The Mellons

Making people miserable with aluminum

PART 5

By Stephen Millies

In 2007 Alcoa’s top boss, Alain Belda, got $25,646,420– nearly a half-million dollars a week. That year the aluminum giant racked up $2.8 billion in profits.

In 2005 workers at Alcoa’s plants in Honduras were making between 68 to 87 cents per hour, according to the International Metalworkers Federation. Alcoa fired all its workers in Honduras when the automotive market plunged in 2008.

In 2001 base pay for the 15,600 Alcoa workers assembling automotive electrical systems in Mexico was $1.20 per hour. Alcoa provoked a work action in Mexico and fired 236 workers. It even sued nine union leaders for $1 million.

This fantastic exploitation of human beings is called imperialism. It’s why people are coming to Pittsburgh in late September to protest the G-20 summit, a gathering of treasury officials and bankers from 20 countries who are plotting how to protect their profits. A National March for Jobs will be held on Sept. 20, which will be followed by a Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed.

A 50-year monopoly

Alcoa was founded by the super-rich Mellon family as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1888. Pittsburgh Reduction became the Aluminum Company of America in 1907 and then Alcoa in 1999.

Pittsburgh is also the home of the United Steelworkers union, which represents more than 15,000 Alcoa workers in the U.S. and Canada. The Steelworkers union has endorsed the Sept. 20 Jobs March in Pittsburgh, initiated by the Bail Out the People Movement.

Over the ages, people have learned to use copper, tin, iron and dozens of other metals. It took the Mellons to enforce a 50-year monopoly on aluminum in the United States. They controlled the patents of Charles Hall, who found out how to get alumina from bauxite—aluminum ore—at the same time French inventor Paul Heroult did.

The Cowles brothers, owners of the Electric Smelting & Aluminum Company in Lockport, N.Y., contested Hall’s patent. The brothers claimed that Hall got his ideas from their similar efforts.

But they lost a court battle when federal Judge William Howard Taft ruled for the Pittsburgh Reduction Company and its patents in 1894. Author Harvey O’Connor estimates that Taft’s decision was worth $100 million to the Mellons.

It was a smart decision for Taft, who became a U.S. president and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Taft also served as U.S. Governor-General of the Philippines when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were massacred.

The Mellons responded to Taft’s decree by jacking up the price of aluminum. After their patents expired, the Mellons used high tariffs to maintain their aluminum monopoly inside the United States. It didn’t hurt that Andrew Mellon was treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932. They also grabbed every bauxite mine.

Prices were kept so high that even Henry Ford complained that he couldn’t afford to use aluminum in his cars. Despite an antitrust suit filed in 1937, Alcoa still controlled 100 percent of all aluminum smelting in the United States as World War II began. They even made half of the country’s aluminum kitchen utensils.

“If America loses this war,” said Interior Secretary Harold Ickes on June 26, 1941, “it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America.”

The emerging military-industrial complex was forced to break Alcoa’s total monopoly just to get enough aluminum to build planes. A federal court in 1950 carved up production capacity, with Alcoa getting 51 percent, Reynolds 31 percent and Kaiser 18 percent.

Worldwide plunder & strikebreaking in the U.S.

Alcoa also spread misery around the world. Pollutants from the company’s plants in Massena, N.Y., and other industries on the St. Lawrence River have poisoned fish caught downstream by the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne.

Alcoa came to Suriname, then a Dutch colony, in 1916. During World War II, 75 percent of U.S. bauxite imports came from Suriname. In 1963 Alcoa flooded 600 square miles of Surinamese land when the Afobaka Dam was built. Six thousand Maroons, descendants of escaped

enslaved Africans, were driven out; each was given $3 in compensation.

Alcoa imposed draconian trade policies on other countries as well. Jamaica got only 12 cents per ton for its bauxite. When Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley imposed a 7.5 percent levy on the selling price of alumina in 1972, Jamaica’s bauxite revenues increased nine-fold in seven years.

Alcoa retaliated, and Jamaica’s percentage of world bauxite production fell from 27 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 1975. Production was shifted to Guinea and Australia.

In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister and then president of the country, planned to industrialize Ghana by harnessing the Volta River. The plan was thwarted by Alcoa. And in 1966 the company’s friends at the CIA overthrew Nkrumah.

Alcoa was also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the 1965 coup in Indonesia, in which a million people were killed.

The company also brutalized U.S. workers. The New York National Guard broke a 1915 strike at Alcoa’s Massena works and bayoneted strike leader Joseph Solunski to death. In appreciation, Alcoa plant manager Charles Moritz tried to give each guardsman a set of aluminum cooking utensils.

In 1917 an Alcoa subsidiary sparked the race riots in East St. Louis, Ill., in which at least 125 African Americans were murdered.

Workers at Alcoa, Tennessee went on strike in 1934 and 1937, where two strikers were killed. This company town had a segregated neighborhood for Black people.

Only in 1941 were many of Alcoa’s plants organized. The Steelworkers won recognition at the Cressona, Penn., plant in October 2008.

Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor; “Alcoa’s High Tech Sweatshop in Mexico” by Charles Kernaghan, published by the National Labor Committee.

Next: Mellon’s million-dollar lie machine.

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Part 1: Mellons over Pittsburgh and the planet

Part 2: Coal mines and machine guns

Part 3: Keeping Pittsburgh poor

Part 4: Blood, oil and profits

Part 5: Making people miserable with aluminum

Part 6: Tax-free hate & paintings

Part 7: Deindustrializing Pittsburgh

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