Local 2869 mustered for a last stand, as best it could, but it had tragically few friends or resources. A desperate move to trade wage and work-rule concessions for job-protection guarantees was cold-shouldered by the company before being vetoed altogether by the international.1 As horrified members watched another two thousand pink slips being readied, the Local clutched at the final straw of an employee buyout, an ‘ESOP’. British Steel, long interested in finding a stable market on the West Coast for its unfabricated steel slabs, signaled that it was ready to consider a liaison with a restructured Fontana mill under ESOP ownership. Local 2869 retained the Kelson Group as advisors and sent representatives to Sacramento to lobby Governor Brown and the Democratic leadership.108 In the event, however, Kaiser’s intransigence about the ESOP frightened off British Steel, while government inter-vention on behalf of Fontana – or, for that matter, of any of California’s floundering heavy industrial plants – was ruled out by Jerry Brown’s new entente cordiale with the California Business Roundtable.