Wayne Alderson: the transformative power of respect

by | Oct 13, 2020 | Leadership | 0 comments

The battle in the workplace was fought by men and women who desperately wanted to be treated with value. This was key to settling the strike, and became a key to everything I have done since. I am not an arbitrator, a mediator, or a negotiator. I am a peacemaker.

Wayne Alderson

October, 1972 – Glassport, Pennsylvania. Tensions are high in this town nestled in the Monongahela Valley just outside of Pittsburgh, as the employees of the Pittron iron foundry that covers 7 blocks of real estate on the edge of town begin an 84 day strike for better working conditions. Years of disrespect by management and racial animosity in a hot, dirty, backbreaking environment had finally boiled over, leaving the workers with no option but to sacrifice months of wages just before the holidays.

When they came back to work in January, they would see a shocking change in the way management treated them. Pittron’s parent company Textron had fired many of the old managers, and promoted a member of the accounting staff to VP in charge of operations. This quiet man, a fellow named Wayne Alderson, would become famous for orchestrating a turnaround at the plant soon to be called “The Miracle of Pittron”, and went on to help find resolutions to the vicious battles between labor and management in the steel mills and coal fields of the rapidly declining Rust Belt.

Alderson first showed the blend of almost reckless courage and duty to others that would characterize his life as an 18 year old point man fighting in WW2. In fact, on March 15, 1945 at 1:35am, Pfc. Wayne T. Alderson, B Company, 7th Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division was the first American soldier to cross the Seigfried Line into Germany on the final push to Berlin. Less than 72 hours later, close range combat in German trenches would end his career as a warrior and the life of his closest friend.

A German grenade so severely wounded him that he would ultimately require 5 surgeries, and would be marked for life by a deep divot in his forehead just above his left eye from the shrapnel.

He returned home to Western Pennsylvania scarred mentally as well as physically by the horrors he had seen. He married, spent 5 years in night school studying accounting and business management, and settled into a middle class life far from the grinding poverty of his childhood as the son of a coal miner and the brutality of the battlefield. in 1965 he accepted a position at Pittron, and seven years later destiny came calling.

While his role at Pittron did not include negotiating with the union to end the strike, he took the risk of having some private meetings with union representatives, who recognized his concern for the welfare of the workers and saw in him a man they could trust. A man who remembered overhearing his father asking his mother “why don’t they [coal company management] value us as much as they value the mules?” And a man who when he saw men on the picket line in December, thought instantly of families with no food or presents at Christmastime. That was the man Wayne Alderson was.

His primary counterpart on the labor side at Pittron was Sam Piccolo, like Alderson a driven man and born leader, who had worked as a truck driver before getting work as a crane operator at Pittron despite having no prior experience. Just as Alderson climbed the corporate ladder, Piccolo rose in the ranks of the United Steel Workers, and would serve 3 consecutive terms as President of Local 1306. While they worked at the same plant, before the strike they kept a wary distance, Alderson in his office and Piccolo in the cab of his crane, befitting the cold war dynamic between their respective teams.

They met face to face in January 1973 in an unauthorized (for Alderson) meeting in a Holiday Inn. One of Piccolo’s associates drunkenly pulled a knife on Alderson, but when the former infantryman barked “Either cut my throat or shut up and sit down before I cut yours, you yellow-bellied bastard!”, the shocked silence that followed was broken by Piccolo agreeing to make a deal. Within days, the strike was over.

Piccolo would say Alderson was either the dumbest man he’d ever met, or the bravest.

Alderson certainly wasn’t afraid to make bold commitments and back them up. When he first presented his five year plan for Pittron to G. William Miller, chairman of the board at Textron, Miller was concerned that Pittron couldn’t hit the goals lined out. Alderson bluntly told Miller that if the plan didn’t work, Miller should fire him. Miller was startled, but agreed that Alderson’s offer was fair.

Alderson went to work on his plan, named Operation Turnaround. Both labor and management watched warily to see if the boldly named plan had real substance. He believed that as the ones with authority, management bore the responsibility of taking the first steps to turn around the downward spiral, throwing away any mental scorecards about past wrongs.

