By Ryan C. Christiansen
Harv Hegvick never expected it to end this way. After 13,088 days as an employee for American Crystal Sugar Company, Hegvick stood by on Aug. 1, 2011, as replacement workers walked into the plant in Moorhead, Minn., to do the work that he and others had been doing day in and day out for decades. On that day, approximately 1,300 union workers, members of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, were locked out of American Crystal Sugar facilities in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa. The workers’ contract had expired after they overwhelmingly rejected what became Crystal Sugar’s final offer during labor negotiations.
That Crystal Sugar would completely sever ties with the union that day came as a surprise to Hegvick. Labor negotiations typically don’t end this way. “I expected by the last day or two of the negotiations that things would break loose,” he said, “and that somebody would come up with a plan. That was what I expected. I felt that they would get together in a month or so and hash things out.”
But that never happened, and it left Hegvick bewildered about the past and what it all meant. “Over the last several years, I thought that we had a really good working relationship between the management and the union,” he said. “There hadn’t been any major difficulties. It was a decent place to work, we didn’t have any major issues, and we all, for the most part, tried to do a good job. We tried to make sure it kept going and tried to produce a quality product for Crystal and its customers.”
It’s no wonder Hegvick is a little dazed. In an age when changing jobs and careers every few years is the norm, Hegvick is the exception. A boiler house foreman since 1983, Hegvick said he started working for Crystal Sugar on Oct. 1, 1975, as a cleaner in the boiler house. He worked his way up to the position of fireman in 1978 and then to foreman five years later. “I worked steady,” he said, and in 35 years and 10 months had never been laid off. As the senior operator in the boiler house, he’d been planning on training last fall to become the chief boiler house engineer when the former chief would retire earlier this spring. The new position “wouldn’t have made much of a difference” financially, he said, but it would have meant a more regular work schedule for Hegvick, who’d been working rotating shifts his entire career. “That was the plan,” Hegvick said. “The plan changed.”
The former chief retired early in September after the lockout, and now Hegvick is collecting unemployment. He only just started working part-time at RCC Western Store in the West Acres Mall in Fargo, N.D. “I’m still getting unemployment,” he said, “but it’s not going to last forever.”
But working in a western-style clothing store has nothing to do with working in a boiler house at a sugar plant. The skills he learned while at Crystal Sugar aren’t exactly transferrable. “Most of the people you talk to in the [Rural Minnesota Concentrated Employment Program (CEP)] or in the unemployment office cannot understand that people have been as long with one corporation as we have,” Hegvick said. “They can’t even fathom that we’ve spent 30, 35, or 40 years working for one company. The other thing that they don’t understand,” he said, “and that most people will not understand, is that the jobs we’ve done, they are either industry- or factory-specific. It’s not like you can go downtown and find a job doing what you were doing. I do believe that we need organized labor for jobs like that, but not everything is black and white.”
Hegvick sympathizes with the middle managers at Crystal Sugar, too. After working alongside them for 35 years, he can imagine what might have been going on inside their heads when replacement workers took over. “You would almost think that they would think, ‘Is this going to work?’” Hegvick asks. “’Are we going to be able to get done what we have to do with all of these new employees that have no idea what’s going on in this factory?’ All of these employees that were here up until then, most of them have been here forever, and most of them know their jobs, and if the managers had been there any length of time, they had worked right alongside us for most of their working lives and most of our working lives. I have to think that they wondered, ‘How is this going to affect our production? How is this going to affect our factory? Are we going to come to work and the place is just going to be a disaster? Is it going to be one mess after another?’ I’m thinking that they would have had to think that way, because if I would have been there, I would have certainly wondered that myself.”
Despite his exasperation over the situation, Hegvick said he’s amiable with everyone involved. “If I see [a Crystal Sugar manager] at a restaurant or whatever, I will not avoid them,” he said. “I will go talk to them, I will shake hands with them, and I will ask how things are going. I don’t hold any personal grudges against any of them individually. I just talked to one fellow the other day and it was okay. It was no problem whatsoever. We just talked about stuff, including Crystal Sugar. We didn’t have any issues.”
Hegvick said what he misses the most about working at Crystal Sugar is the people. “We were involved with each other a lot because we spent a lot of time together,” he said. He still remains in contact with a lot of people by phone, because “I care about them,” he said, “and I talk to them on occasion. I call them up to see what they’re doing or whatever, and I just hope that none of them get depressed, and I hope that none of them lose hope. They’ve got to have a positive attitude. They’ve got to keep looking ahead and looking up. They can’t let themselves get dragged down. That includes me, too. If you’ve got a network of people to talk to, then hopefully something will come out of it some way or another.” The hardest part about not having a job, he said, “is when you don’t have a real purpose every day.”
One of the ways Hegvick keeps his spirits up is through square dancing with the L&M Squares of the F-M Square Dancers Association. He has also been a horse show announcer for many years, working the microphone at the fairgrounds in West Fargo, N.D., at high school rodeos, and a few times in Valley City, N.D. He’s also been involved in horsemanship with the F-M Mounted Posse and the North Dakota Appaloosa Horse Club, and he’s a trustee for the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. For the most part, these activities don’t pay anything, he said, “But it’s something to do. I get out and I talk to people. That’s one of the things I do, whether they’re Crystal Sugar employees or not. I don’t have much of a problem talking to people.”
Being laid off has had a significant financial impact on Hegvick, however. Under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA), he is eligible to retain his health insurance for up to 18 months, but he has to pay his own premiums, which eats up a great, big chunk of his unemployment checks. “I’ve really had to watch my finances and spending,” he said, “which isn’t all bad,” he offers, “but I haven’t been able to go as many places. A couple of times I would have liked to have traveled to Bismarck or to do some different things, but I just couldn’t afford them.” Fortunately, Hegvick said, he lives alone. “I don’t have anybody depending on me at all,” he said. “It’s just me.” He pays rent, but he doesn’t have a vehicle payment, he said, “and so I’m okay, but there are a lot of other ones who are far worse off than I am. If they’ve got younger children or if they’ve got a spouse that doesn’t work, and if they have to pay for health insurance, that’s just about gonna kill ‘em.” Hegvick said because he never expected his employment to end this way, he never kept a nest egg. He never felt the urgency. “People should realize that just because you’ve got a job that you’ve had for over half your life, it may not always be there,” he said. “There is always going to be the chance that you’re going to be walking the street, or that the business might close down, or that the business might make drastic changes. Don’t let yourself get tied down to one particular lifestyle or one way of doing something,” because, “it’s quite a shock to the system,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to have to go and look for a job at age 58. I’m too old to start a new career, but I’m too young to retire.”
So far, the lockout has lasted over nine months, and “a lot of people have moved on, a lot of people are looking for other jobs, and a lot of people have retired,” Hegvick said, “but everybody has to make their own decision about what’s best for them. I really did not expect it to last this long,” he said, but he still holds out hope. “I hope, for the most part, that this can be resolved for the betterment of everybody concerned.”