Among highly anticipated traditions of the holidays, the employees at Simpson Lee Paper Mill looked forward to their annual gift from management: a Christmas turkey or ham – both if each spouse worked at the mill. As such, it was an unthinkable breach of etiquette when the long-honored custom was summarily waved off in 1969. New management “said they don’t do turkeys at any of their other 13 mills, and they’re not doing it in Vicksburg,” recalled Larry Johnson, former Mill quality control supervisor.
This happened during an awkward shift when a founding family that owned Lee had finally all retired and, according to Johnson, “the people from Simpson, they were all out of San Francisco,” took over. Former mill sales manager Jack Page admitted, “The salaried people also felt gypped. We were looking forward to our turkey, too. It was a little extra touch and folks looked forward to it.”
Disgruntled employees posted NO TURKEY, NO WORKY signs and big drama ensued at Vicksburg’s otherwise congenial mill, leading to an unprecedented move: The union filed its first-ever lawsuit against management. “While labor dispute histories are never truly ‘dry’… I expected the records I would find in the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) database to be mostly full of bureaucratic discussion of wage tables and possible code violations,” explained Annelies Kamen, newly ensconced Prairie Ronde Artist-in-Residence from Germany.
Kamen was doing research into the history of Vicksburg’s mill “to explore how this (formidable) space had been related to the people and the community of Vicksburg. I didn’t expect the only Simpson-Lee related record in the archive to be devoted to the discussion of missing turkeys!”
Learning about Vicksburg mill employees “fighting for the holiday birds they had come to expect from their employer” gave Kamen a feel for the people of this village. “Turkeys were given every year by Lee and then Simpson-Lee to all employees, salaried and union, from 1951 to 1968,” Kamen said. “These are the kind of stories I like to explore in my artistic practice, like a way into a labyrinth.”
While management won the lawsuit in the end, the real victory for employees was an immediate reinstatement of the turkey giveaway. Ironically, it was a gift that keeps on giving. “It wasn’t just their own turkeys the Simpson-Lee workers were fighting for in 1969,” Kamen noted. “While the NLRB did not find Simpson-Lee in violation of labor law in their ruling on the missing 1969 turkeys, the case did establish a precedent that is cited in several subsequent labor rulings.” Ever since this legal decision, “Any such bonus or ‘gift’ consistently bestowed for a considerable period of time is considered a component of wages or a term or condition of employment and therefore subject to the requirement to bargain with union workers before the employer may make changes,” has been the law of the land.
The NO TURKEY, NO WORKY precedent “was most recently referenced in a 2022 NLRB decision regarding hazardous work bonuses for essential healthcare workers during the COVID pandemic,” Kamen reported. “Citing Vicksburg, the NLRB ruled that workers are owed significant back pay after their bonuses were unilaterally revoked.”
It’s an unexpectedly juicy story that will inspire Kamen’s creativity over her artist residency that wraps up in early December. Check out the “gallery” link at prairieronde.org to see what she cooks up. Meanwhile, Larry Johnson, Jack Page, and the old gang from the mill will have some new material to digest over their monthly breakfast meet-up. Who could have anticipated the nationwide impact of this brief impasse? “Overall, management and employees at Vicksburg’s mill enjoyed good relations. There were little spats but in general it was good,” Larry Johnson affirmed. “There used to be big picnics. Everybody knew each other and were friends. I retired in 1990 and I still have a relationship with the people I worked with.”