He became known for his genuine gestures of goodwill. He walked around the foundry floor, tried his hand at “chipping” the excess metal off a casting with a jackhammer, waited by the gate to greet workers as they finished their shifts, and had his hard hat, which would have traditionally been white to designate his managerial status, painted black like the laborers. As the oil crisis struck in 1974, he opened up the company’s gas reserve to employees on the honor system to fuel their cars.

But the step he took that drew the most attention was one he hadn’t planned for. A devout Christian himself, he occasionally bantered back and forth with Sam Piccolo, who was not a man of faith. One day, Piccolo and a few others challenged him to read the Bible with them right on the shop floor. That impromptu Bible study of Romans 12 grew into a regular lunch hour chapel meeting in a basement storage room, under the open hearth furnace.

Both regular church attendees and those who hadn’t set foot in a church in years found themselves attending the chapel in the basement. Racial and ethnic hatreds that had dominated Pittron for years melted away in the sense of unity that the chapel services inspired. Pittron employees were shocked to realize that Wayne Alderson was a man who cared about their entire wellbeing, not just what they could provide to the company. The influence of the chapel even led to workers rebuilding their marriages and breaking free of alcoholism.

When Alderson took over, Pittron had lost $6 million over the prior 3 years. In less than 2 years, the improvements he made resulted in Pittron posting a profit of that amount, a remarkable turnaround. After 21 months of success, Textron saw the opportunity to liquidate what had been a unprofitable division while it was valuable, and sold Pittron to Bucyrus-Erie. B-E told Alderson that he needed to make two changes to keep his job. One was to stop socializing with the laborers and return to the old way of management segregating themselves. The second was to stop the chapel services. Alderson chose to be fired rather than compromise. Sadly, with his influence gone and replaced by a more conventional and adversarial management team, Pittron would collapse within a few years.

The news coverage of the Pittron turnaround had made him something of a regional celebrity, an unusual amalgamation of Lee Iacocca and Billy Graham. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, he helped negotiate other labor vs. management disputes and spread the word about his management approach, which he called Value of the Person. In 1978, after he traveled to West Virginia in the January cold to mediate a coal strike, a photo of him praying with United Mine Workers president Arnold Miller hit newspapers around the country.

Alderson would even be under consideration to serve as Secretary of Labor at one point. In his own words, that didn’t happen because: “I had a different idea of what a secretary of labor should do than what the administration did. My belief was that they should be with their people, inspiring them to be the best... The administration wanted a bureaucrat sitting in Washington, D.C. There was no match between their vision of the job and mine.” (emphasis mine)

Until his death in 2013, he ran Value of the Person Consultants, teaching businesses around the country the principles he had tested and proved at Pittron. He once turned down a consulting contract because the business management wanted to hire him without first getting the input of the employees. Alderson recognized that walking in as a hired gun of management would doom to failure any efforts he made to connect with the employees.

He preached a philosophy of ‘Theory R Management’ (As contrasted with Theory X: management by authority, and Theory Y: participative management). The 5 “R”s of Theory R are: Do what is right. Build relationships. Choose reconciliation. Take responsibility. And the product is outstanding results.

All this was informed by his Christian faith. His favorite Bible verse, which he would inscribe along his signature at book signings, was 2 Corinthians 5:18. “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

As an example of his thinking, consider this quote: “We put in rules to protect ourselves from 10 percent of the people who might take advantage of us, and alienate 90 percent of the people in the process. We need to change the thinking. Manage the 10 percent, and lead the 90 percent who want to do what is right.” That openness and willingness to take a risk of being harmed by the 10% in order to help the 90% was exactly what Pittron needed.

That the accomplishments of Alderson and his sparring partners like Sam Piccolo are scarcely remembered today is a shame. In a world where battle lines were drawn and solidified, they had the courage to take the first step to end the brutal standoff that was leading inexorably to the bankruptcy of Pittron and the demolition of hundreds of livelihoods, and the moral authority with those around them to get the support and commitment they needed from every other stakeholder.

That world is still our world, and we need people who will follow their example.

Sources: