My dad was union. Did his apprenticeship in the early '50s and stayed union until he died. In fact, my bet is he's still a union man, and if God ever thinks about bringing in some scab angels, they'll have to get past my dad first.
It wasn't like he signed on with every club that came down the chute. Somebody once asked him if he wanted to be a Mason, and he politely declined ... muttered something when he got home about a "bunch of jokers who think they have a secret anyone else gives a rat's ass about knowing." He wanted nothing to do with the Elks, the Eagles, the Methodist Men's Association ... none of that. In his whole life, he belonged to two outfits that I know of: a bowling league, for fun ... and his union, for about everything else.
Understand, they made union men back then like they made Chevys back then: i.e.--in America, of steel, built to last and proud to be one. Unionized workers were proud not only because they were good at what they did, or that they made decent money doing it, but because they belonged to something they believed to be as indispensable to the bright future of America as wheat farmers or public education or clean water. They understood they and their unions were a fundamental part of the only kind of progress worth bragging about.
We Cope kids could see that pride working in Dad as he sat at the kitchen table doing his apprenticeship homework, learning how to figure the capacity of a stainless steel tank or going over pressure tables for wrought iron pipes. We could see it when he was cleaning up for one of his monthly meetings down at the union hall after a day of grubbing around in other people's plumbing. (He always wore his newest shirt and shaved like he was on his way to a wedding reception.)
We could see it even after he'd retired, in the way he'd study those Plumbers & Pipefitters newsletters that came with his pension checks. At 80, he'd still get fighting mad whenever someone ran down unions. "Rotten bastards," he'd say. "The only thing that ever helped the working man get ahead, and those rotten bastards can't stand it!" Only, he didn't say it so nice.
Dad had a lot to curse about in his final years. The assault on Idaho unions began well before the 1986 Right to Work battle, but dating from that time forward, organized labor has had some tough going simply because that unfair law tipped the battlefield in a manner so adverse to their cause that they've been struggling since just to stay on their knees.
Of late, it seems the enemies of working people have gone back to the battlefield to finish off the wounded. Here in Idaho, our GOP leaders made it clear with the vindictive H.B. 329 that they not only will not tolerate criticism from state employees, but that they intend to choke out the voices that do the criticizing. Bush (America's most prominent un-indicted CEO) recently offered his opinion that the 40-hour work week is out-dated, that it no longer applies to modern realities. And across the country, it's increasingly more accepted to force employees into working off-the-clock, overtime hours--a practice that falls somewhere between indentured servitude and slavery.
So what happened? Why are we going backwards? Why is this richest of nations seeing more and more shoddy exploitation of its labor force, rather than less?
Most of the answer, I've no doubt, lies in the hostile takeover by corporate predators of those few progressive impulses still flowing through America's veins. Huge conglomerates, by their nature, are all too eager to sacrifice anything and anybody, if only to up the stock value by a point or two. They are as little concerned about maintaining a reasonable balance between labor and management as they are about a few dolphins getting snuffed in a tuna net.
But they couldn't smother organized labor all by themselves. After all, if the combined corporate board members and CEOs in the whole world voted as a single block, they couldn't elect a county coroner ... let alone Monkeyboy Bush. No, to launch such a war on working people, they needed--and achieved--an unholy alliance with the Dense Political Right (DPR), most of whom are working people, themselves.
And to get the DPR on your side, you have to accuse. Accuse, accuse and accuse some more. It works on homosexuals, it works on environmentalists, it works on Democrats, and it's worked on unions. When you think about it, that's really the only thing the conservative rank-n-file respond to, isn't it? ... accusations.
It pretty much worked. They accused organized labor of being a punk for organized crime. Over and over, they accused organized labor of being of being against free enterprise, of being socialists, of being communists. They accused organized labor of being whiners, sluff-er-off-ers, lazy bums, extortionists, greedsters, bullies, goons, thugs, mobsters, this, that ... about the only thing they've never accused organized labor of being is homosexuals ... and it worked. All they have to say now is "UNION BOSSES," and the Dense Political Right turns up their dense collective nose as though they actually know a union boss personally.
This is why I did this week's BW feature on union officials, to put a crack in the myth. To show that, whatever you think union people are, most likely you're dead wrong. To get you to take another look, you over-worked fool, you. I don't have space or time to tell all the good things unions do--the training, the pension plans, the heritage of craftsmanship, the community service, the continuing pride. All I hope to do is get you interested enough to find out for yourself. And for your family. And for your future. And everybody's future.
It's the least I can do for unions, considering what unions have done, through my dad, for me.
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