Striking Cummins Machinist takes his own life April 28

"...I can't take what Cummins has done to me anymore."

Those words on the second page of a last will and testament of Machinist Sam Randall are haunting the labor community after the 28-year employee of Cummins Northwest Inc. committed suicide April 28 - the 102nd day of a strike by Portland Machinists Lodge 1005.

"We've had members divorce and lose a car or house during a long labor dispute, but we've never experienced anything like this," said Dave Plant, directing business representative of Machinists (IAM) District Lodge 24.

Randall, 56, was a mainstay on the picket line at Swan Island, putting in 12-hour shifts four days a week. He was one of 26 parts department employees who struck Jan. 18 seeking wage and pension benefit increases similar to those IAM members in the service department received in 1997.

"This was absolutely over the strike," said Jackie Randall, his wife of 15 years. "He liked working at Cummins. He didn't want to go anywhere else. He was very upset that the company was trying to break the union."

Soon after the walkout Cummins managers told union members that they were being permanently replaced. In fact, in the ensuing round of negotiations after the strike began the company said that strikers would be hired back "as needed," that all seniority was lost and that union security was off the table.

"Those guys were asking for a lousy 3 percent raise; it wasn't like it was anything out of line," Jackie Randall said.

Stepson John Colombo, 34, said Randall, who was the most senior employee at Cummins, was depressed about the strike and that the family was feeling the pinch of his lost income. "They were living paycheck to paycheck," Colombo said.

On Wednesday, April 28, Sam met his wife at home for lunch. Soon after she returned to her job he went to the back porch of the family's home and dialed 9-1-1.

"He told the operator he was going to kill himself," Colombo said. "He put down the phone and shot himself."

Randall grew up on a Chippewa Indian reservation in Wisconsin and quit school after the seventh grade. He first worked at Cummins in his home state, married and had three children. After that marriage ended he got a job at the Cummins Medford branch. A few years later he moved to Portland to work at the parts distribution center.

"This is a horrific example of a system gone wrong in a society that has lost its way," said R. Thomas Buffenbarger, international president of the IAM. "When are we going to realize the fact - and respect the fact - that workers have a very critical physical and emotional stake in the companies that provide them with their livelihood? There is something wrong with a system that allows intimidation, indeed emotional terrorism, of the type that made Sam Randall take his life."