Let’s talk about the good ole days.

Let’s talk about the good ole days.   The days when pensions, a year's worth of short term disability, crab legs and stellar wages made Kuparuk a great place to work.  Many of you won’t remember those times but some of us do!  You got a cool trinket when we hit major milestones like 1 billion barrels of total production or the 30 year anniversary of the field.  The field managers used to sit down and have dinner with regular operators and tell hunting stories, you even got a nice pipeline map when you retired.  Was everything perfect?  No of course not, but you know what NEVER got messed with?  Our wages and our benefits.  

Well the good ole days are gone.  We have bosses for Canada and Texas that don’t share our values, don’t value us and want to replace us with the cheapest labor they can possibly find- qualified or not.  

Why do I bring up the good ole days? Because management is going to start spreading lies that ‘liberal union extremists’ have taken over Kuparuk and are ruining the place.  We know that’s bullshit because we’re here- but the lies they’re spreading aren’t for us:  As this fight heats up management is going to work on a “Plan B”-  This will most likely include finding a way to use scabs to keep the fields afloat if things get really ugly.  They’ll reach out to former DSM’s that have taken jobs with Santos and Hilcorp as scab DSO’s and they’ll tap retirees to limp the plants along. 

So this is where you come in:  Reach out to your former leads and mentors and talk to them.  Explain how bad (and how quickly!) things have become.  Assure them that we ARE NOT some radical pro-union nutcases that infiltrated the field- we are the guys that our former leads hired, trained, scolded and mentored.  We are the guys that they were proud of when we worked the board alone for the first time or made it through our first seawater leak without 32 phone calls to them.  

Call them and explain how we got here, why we’ve been forced into this corner.  Tell them what they’ve done to our leads, and our staffing levels.  Explain how our new guys will never make “big oil” money.  Tell them how they’ve added more bosses and fewer workers.

Ask them what they would do if they were in our positions.  Ask them if they would really side with a bunch of foreign managers over the very guys they taught how to bring on wells or EIP turbines. 

Ask them “What would be the reason you’d scab?” 

 Is it for the money? If ARCO/Phillips pensions wasn’t enough for them then there’s no way the 25% paycut and no pension is ever going to be enough for our new guys. Is that the legacy they want to leave?...The last generation of well paid workers? 

Is it to “fight the radical union liberals” that took over the field?  Those don’t exist- we’re not pro-union, we’re just Pro-Not-Getting-Fucked, they don’t need to don their old hardhats to fight what doesn’t exist.  

If it’s to re-live “the good ole days” then they might as well sit this one out.  Those good ole days got RIF’d. This new management didn’t care how much experience they kicked out the door, they just wanted a quiet, cheap, compliant workforce; the good ole days were never about that-  we were paid well and our concerns were listened to, people were encouraged to speak up about things that weren’t right.  The good ole days took a package and walked, there’s nothing left on the slope but a wage-race to the bottom and a contract workforce. 

Call all your former Kuparuk and Alpine friends and give them the facts, don’t let them end up on the wrong side of this mess.  Our managers don’t care what relationships they destroy or what legacies they ruin because they weren’t here when we were building them, but we were and so were our retirees.  Let’s protect those relationships and legacies and find a way to keep the good ole days alive.