For Labor Day 2013

When there were unions

By Ed Rogers

My father was in the military. Therefore, growing up, I had no idea what a union was. The rest of my family were from Mississippi and so afraid a black man would take their job if the unions ever came to the south, they voted to make Mississippi a right-to-work state.
    The first time I can remember hearing about unions was on a vacation back to Aberdeen, Mississippi. This was in the early fifties. It was some time after my family and I came back from Alaska in 1950.
    Garment plants were the big industry in the South at that time; in fact, it was the only industry. My second cousin, ‘Coot’ Hill, married a lady who was very different from the rest of the family. Vera Hill was a union organizer. She was a very dedicated union member, and she traveled throughout the Southern states spreading the word. Her life was in danger all the time. The plant owners—who paid slave-labor wages and worked people(mostly women) twelve hours a day, with fifteen minutes for lunch—offered an award for the demise of any organizer—no questions asked.
    Then there was the KKK. The KKK was where the really stupid came together with the really powerful. While the power brokers stayed in the background—the stupid did their bidding. Vera had a cross burned in front of her house more than once. The strain became too much for the marriage and my cousin and Vera divorced in the late fifties. She organized and fought for workers rights all her life. She died in Monroe County, Mississippi in her eighties—still a card-carrying member of her beloved union.
    As I look back on that time, it is strange that the only people with balls enough to organize a union were the women. Today we wouldn’t think that much about it, but in the fifties, in the South, it didn’t seem possible that they could succeed. However, by the beginning of the sixties most of the plants in the South were union.

I came of age during the sixties, and the next time I heard about the unions was when President Kennedy signed an Executive Order allowing government workers to form unions. Soon after that he was dead and I was in the Army, and unions were never mentioned where I was. However, after my discharge, I visited my uncle in Zion, Illinois. He worked for American Motors; in fact, he retired from American Motors with full union benefits. He tried to talk me into going to work for AMC, but it was too cold up there for me!
    Instead I came back to Aberdeen, with no intention of staying. My cousin Coot, who by then had remarried, was an engineer aboard a push-boat on the Black Warrior River in Alabama. Over a bottle of bootleg whiskey, he talked me into going back with him and going to work on the riverboats.
    My time on the boats is for a whole other story. I started out as a deckhand making $14.00 a day. No benefits at all, no medical, holiday, sick leave, or overtime—nothing but six on and six off, unless they needed you to work longer. I put in many 24-hour days for 12 hours pay. By the time I had worked my way to becoming an engineer, at $17.00 a day, there was talk of forming a union.
    Outside of my brief encounter with Vera Hill, I hadn’t thought much about unions. Two men from one of the other boats met us at the top of the hill, off company property. It seems US Steel had boats running the river with all-union crews. The deckhands made $18.00 a day with medical, double-time on holidays, sick-leave pay, and if they were asked to work beyond their six-hour shift they were paid two hours overtime even if they only had to work fifteen minutes. It all sounded good to me.
    The union they had chosen to become affiliated with was the Coal Miners Union. It seemed reasonable, as the boats we worked on moved the coal from the mines down to power plants all the way to Mobile. A little more than half of us walked off the boats one day. The owners had refused to even sit down with our representatives and we were told this would get them to the table. The boat captains stayed with the boats as they were classified as part of management. The members of the crew who chose not to support the union were sent home, while the boats were tied up at the docks.
    This was when I learned about a right-to-work state. We were dealing with the National Union, and the local union, which didn’t have much power or any say in what the company did, offered no support. And when the coal mines told the boat owners they would load any boat they brought up river, the union was busted. The company I worked for fired the ten men who organized the strike and offered us our jobs back if we came to work right then.
    The company doubled my work load and cut my pay to $15.00 a day. I worked ten days or until payday. Then I caught a Greyhound north. I was on my way to Alaska. I was determined to get as far away from the South as I could get. I made it to Washington State and remained there for fourteen years. I joined, supported, worked, and organized for unions the entire time I lived in the Great Northwest. I saw firsthand the benefits of belonging to a union and I had experienced firsthand the exploitation of workers without a union.
    For those who live in the South without a union, or anywhere else for that matter, you can thank a union worker for your 8-hour workday, your overtime pay, your sick-leave pay, your holiday pay, and even the days off for those holidays. Companies in right-to-work states pay these benefits not out of the kindness of their hearts but to keep you from joining a union. It was through the strength of union workers that laws were passed to keep you safe on the job, laws that paid you benefits if you couldn’t work. Unemployment insurance wasn’t something Washington came up with on its own. All the rights you have as a worker came because a union man or woman put it all on the line for you.

Then came the great communicator, Ronald Rayguns, with the stupid idea that the workplace would be better without regulations. If these companies could be trusted to do the right thing, there never would have been regulations in the first place.
    Reagan destroyed the unions and destroyed the industrial might of the United States. What had taken unions a hundred years to accomplish, Ronald Reagan tore down in eight years.
    The companies you see moving overseas everyday could never had done that if the unions were strong—if they had closed and moved out of the country, they would have paid a heavy price. But instead we give them big tax breaks to pay for the move.
    If we had strong unions, China could never have flooded the market with cheap steel, which closed our factories down. Today, “Made in the USA” is a joke. It may be assembled here, but there are very few things you can buy that don’t have a part or parts made somewhere else.
    And those hard-won benefits, if you notice, they are all under attack and one day will be gone. When that day comes: Remember, Once There Were Unions!
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Copyright © 2013 by Ed Rogers

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