I played a pretty big role in a labor fight noted in Erik Loomis's entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued new book, A History of America in Ten Strikes. Back in the day, I was a “comprehensive campaign” guy—the newish strategic paradigm that was supposed to compensate for labor's loss of shop-floor power by investigating and pressuring a company's entire business operation. Loomis describes one such campaign: a lockout of 1,700 members of the United Steelworkers (USW) at the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation (RAC) in Ravenswood, West Virginia, between 1990 and 1992. Marc Rich controlled the RAC, and as the world's most powerful metals trader, he was nicknamed “Aluminumfinger,” a nod to the classic James Bond villain Auric Goldfinger. At the time, Rich was a top target of the FBI and Interpol and a fugitive from justice, having been indicted in 1983 for what was then the largest tax-evasion case in US history. (Bill Clinton later controversially pardoned him for his alleged crimes.) The workers were steeped in West Virginian solidarity, and the campaign that we organized spared no expense or effort in attacking Rich's international empire. The USW sent workers all over North America and Europe to harass Rich—from New York and Vancouver to London, Amsterdam, Paris, Bucharest, and Zug, Switzerland, where Rich lived, protected by the country's lenient money-laundering laws. The campaign disrupted Rich's business deals and got the US Mint to stop buying copper from a man who had flouted the American system of justice.
