Working Class Heroes

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE: When the GOP swept into power on the wave of mid-term victories in November 2010, they came away controlling 31 statehouses. Shortly after taking office, Wisconsin’s Gov Walker put in motion an effort to remove collective bargaining rights from public employees – led by teachers. It wasn’t long until Ohio’s Gov Kasich had a similar plan in place. Then it was NoRightsAtWork efforts in a number of states, followed by abortion ultrasound testing and welfare recipient drug testing and voter registration legislation around the country. State after state, an obvious agenda has come to plague progressive liberal social gains of the last century. We can imagine none worse than the dismantling & giveaway of our nation’s public school system. The agenda hasn’t always taken the same chronological course, but rest assured, it IS coming to you soon! In April we had asked our friend and WCH contributor Ron Horvath to write a piece on the situation facing public education – he obliged with another fine piece! Today as we celebrate this Memorial Day, and as the fight to destroy collective bargaining for teachers has come to our beloved Pennsylvania, we bring you this re-post. Please read it and act! Help save our schools & the teachers’ ability to bargain collectively. Don’t let the GOP have their foot any further in the door!!

It is interesting to note that Harvard College was founded within seven years of the birth of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So it was that in a country still strange, still mostly wilderness, still without most of the comforts that even the early seventeenth century could provide in many of the civilized countries of Europe, and where producing enough food to feed a small number of immigrants was problematic to a degree that would exclude most intellectual pursuits, the very idea of education nevertheless held a place of priority among a struggling and isolated people. I would like to believe that it still does.

Once this country got off the ground, so to speak, it became apparent to the world that Americans had aspirations. The first Yankee seamen, the first American crews to land on European shores amazed the denizens of the “old world” by their rate of literacy, and free public education was among the first demands made by nascent labor organizations in our earliest days. Workers knew then that knowledge was the key to that upward mobility which was the promise of this new, open and supposedly egalitarian society. It was the first step toward what would become the “American Dream.”

That dream is now in danger. The Republican Party, riding on a surge of right wing fanaticism, is attacking public education just as it is attacking any “public” institution as being the antithesis of their demand for a society based on the “free” market, privatization, and capitalist principles. Public education is seen as another dreaded example of invasive government, of social engineering, of the inculcation of “liberal” views into the minds of their children, in other words the threat of an open society to the security of closed minds.

Charter schools, one of the new innovations in education, have become a favorite stealth program among Republicans for destroying public education. Charter schools were the inspiration of Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, who, in 1988, had the idea that a group of public school teachers would ask their colleagues for permission to create a small school that would focus on the needs of dropouts and problem students. Shanker became disillusioned with the idea when he realized that business organizations saw it as a profit making opportunity and were pushing an agenda of school privatization.

Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” says that the promise of charter schools has not been fulfilled.

“The only major national evaluation of charter schools was carried out by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond and funded by pro-charter foundations. Her group found that compared to regular public schools, 17% of charters got higher test scores, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse…”

Even this mediocre success is easily explained by Ravitch as a process of exclusion. “The students who are hardest to educate are left to regular public schools, which makes comparisons between the two sectors unfair. The higher graduation rate posted by charters often reflects the fact that they are able to “counsel out” the lowest performing students… Those who survive do well, but this is not a model for public education, which must educate all children… They also fail to recognize that the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers.” In other words charter schools solve the problem of poverty in the old, time proven fashion of the political right. They ignore it.

Ravitch impales the recent “documentary” film that glorifies charter schools, “Waiting for Superman,” and its creator, Davis Guggenheim.

“The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?”

In the midst of this controversy we get Republican candidates who, like Rick Santorum,denigrate public education in favor of home schooling. And yet we have to ask ourselves how many working families could follow Mr. Santorum’s advice? How many families where both parents must work to support themselves and their families could afford to cut their income in half or more while one parent stayed at home and educated their children? How many are equipped, or trained, to do so?

