Born and raised in Beaumont, Darrell Kyle first started working for ExxonMobil in the 1990s at the blending and packaging plant, which produces Mobil 1 motor oil. It’s part of the company’s sprawling refinery complex that sits on the banks of the Neches River next to Beaumont’s historic Black neighborhood Charlton Pollard. He became an active member of a labor union—Local 13-243—that’s represented refinery workers there since World War II. It’s now a part of the United Steelworkers (USW), an amalgamated industrial union that represents more than 30,000 refinery and petrochemical workers in the United States. The 55-year-old worked his way up through the ranks from shop steward to top leadership, getting elected president in 2015.
With a gravelly drawl and a healthy dose of colorful fourletter words, the union leader makes no secret of how he feels about his employer, one of the world’s most powerful and profitable oil corporations. “Exxon is a company that believes wholeheartedly, it’s my way or the highway: ‘You don’t tell us what to do and you can go take a flying shit,’” Kyle told the Observer in an interview at the union hall last November, seven months into Exxon’s unprecedented lockout of roughly 650 union workers.
A veteran of several contract fights, Kyle has witnessed various ways—some obvious, some subtle—that ExxonMobil has fought to undermine the union’s power. But as he and other union leaders began contract negotiations in January 2021, Kyle could tell that the corporation was taking a harder line. From the first time they met, he said, it was clear that management was gunning for major concessions. Exxon was proposing a contract that would freeze wages for a number of workers and eliminate certain job classifications and seniority rights that the USW had scratched and clawed to secure and protect for decades. “We knew right then and there this [contract] was gonna be a shit pile,” Kyle said.
The union responded with its own counterproposal, which was swiftly rejected by Exxon, declaring it had already made its “last, best, and final offer.” With negotiations stalled, the union then issued notices that it could call for a strike if a deal wasn’t reached before the contract expired on May 1. This time, though, Exxon responded by saying it would lock out
