Love-Hate Affair: Unions in America, up close and personal

NOTE: Union firings rise during Republican administrations. (Wiki Commons)

I grew up in a household in which the eldest male, my grandfather, was a Republican accountant who believed only in business and making one’s own way. He espoused the truisms of the time: it’s not what you know but who you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps…and so on. He was a successful man, and a bold one, having moved his wife and three teen-to-20s daughters into a house in a German neighborhood during WWII; his name was Harry Stillman. Any way you look at it, he wasn’t likely to be welcomed by a neighborhood friendly to the Nazi regime.

The second eldest male was my father, a man lacking even a high school diploma who nevertheless had secured a technical job with the Bell System. He was smart, though, and unaccountably cultured. He liked opera and red roses and mahogany wood. But Nicholas G. Box was a member of a union, the Communications Workers of America. He credited them with the excellent salary and benefits he had, at a time when all my friends’ fathers worked very hard for a lot less in the way of emoluments. My high school guidance counselors thought we were rich because my parents drove late-model cars, I never lacked for money for school trips, and my clothes--and I had more than most, being somewhat interested in fashion at the time--were not bought at the local 1960s version of Wal-Mart, but at mid-level department stores.

Union bugs

We were not rich, but we had much more than the families whose breadwinner did not belong to a union. My father was not bold; he worked hard and kept his mouth shut. And he appreciated his union. 

For many years―because I had been infected with 1960s knee-jerk liberalism (since transmogrified, I hope, into something more compassionate)―I believed my father was wrong, that everything in life really depended upon one’s own initiative, as it had for my grandfather. Harry had gone to college but didn’t graduate. The family story was that he pushed over an outhouse with one of the early female students in it and got expelled. I figure it was something a lot more rascally than that, in truth. (He never pulled a punch. When one of my uncles complained of a headache, Gramp would calmly tell him it was impossible since he had nothing to get a headache in.) But Gramp worked as both an accountant and a chemist in New York State’s dairy industry anyway, and set up a milk cartel that took 50 years to break. The cartel, oddly enough, favored the producers―the farmers―and not the milk industry. And after he retired, the school he didn’t graduate from, the State University of New York at Albany as it had become―asked if they could claim him as a graduate. Answer: Hell no.

As it turns out, both of my father and maternal grandfather were, in their own way, self-made men. And both, obviously, were champions of the laboring class and the small business class; Grandpa never worked for a Kraft-size organization, but for co-operatives and small packagers of milk products. And there was that farmer-friendly cartel!

Old Dixie never died

It took moving to Georgia to attend graduate school at the University of Georgia in Athens to shift me from dyed-in-the-wool anti-unionist (despite my other liberalism) to union supporter. My first job, at the (Athens) Daily News, exposed me to the horrors that constituted the working man’s life in Georgia, a rabidly non-union state. I was badly affected by the plights I came across almost daily in developing stories for the newspaper. Since I was still taking courses while working, I went to see a university shrink. (I should have realized that what one gets for "free" is worth exactly that.) Perhaps the plenitude of Bulldog images decorating the shrink's office should have been a clue. However, what he told me after my revelation that the local business culture disturbed me, sickened me really, was that I had a “Joan of Arc complex.”

I didn’t laugh out loud; my mother had raised me to be polite. But I left that man’s presence as quickly as I could, never to return. I’d like to say that I got over my distress about the workingman's plight, but I didn’t. Indeed, I became a bigger and bigger union supporter, at the same time also favoring independent actions to improve one’s own life whenever possible. 

But I had to face it: without concerted action by a number of people, there are many functions in the economy that will never be bested by individual action. 

Limits to independent action
For example, as a writer, I can―to a certain extent―name my price if I’m any good. But if I were an auto machinist, would that be true, even a bit?  I think not.  It is only in creative and management/executive work that individual action has any hope of success for improving worklife and benefits. In laboring arenas, that's not so true, as anyone who has had a lemon of a new car will tell you; industrial work is essential and needs to be done well by someone who cares, if only because that work is allowing them to live well and raise their families in comfort and dignity. Sometimes that’s all that’s interesting about some industrial jobs; taking the prospect of a decent life out of the equation is not only stupid, but cruel.

And yet, that’s where we are, at least in America’s Midwest, and especially Wisconsin. Those numerous Americans who have always kept America humming are having the wind knocked out of them by a bunch of tuneless, gormless politicians whose understanding of their own culture and world economics makes George W. Bush look like an international affairs genius. And whose self-regard and cruelty make the juggernaut of a Pol Pot look compassionate and expansive, to use hyperbole to make the point.

It is not acceptable to bash unions. It is tantamount to snatching food from babies’ mouths, sending fragile populations into despair and misery and death. It is unworthy of America. And it must stop.