I fear that a religious ideologue like Santorum is more concerned with indoctrination. Mr. Santorum, on the other hand, fears the introduction of any teaching that will conflict with the rigid belief system that he feels is his privilege with which to indoctrinate his children. He fears any opposing knowledge. Science and objectivity have no place in his ideology. He fears to compete against other beliefs. Indeed he fears ideas themselves. He fears the imagination. He is terrified by possibility. He is horrified that science may actually insert some semblance of and potential for intellectual differentiation into the calcified mindset that he demands his children carry with them all their lives. He fears that, once exposed to public education, they may actually accept the beliefs and principles of others as having legitimacy in the “market place of ideas.” Indeed, he fears openness itself, and sees public education as one of the pillars of an open society.

And it is an open society that the conservative right fears most of all. If the Republicans have their way public education will die a slow, miserable death, starved of funds and ignored by government. It will return society to the days of segregation where the poor, the minorities, the disabled, the undesirables will be weeded out of “good” schools and cast off into holding facilities -for lack of a better term- where they will be prepared to serve as the lowest common denominators in a corporate controlled system of wage slavery. Indeed it is the egalitarianism of American public schools -the leveling effect- that truly rankles the right wing. People are not born equal in their ideology and should not be encouraged to think of themselves as “deserving” equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work, or any chance to climb the ladder of success to levels where they obviously don’t belong. No one, in the conservative mind deserves anything, unless of course, your parents and grandparents earned it for you.

But even more offensive to Republicans is the idea of government setting the terms of education to cancel out regional prejudice and ignorance. In their minds the south should be allowed to re-write history, to abolish any mention of slavery or Jim Crow laws, to ignore the Civil rights movement and describe the Civil War as the “war of northern aggression.” State control over education would mean the same indoctrination that Mr. Santorum fears, except that it would be the indoctrination of programmed ignorance, of creationism over evolution. Local control with no government oversight could mean schools created by and for the Klu Klux Klan, white supremacists, skinheads, or any religious cult anxious to turn their children into reproductions of themselves with no outside influence to spoil the brew. How many children in this country would be hamstrung in any hopes for a meaningful future by being spoon fed whatever favored myth or prejudice their parents or local official desires. One has only to look at the worst and most primitive places in the middle east where students are taught the Koran and little else,  guaranteeing their future fanaticism to Islam and a life of poverty, brutality and deprivation, for them and the generation that follows. Indeed, any school or educational system based on any fundamentalist beliefs –religious or otherwise- would produce the same results. Why would we permit that here?

One has to wonder if Santorum’s attacks on public education aren’t just part and parcel of the Republicans’ class war against the poor, the working, and the middle classes. The formula is straightforward. Attack unions to keep the working classes divided. Attack wage laws to keep them poor. Attack labor laws to keep them weak. Attack voting rights to keep them impotent. Attack women’s rights to keep them servile and constantly producing new recruits for the military and drones for the work force. And attack education to keep them all too stupid to do anything about it.

Destroying formal institutionalized education for average Americans would go a long way toward destroying the upward mobility for which the American life style was once famous. It would result in the re-creation of a permanent underclass mired in ignorance, politically impotent and malleable to the requirements of the corporate, capitalist state.

The other result would be a permanent over class. This is the real goal of the corporate elite, to fix their own position in the political firmament, at the top of the social and economic structure, to become a new aristocracy with the political power to control art, science, culture and thought, to define reality according to their own dictates and enforce that reality for the masses. With the pseudo-Christian right at their side how long would it be before Mr. Santorum’s kind would be proclaiming rule by divine right for the capitalist class. “God helps those who help themselves” has become scripture to conservatism even though it is nowhere to be found in the Bible.

Knowledge is power and by inhibiting education conservatives hope to disempower the working and middle classes. Democracy is the rule of the people, after all, and Republicanism is the rule of the “right” people. By limiting education those who think of themselves as the right people hope to limit political power to themselves.

Ron Horvath
Maine

        In 1873, a multinational consortium of investors bought a copper mine along a river in Huelva, Spain. As one might expect, a copper mine along a river colored and degraded the river. The river had come to be known as Rio Tinto - literally, “tainted river”. By the end of the 1880s, financial control had been taken over by the Rothschild family who concentrated on increasing  production. In 1891, this Rio Tinto Company became the world’s leading producer of copper. In the 1920s they began to seek to expand to other sources and bought mining interests in Rhodesia.

