My mother had nothing but a high school education. My father dropped out of school in the 8th grade. I probably should have grown up dirt poor, instead of lower middle class, as I'd guess we were.
Our relatives like to say my parents had it made, and I've spent years defending them. Saying that they were hard-working. They were careful with their money. We didn't have expensive cars, an expensive house, nice clothes. We grew up in a time before credit cards were pushed upon people.
But what's happening in Wisconsin, has shown me my parents had one more really important thing going for them:
Union jobs.
And because of the unions, my parents, my brother, sister and I had better lives. My kids and most of my parents' grandchildren will have better lives.
My father was born dirt poor in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. You've seen the place when TV news wants to show some of the worst poverty in America. But you haven't seen it like I have -- from visiting my father's relatives there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And I haven't seen nearly what my father's seen of the place from actually living there.
His father was a coal miner, among other things, and died young of heart disease and I don't even know what else. I suspect a lack of environmental protections for mine workers and lack of health care contributed to his early death. My father was 20 or so.
Daddy's mother died when Daddy was 3 or 4. He barely has any memories of her. He also had a sibling who died in infancy, a twin to his beloved sister who survived and three other surviving brothers.
They grew up hungry. Real, true hunger unsatisfied. My father tells stories of not having any shoes to wear to school, not having decent clothes, being tormented by the other kids, fighting back and finally dropping out of school in the 8th grade. He tells stories of an evil stepmother who'd buy candy for her own children and laugh in the faces of him and his siblings when they also wanted some.
The stepmother kicked his little brother out of the house at some point, and Daddy couldn't let his brother be out on his own, so he left, too, to take care of his little brother. Daddy was 16 at the time, somehow making a living for both of them.
He did all sorts of jobs, could build things, fix things, would do any kind of work he could find to earn money. When I was little, he worked as a welder for a while until he started having trouble with his eyes and the doctors told him if he kept welding, he'd go blind. He was already deaf in one ear from a childhood case of the mumps left untreated and didn't think he could afford to be blind, too, so he had to find another job.
My father eventually landed a job with a local union based in Lexington of contruction workers. He wasn't a carpenter, an electrician or any kind of skilled laborer like that. He was the lowest of the low, one of the guys who did the dirtiest, hardest jobs in construction, the so called unskilled laborers. They ran the jackhammers (again, a nasty job -- the sound assaults your ears and the machine shakes your entire body while you use it) poured concrete, helped hoist steel beams into place and tighten the big bolts on tall buildings.
They worked mostly outside all the time, in the cold, the heat, the rain, whatever. They got dirty, sweaty, cold and exhausted. It takes a toll on the body. Most of the people who do this work don't live a long time after retirement. Their bodies are simply worn out. The union sets up pensions so that you can opt to take a higher retirement pay for the first ten years and then take a pay cut, because so many of these guys don't live longer than 10 years after retiremment.
People might say, who was my father to have a decent-paying job? He had no education. No real job training. Nothing but muscles, some minimal skills and a willingness to do a tough job.
Well, let's think about what he did for Central Kentucky. He built roads. If you drive in the area, he probably helped build some of the roads you use. He built bridges. Ever go over that monster bridge at Clay's Ferry where I-75 crosses the Kentucky River just south of Lexington? He worked on that sucker.
He helped build Rupp Arena, where the beloved Kentucky Wildcats basketball team plays. If you love basketball in Central Kentucky, my father helped make that arena.
I saw Journey and REO Speedwagon in concert there in high school. My husband saw the Rolling Stones. Together, we saw Springstein. Lots of people enjoy all sort of events in Rupp and it generates a lot of money for the city and the people who perform and hold events there.
My father helped build numerous buildings at the University of Kentucky . I don't remember which ones. But kids get an education today in buildings my father helped build.
He bulit one of the editions to Keeneland Race Track , which is one of the most beautiful places on earth in the spring and fall when the horses are running there. Rich people come from all over the world to buy and sell race horses and to see the horses run. Some ordinary people, too, because it's so beautiful. It generates a lot of money, including for charities, for Central Kentucky.
People get health care in hospitals my father helped build. They do business with people in office buildings my father helped build.
Yes, he was just an unskilled worker with an 8th grade education, but he left his mark on this state, him and all the other workers like them.
When you provide things like they do for a state, for a people, don't you deserve a job with decent pay and decent benefits?
The pay wasn't great, but it was better than he'd have had without the union. He didn't get vacation time and I don't know if he got any sick days, but he got wages that were okay and a chance to build up a retirement pay. It was unsteady work, though. The deal was, if you were part of the union, when there were union jobs, you worked. If there were no union jobs, you didn't.
You never knew how long a job would last and how long you'd be laid off when a job ended. Your name went to the bottom of the list of available union workers and as new union contruction jobs became available, they took people off the top of the list. You sat until your name got to the top.
It made for some difficult times financially for our family.
Thankfully, my mother's job was better. She was born in 1943 in Central Kentucky into a family where no one had ever gone to college before. I doubt there was ever any consideration of getting her an education beyond her high school diploma.
She was a cashier at a place she called the Dime Store, that sold just about everything, like a department store but tiny and with cheap merchandise.
A couple of years after high school, she got lucky and moved from the Dime Store to a job as a telephone operator with the phone company, either AT&T or Bell South over the years. And the telephone operators had a union -- Communication Workers of America.
