Boycott takes toll on Crown oil

Special to the World

BALTIMORE, Md. - Several hundred disgruntled Crown Oil Co. workers took their case to the streets April 8, when they converged on six southern states to demonstrate at Crown gas stations. Crown stations in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland were targeted to remind consumers of the national boycott against Crown for its deplorable business practices.

The Baltimore-based Crown Central Petroleum Corp. continues to be buffeted by multimillion dollar losses, a national boycott, discrimination and environmental lawsuits, bitter locked-out workers, attempted hostile takeovers and now a shareholder class action lawsuit aimed at stopping Chairman Henry Rosenberg Jr. from buying out shareholders and taking the company private.

Crown stock, worth $36 a little more than 10 years ago, is now worth slightly over $7. Rosenberg and company want to buy out shareholders for about a dollar more than the current market value. Many of the shareholders, though, are long-time Crown workers locked out four years ago while negotiating a new contract at Crown's Pasadena, Texas refinery.

According to the Associated Press, Crown management had threatened to leave Baltimore, but then reversed itself. "Rosenberg said he was unhappy with a 1998 Baltimore City Council resolution that called on city residents to support a union that was locked out of Crown's Pasadena, Texas, refinery in 1996," the AP story said.

Crown received the largest air pollution fine in Texas history, over $1 million.

"It's very disturbing to live near this big refinery ... As a resident of Pasadena, Texas, I can tell you that their pollution has dangerously affected this community, my family and friends," complained Roslyn Norman, a member of the environmental group Texans United. "We have a host of medical problems, as a result of living here with the toxic fumes spewing all over this predominantly Black and Latino community,"

The work force at the Pasadena refinery was about 35 percent African American and Latino before the lock-out, the union reported. Today, it's "virtually all-white," one of the reasons why national Black organizations are boycotting Crown and the NAACP has condemned Crown's corporate irresponsibility.