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Union-Busting Boss Loses His Perks

As a concession to employees, Bill Crumbaker, the union-busting CEO of Seattle's Daniel Smith art supply company, has lost his executive parking space and reportedly his company-supplied cellular phone.

Crumbaker and his management staff, with the help of a California union-busting consultant, succeeded in preventing the company's 70 employees from creating a unit of the International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union Local 9. (see "The Art of Union Busting" Free Press, Sept., 1993).
However, the unionizing effort, though failed, drew attention to management excesses, leading Crumbaker to lose some of his perks. For some reason, Crumbaker's vanity license plates, which used to say "RTSPLYZ," now have regular-issue numbers.
At press time, Daniel Smith management continued to hold meetings to discuss changes in the way the company is run. To date, however, the only changes have been symbolic.
Mercer Island personnel consultant Susan Ogden has been brought back to continue her "team-building efforts." At least 10 employees have either quit or given notice since the Labor Day weekend vote, which was 52-18 against unionizing.
Daniel Smith is a national art-supply company with a retail store and a warehouse operation in south Seattle. Union supporters said boosting chronically low wages paid to art-supply workers was one of their missions.

Eastern Washington Incinerator
Plans Crash and Burn

A new hurdle facing a hazardous-waste incinerator proposed for Eastern Washington has environmental advocates celebrating what they hope is the dawn of a new era of environmental protection and waste management.

On Sept. 30, Gov. Mike Lowry and state Ecology Director Mary Riveland dealt what may be a fatal blow to plans by Rabanco and the Swiss Von Roll Corp. to build a 50,000-ton-a-year incinerator in Grant County.
"Governor Lowry has stopped what would have been the greatest deterrent to pollution prevention this state has ever known," said Carol Dansereau of the Washington Toxics Coalition, a leading opponent of the project. "The citizens of Eastern Washington never gave in. They have fought this misguided proposal with passion and sophistication. Citizens and common sense have prevailed."
While technically not dead, the project may not be able to recover from Riveland's decision to stop reviewing Von Roll/Rabanco's application for the incinerator. She cited EPA Director Carol Browner's decision in May to put a moratorium on hazardous waste burners until the government can determine if current technology is safe.
The incinerator project may have bitten the dust last spring had it not been for a flip-flop by the Boeing Co., which unexpectedly pulled its support for legislation intended to make the construction of new hazardous-waste burners more difficult.


-Free Press staff



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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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