Labor Pains

Ask any trade show manager and they’ll tell you it’s best to make friends with the union guys. So when a trucking strike and a rebel booth designer put my program at odds with them, I needed to act fast to solve my problems before my exhibit suffered some serious labor pains.

Just a few months into my job as marketing director for Kisters Kayat Inc., I began planning the first big show with my new company, which happened to be the 2001 Pack Expo in Chicago. We had an 80-by-50-foot exhibit primarily comprising a central structure surrounded by our packaging machinery, which would be chugging along for attendees during the show.

My troubles began when the company’s home office in Germany decided to make some booth-related decisions for me. Among them, the higher-ups decided to ship some packaging machinery from Germany up the Great Lakes Waterway to a port in Canada rather than the port in Chicago. Since unloading cargo was more expensive in Chicago than in the Canadian port, they opted to offload north of the border and then truck our shipment to the Windy City.

The only problem: There was a trucking strike in Canada that took effect after the machinery was en route to the Canadian port. So about a week before the show, I had to scramble and reroute my machinery via rail from the Canadian port to Chicago. Despite my stress, I soon found out that striking Canadian truck drivers were a minor inconvenience compared to what came next.

To ensure the booth in Chicago kept the same look and feel of those the company used in Europe earlier that year, the home office decided to use the same Dutch designer, a man named Jos, to create our Pack Expo booth. Knowing that European exhibit halls typically don’t have union labor, I made sure our Dutch designer understood Chicago’s unique exhibit-building rules. I sent him copies of relevant show-manual materials, along with a note outlining booth installation dos and don’ts, the biggest being: Use union labor or join the union yourself.

As the show approached, I sent a few more messages asking if he had any questions about the union regulations. I also asked what type of booth system he’d be bringing so I could start ordering the labor, but I got no response. Hoping my Dutch artiste was merely incommunicative, I waited anxiously and hoped that the labor I ordered would suffice for whatever he planned to bring.

When my designer arrived in Chicago, I was shocked to see Jos had ignored all my paperwork and planned to thumb his nose at the union rules, all in the name of creating his own exhibit masterpiece. Rather than some ready-to-assemble system, he brought a crate full of wood, nails, and paint. Jos planned to build the booth from scratch on site. Worse, he and a couple of his colleagues planned to do all the labor themselves — without union help.

As my Dutch designer told me his plan, I wanted to faint. His Euro-inspired exhibit-building process not only broke union rules, it was likely to land him in cement shoes at the bottom of Lake Michigan. With an international labor nightmare flaring up in my exhibit, I needed to find a way to snuff out this major cultural rift.

As Jos began removing materials from his crate, handling tools, and breaking myriad other union rules, my first order of business was to get him to put down the saws and hammers before anyone got hurt … by the union guys, who for now were taking the high road and merely threatening to shut us down. I somehow mastered that task, but my next job was even harder.

It seemed Jos fancied himself quite the Dutch Master, and the thought of having his artwork assembled by anyone but him and his crew was an insult to his creative vision. But as I told Jos, he’d been informed of the rules before he’d arrived in Chicago, so there was no room for him to complain.

While Jos agreed to my demands, he didn’t like it. And as the union labor moved in to follow Jos’ orders, he followed them around complaining constantly about their workmanship.

With the union guys looking mutinous, I tried to calm their anger. For four days I brought them coffee, bought them lunch, and followed behind Jos telling the workers what a great job they were doing.

Unfortunately, my damage control hit a speed bump when Jos decided to try his hand at installing electrical wiring. Naturally, the installation was in full view of the union electricians, who decided they were tired of our union-busting ways and simply shut off our electricity. No power meant no lights, no power tools, and no way to run our packaging machines that, coincidentally, we’d been trying to synchronize together at that moment.

I was nearly at my breaking point, so I sent one of my colleagues to talk to the electricians. He explained that we would follow union rules to the tee and hire plenty of electricians, and surprisingly, the union gave in. In fact, the power wasn’t off for much more than one nerve-wracking hour.

As Jos and the union guys settled back into their routine, I had hopes that my labor troubles were done. But my hopes were dashed when I discovered that one machine from Germany that I’d re-routed from Canada was stuck at the Chicago rail yard. A quick call to my freight company in Chicago revealed that it had overlooked my fax requesting the pickup and delivery.

It was the final straw. After I fired my freight company on the spot, I stormed down to the loading docks, walked up to the first truck driver I found, and asked if he could pick up my machinery. He happily agreed, took the information for my missing crate, drove down to the rail yard, and brought the packing machine to my exhibit space within a few hours.

Of course, with so many booths already built, the drayage folks at McCormick had to perform a minor miracle to move our big crate to our booth without damaging our neighbors’ exhibits. But our union guys quickly unpacked and positioned it before the day was done.

By the time the booth was finished, I had tipped (a practice that has since gone out of favor in Chicago) the union guys about $500. But it was money well spent, as the rest of the show went off without a hitch. The moral of this story? Keep your Dutch designers close, and your union workers even closer. Because when something goes wrong, they’re the ones who will help you survive your own series of labor pains.

— Samantha Bishop, director of marketing, Exhibit Source Inc., South Holland, IL