being hand-loaded in cloth sacks into railroad box-cars. HPC steamed ahead into the 20's and the business was solidly in the black. Then the Depression hit.
At Huron Portland, and elsewhere, bust finally turned to boom at the end of WW II, but unlike some firms in the industry, HPC was prepared. On the strength of predictions, it's captains added 10 more kilns bringing the number to 24, and purchased a new Great Lakes cement boat/ore carrier, the 550 ft. Paul Townsend.
But by 1957 the business hit the skids and HPC was acquired by National Gypsum. At that point the entire company--the Alpena headquarters, six boats, and 12 distributing plants employed over 2000 people and had a 1959 sales potential of $35 million. National gypsum then implemented a 14 year expansion program that would double the capacity of Huron's Alpena mill. When the president of National Gypsum announced the expansion in early 1961, he added, "It is evident that the town's future in the cement business is assured." No one disagreed, after all, the Alpena cement works were now the largest in the world.
The 1960's were good for business and pleasantly uncomplicated. In the first six months of 1972 it posted record earnings, but 72' was also the year that the Michigan Air Pollution Control Commission slapped National Gypsum with a violation of state air pollution regulations for releasing up to 200 tons of cement kiln dust per day into the air over Alpena. Cement kiln dust is a waste by-product of cement production, and contains toxic heavy-metals scrubbed from the fuels used to heat the kilns. This forced National Gypsum in 1975, to enter into an air pollution abatement program financed by $35 million in bonds issued by the County of Alpena.
With it's pollution control requirements met, and a new labor contract being
signed, the ensuing years should have been good ones for National Gypsum, but
they weren't...or at least that's what the workforce and the community were
told. From 1978 to 1982 Alpena was rocked by tremorous rumors of jobs loss and
company divestment.
In 1981, Local 135 of the United Steelworkers Union conceded $3
million in benefits and wages to the company. Lay-offs began and the work force
started to slide. The plant staff had dwindled from a peak of 1200 to around
900. Sometime in 1982 "those french guys," as the workers called them, began to
mysteriously pop up in various departments at the plant, studiously snooping
around with clipboards in hand. Nobody really paid much notice.
In 1983 the industry rebounded with a 210% percent increase in earnings, but a new rumor...that National Gypsum wanted out of the cement business...precluded any celebration. The town was uneasy but not terrified because nobody believed National Gypsum would close the mill, it would sell and the transfer of ownership would be painless. After all, Alpena had been a loyal, uncomplaining host for decades, obligingly wiping away the layers of cement dust from their homes and cars. They casually referred to the dust as "pay dirt" and gave up three generations of sons and daughters to make the mill a success, so, they thought, National Gypsum surely would do the right thing and make the transition virtually unnoticeable.
But this atmosphere of hearsay persisted and in 1984, the vulnerable Steelworkers gave up another $9 million in wages and benefits. By 1985, the "french guys" had again become a part of the landscape.
In the Spring of 85' two National Gypsum plant managers invited some officers of the United Steelworkers to attend a "business" luncheon. The plant managers got straight to the point...if the Steelworkers would concede 4 more dollars an hour across the labor force, there was a very good chance that Lafarge Coppee, the giant french-owned cement maker would exercise their option to purchase the Alpena mills. The union officers were flabbergasted. In the past four years they had given up more than $12 million. It was a very short luncheon.
In the late fall of 1985, Dick Wysocki, full time United Steelworkers officer and "chairman of the Grievance Committee", was pulled aside by National Gypsum's personnel manager. He told Wysocki of the company's plans to begin the use of hazardous waste as fuel in the cement kilns.
The Union officer was skeptical, but was assured that waste burning would be the "salvation" of National Gypsum and the beginning of a new day for the Union. Waste-burning would bring economic viability, and more importantly, protect National Gypsum from being out-priced by "foreign" cement.
Wysocki was given the charge of selling this idea to the Union Committee and the Union Committee would then sell it to the membership, because, the personnel manager warned, "it just can't happen without full Union approval."
Dick Wysocki did his job well, and in late-winter the Committee accepted National Gypsum's waste-burning proposal. The company added one thing: "Keep this quiet and "below decks" until we get our permits from the Department of Natural Resources...and instruct your membership to do the same...because if this gets around town, there will be people with gas masks demonstrating in front of the plant, and that'll definitely hurt our chances of getting permitted."
The Union Committee agreed, and in the spring of 1986 National Gypsum received the permits and went on line to burn 56 million pounds of hazardous waste a year in their two largest kilns. But it wasn't long before the workers knew they'd made a big mistake. As soon as the waste-burning was up and running, the cozy relationship between the company and the Union cooled. The company reneged on agreements with the Union...agreements set in place to guarantee the health and safety of the workers. Ventilation wasn't installed and the stench of the waste was overpowering. The agreement to let Union men test the waste and do stack monitoring was broken. Spills and dripping tanker-trucks were ignored, and soon it became obvious that management wasn't comfortable with having Union men around the hazardous waste.
When Dick Wysocki, Union Grievance Committee chairman, filed a list of these grievances, the plant manager responded, "Don't complain, soon you'll reap the benefits of hazardous waste burning...you can ask for the "moon" in your next Contract negotiations in 87'...no more concessions, and by then we'll be making more money on the hazardous waste than on cement." He acquiesced and the complaints were silenced. A few months later, Dick Wysocki was terminated along with over 500 other National Gypsum employees.
Fred Baker was one of them. Job Watchman and Company Clerk, Fred was manning the gatehouse switchboard one day around the 1st of December. The phone circuits had been screwed up and it was impossible to transfer calls without being an inadvertent eavesdropper. After dark a call came in. It was from a National Gypsum attorney to a plant executive.
