Striking office workers, 1935, New York City. My grandfather is second from left, wearing a suit. He was the strike organizer - at 19 years old.
Today was Harry Avrutin's favorite day of the year - although it might have been edged into 2nd place by his wedding anniversary. You see, Grandpa Harry was a Union man; more specifically, he was an organizer and high-ranking official within the New York City labor movement for over 50 years.
His life is worth examining on this favorite day of his - Labor Day, 2016, in an America where unions are trying to prevent another Gilded Age from occurring. This is not a mere panegyric to my Grandpa; as you will see, his career is a mirror of the changing fortunes in the union movement in the 20th century - a great rise and a slow, painful decline.
Harry Avrutin was born in Philadelphia in December 1916, but moved to New York City as a boy. His father was a presser, his mother a seamstress, both immigrants from Czarist Russia. Both were activists and, like most working-class organizers of the period, ardent Socialists. Not the stereotypical "Reds" that conservatives have shoe-horned every member of that movement into - just working-class Americans who wanted a better future for their children, and saw no relief from the political leaders of the day.
So they organized. They taught Grandpa Harry the importance of collective action, of building coalitions to challenge the business magnates who sought to enforce Social Darwinism on their workers. "Survival of the Fittest" is an inhumane doctrine, they told him, and my grandfather learned that the only way to stop its application was to build an army capable of fighting it.
The photograph you see at the top of this story is from 1935, and shows Grandpa Harry leading a group of Manhattan office workers on strike. They wear barrels and shoes, nothing else. He stands on the sidewalk to their right , letting the strikers take the spotlight. He was just 19 years old when the photo was taken. It is a motivating force for me each and every day.
It is worth remembering that only 2 Presidents before World War II recognized that unions could help limit the excesses of corporate greed. Theodore Roosevelt gave union workers the ability to exist without persecution. Franklin Roosevelt gave them the ability to organize en masse. My grandfather was a lifelong New Dealer, idolizing "FDR" for what that man had done for working people like him.
It wasn't easy. Just as Civil Rights marchers and activists were beaten, jailed and (sometimes) murdered, so were strikers and union organizers a generation before. My grandfather earned virtually no income for his work as an organizer until the end of the 1940s; his reward came from seeing workers endure and succeed despite intense pressure.
Once, when an OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International) strike was under attack from strikebreakers, a "scab" stuck a gun to my grandfather's head. Other organizers saw it, but could do nothing - strikers carried signs and banners, not pistols (we don't pack guns at our events, unlike Tea Partisans).
Grandpa Harry turned to face the scab, and said in a loud, clear voice, "Pull the trigger. Go ahead."
Perhaps the scab looked at my Grandpa - kind eyes, thick glasses, balding head, always a friendly smile that said "Welcome to the movement" - and saw a human being and not a "Communist" caricature. Maybe he got scared (unlikely - Grandpa allegedly wouldn't hurt a fly). Either way, he ran away.
In all the 50+ years Grandpa Harry organized, only once did he fail to make it home at night to my Nana. He didn't want the limelight, or the publicity of being jailed for his efforts. He just wanted the workers he was helping succeed in achieving their goals, be it for higher pay, shorter hours, better conditions, or just the simple right to live their lives with dignity.
In an interview he taped in 1981, he stated:
I believe labor unions are all-American at heart. We are patriots that fight for the same freedom the Founding Fathers sought 2 centuries ago - the right to rise or fall on our own merits.
My grandfather held several notable positions with the union movement in the Tri-State area. My grandfather didn't speak at labor rallies. He just organized them.
If you attended the Labor Day Parade in New York City during the 60s, 70s or 80s, Harry Avrutin was the one to thank for making it happen. He was the Parade's organizer and manager for over 2 decades, as part of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.
If you wanted to buy products that only had the "union label" on them, Harry Avrutin was with you 110%. He ran the union label effort for the Tri-State area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) for 39 years, until the day he died.
If you wanted to organize your fellow workers into a union, or audition for "Miss Union Maid", or schedule a speech at a union hall to woo members, you first called Harry Avrutin.
The truth is that my grandfather was not a publicity seeker - he deliberately stayed in the background and let leaders like Harry Van Arsdale soak in the spotlight. His contributions to the labor movement were considerable, but also considerably unknown (when he died, his obituary in the New York Times was just 3 paragraphs long and had no picture).
It was also a movement that, in retrospect, was in decline. We can look back in 2016 and see how the union movement ossified after the 1960s. The fighting spirit of the 1930s and 40s withered; corporate power surged to new heights; unions became a target for the public to hate, not a popular force for good.
For close to 40 years, the Union movement in America has been under siege. For too long, sadly enough, its leaders adopted a "bunker mentality" of trying to hold on to what they had, rather than fight back.
A direct example from Harry Avrutin can illustrate my point. In 1981, a young reporter named Janet Wells Greene was doing a series of oral interviews on the labor movement in the 20th century. She was told to contact my Grandpa, who had a ton of files on the subject (many of which are now in the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU).
As a self-proclaimed "practical radical", Janet Greene should have been a great person for Grandpa Harry to speak to. She could be counted on, one would think, to portray the work he had done in a favorable light. Instead, Secretary-Treasurer Avrutin declined to be interviewed by Greene.
"Will this hurt the movement?" Greene recalled him saying to her. "I don't want a reporter taking pot shots at the movement on my account."
From an article by Deborah Bernhardt, 2001 - link no longer available]
He later reconsidered and gave some generic, on-the-record remarks about his life. He saved his detailed recollections for the Central Labor Council's oral history project.
My grandpa's last public work came while he was dying from cancer. The Coors Brewing company, which actively denied its workers the right to organize, had begun to set up shop in the Tri-State area. Grandpa Harry organized a mass boycott and made sure Coors ran back to Colorado with its tail between its legs.
Yet such successes have increasingly become few and far between. People like Harry Avrutin knew how to hold on to what they had won a half-century before, but they had forgotten how to push forward and make new gains for a new generation of workers. The heavy price paid by working families in states like New Jersey and Wisconsin, and the day-to-day trepidation felt by tens of millions more whose jobs depend solely on the whims of their employers, is being felt each and every day.
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I was born 2 months after Harry Avrutin died; were it not for Nana's point-blank refusal, I would be writing this as Harry Yellin, not Stephen Harry Yellin. No matter; my mother has filled my life with the stories of my Grandpa, and I feel his spirit of activism grow within me with each passing year.
He is why I got involved in politics at the age of 13. He is why I ran for Township Council in my hometown of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, and am running again this year. He is why I am a Democrat - because I believe in the rights of workers and working families to dignity and a decent life, and so do most Democrats. It makes more sense than siding with the party of scabs and strikebreakers.
As you enjoy this Labor Day, perhaps with a parade or barbeque (or both), I hope you will take the time to remember people like Grandpa Harry. More importantly, remember him not just for the good work he did, but for the work left unfinished. It's not just about saving the union movement today - it's about giving all Americans the chance to climb the economic ladder, free from exploitation and abuse, and pass on a better life to their children and grandchildren.