So the wages were decent. Not extravagant, but decent, especially for a woman in the 1960s with only a high school education. She also got health insurance for her and our family. She got vacation time, sick days and maternity leave.
The operators gave people phone numbers when they didn't have a phone book or couldn't find numbers they needed. They physically connected circuits that connected calls. The consoles they worked looked Like This.
And one more really important thing -- this was before we had 911. Back then, if you had an emergency and you needed help, you dialed 0 and got a telephone operator like my mother, who connected you to the police, the fire department or an ambulance.
The importance of that hits home for me because when I was 13 or 14, my grandfather killed himself on our farm (after being hurt in a non-union job, refused disability of any kind, and going broke.) I didn't see the body in our barn. My grandmother grabbed me and told me to take my brother and sister to the house and call for help. I remember that, but not actually making the call.
But I know who answered it: someone in my mother's office. She was there working that day. It was a small office, and she'd been there since before I was born. Everyone knew her. They knew me. They would have recognized the name and the street on which we lived. I hate to imagine how she got the news. The next thing I knew, someone had put her in a cab and she was arriving at our house, crying, falling to her knees in the front yard, collapsing into my father's arms.
Before she retired, the company started innovating with computers and cutting jobs, closing offices, forcing people to move or lose their jobs, if they weren't simply laid off. My mother moved twice to keep her job and the third time got lucky and with some company incentives, had enough years in to retire rather than move 600 miles away from her entire family.
She and my father are 67 and 70 now, living modestly but comfortably on two social security checks and two union pensions, although my mother's told me if Daddy has to go into a nursing home or dies, it won't be easy for her to live on what she'd get on her own. They don't have any debts, but they don't have any real savings, either. Still they're better off than most people their age.
It wasn't like that growing up. My parents bought a home they described as a box, four rooms and a bath, with walls so thin and poorly contructed, the wind blew through it in the winter. My mother worried I'd freeze to death in that house the first winter I was alive, in 1963. But I didn't.
Because Daddy could do almost anything with contruction, over the years we slowly fixed up the house. (I was chief carpenter's helper to my father, some of my best memories of growing up.) Over fifteen years or so, we turned the attic into two bedrooms, added a carport and then later turned it into a kitchen and dining room, added a master bath and 2nd bathroom and finally put field stone around the house in place of the old siding. We did all the work ourselves, slowly over time, and when I say we put up field stone, I mean... we went into the fields and picked up stones and brought them back to the house and slowly laid them like bricks around the outside of the house. One of the hardest jobs I ever helped Daddy do.
It was a nice house by the time we got done. Not fancy. Not expensive. But nicer than anything my parents had ever lived in.
We had five acres, and we grew just about everything at one time or another, both crops and animals. The nastiest of which was tobacco. I know everything you need to know about raising tobacco in the late 60 and the 70s, because I helped do it all. It's hard, dirty, nasty work, but it brought in some extra money, and my father would do just about any hard, dirty job to get a little extra money.
There were times when he wasn't working and it was hard, times when both my parents went on strike that were scary and hard. Relatives got in trouble, couldn't afford to eat or keep their utlities on or get an old car running again, and they came to my parents for money to keep going. And my parents helped them, because my parents were the one who supposedly "had it made."
We didn't have great clothes or great cars, but we never went hungry. Never really had any savings, either, but my parents refused to run up debts, also, so it worked in the end.
I do remember as a Freshman in high school needing some money for a trip, a huge trip to me. My high school band was really good, and we got invited to play at a prestigious music educators' conference in Chicago, and even with fund-raisers, each kid had to pay $25 for the long weekend trip, plus have spending money. I remember my parents worrying a lot about where to get the money. But they did, and I got to go and see the big city of Chicago in 1977.
One more time that stands out -- honestly, I think the only time I was embarrassed to be poor -- was my first car. I was working in a cheap steakhouse, waitressing, during high school, and we took my tax return one year -- $250, I think -- and Daddy found me a cheap car. A really ugly boat of a car, tan-colored, some big sedan, and I was actually embarrassed to drive that car. (I know, lots of people will say I should have been happy with any car.)
In my own defense, I'll say my next car cost $600. It was a bright red Vega. The shocks were off in some way. It either sat too high in front or too high on one side. I can't really remember. It drank oil, smoked and when you turned the key off, the engine kept running for a while, doing that coughing thing until it really quit. And it was a big step up from the $250 car. I adored the red, smoky, coughing Vega.
I became the first person in my family to ever go to college. I'm still not sure how we did it. Cheap school in Kentucky, a bit of a scholarship, me working, my parents working, a bit of loans, and we did it. It felt like a monumental accomplishment to all of us.
Thank you to the unions for that and for the upbringing I had, for the lives my parents live now.
This week, Wisconsin, has made me think of what my life would have been like if my father was out there trying to get a job today in this economy. I think he'd likely be one of the poor Hispanics, likely here illegally, and taken advantage of like crazy by American companies wanting to make as much money as they possibly could on the backs of poor, unskilled workers.
He wouldn't have health insurance or any kind of retirement, no union to stand up for him, and our lives would have been very, very different.
I think people who work hard in America deserve to be able to afford a decent place to live, health care, food to eat, decent schools for their kids, a chance for those kids to go to college, to not starve in their old age or go without health care. I think those should be basic rights for American workers.
My parents had that in the 60s, 70s and into the 80s before they retired. We're trying to go backward in this country and take those jobs away.
Just wanted to take a moment to say what Unions did for me and my family.