Fred Baker will never forget what he heard.
The executive asked the lawyer, "What's it look like?". "These guys will buy whatever we throw at em'" the lawyer replied.
The executive didn't hesitate, "Well, then fuck em'...we got em' right by the balls."
"What about the community?" begged the lawyer.
"Fuck the community, we got them by the balls too."
For Fred Baker, this was too ominous to comprehend...the largest cement plant in the world and the number one employer in Alpena would close..."go down"...forever? The manager's words were too simple, too profane, too casual and ignoble to describe the death of a king. It couldn't be.
Outside in the pitch-darkness, a nor'easter wailed in from Thunder bay scouring cement dust from the haul-roads to obliterate what little light spilled from the windows of the old three-story raw-grind building, and as Fred Baker lay down the phone, he knew in his soul, that for Alpena, there would be no darker night than this.
Within hours, a conference-call came in from the National Gypsum Headquarters. The Alpena plant manager had a Christmas gift for the four Union locals to take to the membership...the plant was "going down". On the 12th of December, in less than two weeks, 2/3rds of the workforce would be terminated with the remainder gone by the 19th. The news hit like a concussion grenade.
But there was a ray of hope. It lay in a "successor" clause in the Steelworker's Contract which stated unequivocally that if the plant shut down, if within 90 days it was picked up by another company, the purchaser would have to honor the prevailing Union Contract and would be bound to restore the workforce in full with all Union benefits intact. But, would there be a buyer?
Like water torture, the ninety days dripped away one by one as the city stood shell-shocked and paralyzed.
Eighty days...ninety days...over a hundred days. During this time, the plant was "embalmed" with three railroad cars of anti-freeze as a gesture by National Gypsum to demonstrate the finality of their decision...and meanwhile, the "successor clause" flickered away and died along with the plant. It was over.
That's when the "french guys", the Lafarge Corporation, swash buckled onto the scene like Robspierre. They announced to the community that they had "finally decided" to exercise their "option to buy"...to save the dying king, along with the good City of Alpena. Guarded hope rose up from the ashes of despair.
But there were stipulations...no Union, and a new and more efficient workforce...instead of close to 600 laborers, a crew of 250 that would neck down to an eventual 150, and Lafarge themselves would hand-pick them...plus lots of automation and tripling the thru-put of hazardous waste to 21 million gallons a year.
The Union warriors had been emasculated and the city was at their mercy. Pensions and insurance benefits became the fodder of endless litigation skirmishes.
Lafarge took control and the "hand-picked" workforce was chosen from every township in the County, one here, one there, to broaden a loyal constituency. Hard-line safety minded Union men were excluded. One thing for certain, unlike Lafarge's proclamation to the community, the "most qualified" were not hired back. The town turned on itself. Divorces, suicides, houses for sale...welfare.
Immediately, after Lafarge took control they demonstrated the company "psychology" concerning the environment when they ordered workers to empty the plant water-lines of anti-freeze, all three railroad cars worth, directly into Lake Huron. When the workers protested, they were told they could be replaced in a heartbeat. With no Union to protect them, they obeyed.
Hidden in the middle of this vortex of fear and despair lay the awful truth that the french-owned Lafarge Corporation, disguised as a cement mill, could become one of the largest hazardous waste incinerators in North America, and there is no doubt among the majority of Alpena's residents...that's precisely why they invested in the plant.
This is more than mere speculation. As citizen concern in Alpena mounted against the waste-burning after 1991, when the EPA "pretended" to want to regulate Boilers and Industrial Furnaces (cement kilns) more stringently, file searches by the local grassroots opposition, the Huron Environmental Activist League (HEAL), revealed that the Lafarge Corporation had in fact "owned" National Gypsum back in 1985 through a "leveraged buyout".
From within, Lafarge, wearing National Gypsum hats, coerced the Union to sanction the waste-burning to "save" their jobs, and then, when the waste-burning was installed, orchestrated the "failure" and ultimate demise of National Gypsum and the people who served her. Not an isolated instance, in the last two years of Ronald Reagan's first term in office, 1.3 million industrial workers lost their jobs. Some 16,200 businesses closed, with 60 percent of those in manufacturing.
Through dedication and hard work, HEAL has stopped the expansion of the waste-burning to the remaining kilns, but in 23 other small, isolated communities in the U.S., "friendly" old cement companies are burning up to 70% of the country's burnable off-site waste and doing it with minimal state and federal regulation and oversight. Most of these companies are foreign-owned.
Today Lafarge and hazardous-waste burning is on the throne in Alpena, reaping royal and grandiose benefits. Lafarge enjoys the lion's share of Alpena County's tax abatements, a $26 million state tax exemption, and millions of dollars in waste disposal revenues, all this, plus vast profits from cement production.
But, they are the sole beneficiaries. Lafarge's litany of violations of state and federal environmental laws have crippled and "stigmatized" the region's economy. Investment in tourism and retirement is slow coming to hazardous-waste disposal communities.
The men and women who lost their jobs and had lives interrupted have picked up and gone on. An honest, sturdy and patient people, they've seen kings rise and fall. They are more aware than most that a king can't persevere without loyalty. They understand that "king" Lafarge, a despotic aristocrat and vile deceiver, didn't earn the throne but filched it in the dead of night.
Quietly, inexorably, in the country sides and on the city streets, the opposition to waste burning in Alpena is growing, and those who Lafarge "had by the balls" are finally coming together. The guillotine is being primed, and the sweet smell of revolution fills the crisp, unpredictable winds churned from the troubled waters of Thunder Bay.