I’m old enough to draw Social Security now. I lived through the 1960s, and remember some of it. Yet I really began measuring my life from the mid 1970s, when internal and external forces drove me to become an union organizer.
Here is my Labor Day diary.
Fights with strikebreakers and cops? Yep. Clandestine meetings with desperate workers? Done it. I lost count how many times I was fired from jobs. I do remember when I got ruthless bosses fined hundreds of thousands of dollars, including a Koch-owned business, and when I got that the mine owner indicted on criminal charges.
My story started in what I’ll call River City. My dad was a newspaper reporter, but very taciturn at home. I think World War II, when he flew over Europe in a B-24 bomber, traumatized him. One clue was when he left the movie theater, hands trembling and gasping for breath, halfway through a screening of a bloody episode in the movie “Catch-22.”
We weren’t rich. So I worked. Delivered newspapers for $2.70 a week. Flipped burgers for $1/hour. Shoveled gravel. Mowed at a golf course.
I always hated the bosses. Once on the job, I couldn’t help but work obsessively. I probably had ADHD; I was prescribed Ritalin in 6th grade, but wouldn’t take it. And when I worked so hard, I resented the crappy pay.
The final year of high school, I drove a cab at night. I had a real pretty girl friend, whose gigs included wearing a bikini to Warren Buffett’s house, so his party guests could smear body paint onto her slender frame when they got stoned and drunk.
A dump truck ran me over on the last day of high school. I woke up in a cast to my waist, with a fractured skull, in the hospital, for a lengthy stay. My pretty girl friend went to California with another guy.
I came to California later, racked up a marijuana conviction, and became a self employed carpenter, but the work wasn’t steady. I drifted into warehouse and delivery driver work at minimum wage.
Then I got a teamster job at triple minimum wages--$9 an hour!! as a local delivery driver in Oakland. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to make teamster wages. I was the hardest working driver there.
But Reagan got elected, and my boss decided to ditch the union contract. He hired an anti-union law firm called Littler Mendelson, filed bankruptcy on Friday, and re-opened on Monday with a different name. I got laid off. I was very bitter.
I went to UC Berkeley, and got a degree, but I spent a lot of time studying the labor movement. I wanted to build unions back up. Unions were just about 20% of the work force then.
I got hired as a driver at an Oakland delivery company. They had laid off their union drivers and contracted out their deliveries. The new work force was a black manager, and me, who is very white, and 19 blacks, working for minimum wage. Most of those folks were single parents, raising families. I went to the Teamsters union and got union authorization cards, and began passing them out.
I was by far the most experienced driver, so I was swiftly promoted and received a 25 cent/hour raise. Then, as the manager and I were discussing the delivery routes, one of the drivers came up to me. Right in front of the manager, he said,”_, here are the union membership cards for me and the other drivers. How soon do you think we can get the union in here?”
The manager’s eyes widened as he stared at the union cards, like a cat would if a fidgety pit bull strutted into the room.
I tried to smoothly pocket the cards, “Ah, talk to you later,” I choked out.
Of course, the manger immediately began jockeying my shifts around without warning, until finally I missed a route, and was fired.
I filed NLRB charges, and eventually received $500 in back pay for the illegal firing.
A few months later, late at night, I got a phone call at home. It was the former delivery company manager. He was drunk.
“___, I’m real sorry, but the company lawyers told me to lie to the NLRB about you and say you were a very poor delivery driver and were fired for that. It was pure BS but I had to do what the lawyer said, or they’d have fired me.”
They’d fired him anyway, a little later.
So a corprate lawyer had counseled their client to lie to the NLRB in a sworn statement, which is a federal crime, just to try and screw me out of $500 in back pay. That lawyer was from the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, whose most well known partner at that time was William French Smith, the Attorney General of the United States when Reagan was president.
If I was bitter before, imagine how I felt then.
Over the next few years, I successfully organized several small warehouses by hiring on, and recruiting for the union from the inside.
Later, I helped develop a version of a “corporate campaign,” during which you attack an employer for any type of environmental or legal violations you can uncover, if they refuse to bargain a union contract. We helped a few hundred workers get their first contract with that tactic. I got Koch-owned Georgia Pacific fined several hundred thousand dollars for water pollution, too.
I even got back at the law firm of Littler, Mendelson, who’d gotten me laid off from my first Teamster job. I provided testimony to Congress about their no-bid $300,000 labor relations contract for the federal Postal Service, and got them fired.
Later we came real close to getting a union election for 5000 workers, mainly female, at a Bank of America data center. That would have changed the whole landscape of clerical work, if we had won.
Yet grief consumes me as I look back at over 30 years in the labor movement. I worked night and day to build unions, and recruited hundreds of workers. But meanwhile, unions lost millions of members. We’ve gone from over 20% to below 10%, of the labor force.
I wonder if it was worth it, but I’m getting up Tuesday morning, and doing it again.
I'll be back about noontime in Ecotopia, to respond to any comments.