My father was an Electrician in Alaska, working on a BMEWS, (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), station when I was six years old. It was during this time, I recently found out, that he experienced the other side of unionization.
A short history of Alaskan communications.
Sometime after the Alaska purchase and Nicolai Tesla, it dawned on someone that somehow we had to go up there and wire the place for communications. The only problems were
- it is cold
- it is colder
- it is a lot colder
- it is huge
As Alaskans are so fond of saying to Texans, we can cut our state in half and then Texas will be the third largest state in the union. Laid over the lower 48 states, Alaska stretches from sea to shining sea. The distances and climate are truly daunting. My father told me of a time in a far northern station at Tok Junction, Alaska, when he and some others had to go out in the middle of a winter night to check some equipment. They piled into a huge Arctic Cat and brought plug-in heaters to warm the compartment of the Cat, as well as the Cat's own heating system. By the time they had reached their destination, the cabin had warmed up to ten below zero.
Faced with these conditions, America turned, as it so often has, to the military. Thus was born WAMCATS, (Washington and Alaska Military Communications And Telephone System). Soldiers were detailed to the north and rudimentary facilities were set up, but the conditions were such that it was generally considered that winter was a time when no work could be accomplished. The ground was frozen, which made placing poles difficult, and cars had a tendency to freeze as well. Sometimes it would get so cold that the tires would freeze and shatter when they hit something solid like a rock or a curb. The problem was that it was almost always winter, so not much was getting done.
Just when it looked like the entire plan may have to be abandoned, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle arrived, the same Jimmy Doolittle that, years later, would lead America's first raid on Japan after Pearl Harbor. In no time at all, people were doing things and things were getting done, winter, summer, spring and fall.
Eventually the communications system that the Army had helped build was a fully functional telephone system that linked most of the human habitations in Alaska. It had metamorphosed into the BMEWS and the DEW Line, (Distant Early Warning), as well as the telephone system. This was, of course, the whole idea, so the government turned the system over to the commercial telephone companies to manage and bugged out. One of the first companies to handle this system was RCA. It was the call for civilian electronics technicians that RCA published in the states that brought my father there.
My father, Jack Lang, with my brother John, (center), and a smattering of aunts and uncles.
We moved to Annette Island in 1963. At the time, the unions were not present in any of the communications sites. However, RCA seemed to understand that the job was more than a little demanding, owing to the landscape and the harsh weather. The men working the sites were offered many perks, including occasional paid weekend trips to Anchorage, a fully stocked break room, plenty of food, the men's wives were treated to a lunch once a month at RCA's expense, men who were hired were moved to Alaska at company expense, as well as the attractive pay rates that brought them in the first place. In general, if you needed something, you asked for it and the company would, if at all possible, provide it.
At this point, one of the men working on the site began to organize a union. It took a while, but he succeeded in organizing the station as a part of the Electrical Worker's Union. As soon as this happened and the first contract was signed, the perks stopped. The company went by the letter of the contract and if it wasn't in the contract, no force on earth would budge them.
As soon as the union came into the station, the man who organized it disappeared to California. Before he went, though, his wife gave my mother a call. They had been good friends and she told my mother that she could not leave feeling as guilty as she felt, that she had to tell someone the reason her husband had worked so hard to unionize the station.
It turned out that the man had the prospect for a very cushy job in California. The one sticking point was that the company was represented by the Electrical Worker's Union and it was a closed shop. In order to be hired, you had to belong to the union. As soon as the union was certified, he was gone, leaving the workers with $140.00 dues payments and a much less responsive corporate environment.
What is the lesson we should draw here?
First of all, I support unions. I have been a shop steward and a union president myself and I am well aware that, in many many cases, the union is the only way that the worker has to effectively communicate their needs to an employer. I understand that laws that protect union activity protect workers and help to guarantee a safe and productive work environment. Unions are an important and necessary tool for assuring that the American dream is available to all citizens.
However, I think that we should note from this story that there is no 'canned answer' to every situation. It is not always necessary to unionize, just as there is no political opinion that is always right in every situation. As much as we would like to believe that our views are what is right for moving the nation forward, that we are more enlightened than those who seem to blindly follow a political viewpoint that we cannot agree with, we must be aware that there are bound to be times when what we think should happen is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I believe that this is why President Elect Obama has called for a bi-partisan approach. It is why he is choosing people from both sides of the aisle to fill his cabinet. It is because he knows that a house divided against itself cannot stand and that, if we are to overcome the problems facing us today, we must find a way to work together.
More than anything else, we must be creative in our approach to the problems our nation faces. We must be willing to listen to competing ideas and, in some cases, leave well enough alone or admit that perhaps the other guy has a good idea that may work.
It doesn't mean that we have to begin watching Hannity and Colmes, (bleh), but it does mean that we have to put our stereotypes away and reach out to what is human and American in us all. There is only one answer we can give that will overcome any obstacle in our path, one engine that drove this country forward in the thirties and forties to win a war and will drive this country forward under President Elect Obama's leadership.
It's us. Are we ready?