By the 1950s, political turmoil in Spain led them to sell off the original Rio Tinto mine site. In 1962, they merged with the Australian firm, Consolidated Zinc, forming Rio Tinto – Zinc Corp. In 1968 they bought US Borax, in ’89 they bought Kennecott Uah Copper and BP’s Australian coal assets, as well as Nerco (an Oregon-based coal, natural gas and oil concern) and coal operation Cordero Mining Co. The year 2000 saw the acquisition of Northern Limited, an Australian iron and uranium company. ’01 saw the purchase of Peabody Energy Co’s. Australian coal operations. November ’07 saw their largest acquisition to date, buying Canadian aluminum producer Alcan.

April 2011 saw Rio Tinto gain a majority interest in Riverdale Mining and December saw the takeover of Ivanhoe Mine Ltd. Does anyone see a pattern developing here? By now this company has holdings on six continents. They produce and sell copper, gold, silver, molybdenum, and sulfuric acid; aluminum, bauxite and alumina; coal, uranium, diamonds, borax, talc, salt, gypsum and titanium dioxide; iron ore and iron, in their 5 defined “operating groups”. Obviously, they don’t monopolize any of these – that would be illegal. They do play dirty, or perhaps that is the ethic of those in these positions.

In the early 1990’s, Rio Tinto had a plan to strip mine titanium oxide along the coastal beaches of southern Madagascar, an area of extreme bio-diversity and environmental sensitivity; and they planned to use World Bank funding to do it. International pressure, and public awareness slowed the project by 11 years and brought some mitigation that wouldn’t have been there had the company had its way entirely. In 2005, Indonesian officials announced that a company in which Rio Tinto owned a 12% stake in (operating a mine where RT got 40% royalties) had paid bribes to its military to “guard” the mine – in excess of $18mil over a six year span. July 2009, four company executives were arrested by Chinese authorities for taking bribes in connection with China’s iron and steel industry. A Rio Tinto executive pleaded guilty and was fined 30,000 dollars for insider trading in Australia in 2010.

And those are the environmental and social issues. We haven’t yet touched on their labor practices! During the Spanish civil war Rio Tinto applauded Franco for murdering strikers and radicals who occupied their mines. There had also been significant labor conflict at its uranium mine in Namibia. Conditions at the mine were described in 1979 as “akin to slavery”. Labor relations and management’s racial biases continue to plague that site to this day! Rio Tinto’s presence is so large and harsh in Australia that workers there led a drive to form a global union -ICEM Rio Tinto Global Union Network- to battle the company wide ‘de-unionization’ policy. On January 31, 2010, this company locked-out 570 ILWU members at a borax mine in California. What would soon be called the “Batttle in the Mojave” lasted three and a half months and took extraordinary means to conclude.

William Trent Pancoast’s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Fried Chicken and Coffee, Night Train, The Mountain Call, Solidarity magazine, and US News & World Report. Pancoast retired from the auto industry in 2007 after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio.

Bill is a WCH Contributor who has allowed us to post this, novel in installments. We expect to bring you a chapter a week.

Just when General Motors is facing its biggest challenge, along comes Bill Pancoast’s Wildcat. This gritty connected sequence of short stories follows a team of autoworkers back in GM’s oil-spattered glory days. Whether you’re reading about security captain Big Bill or line worker Bobby Finnegan, these stories reveal the slimy underbelly of the car industry with a muckraker’s finesse. Pancoast’s knowledge of factory operations, his portrait of labor—and human—relations in America’s heartland, recall Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, as well as Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company.         

—James Reiss, author of Riff on Six

Chapter 5.5

A Dead Son

It was cold and raining that May day in Matewan in 1920 as Jack watched the Baldwin-Felts detectives let themselves down one at a time from the train. They had just finished the evictions of the miners at Mine #2, three miles south of town. They were big men, used to sitting a lot and eating well. But they were all crack shots, whether it was with a revolver or a rifle; no one in Matewan who knew anything about the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency would dispute that. Through the steam rolling out from the boiler and stack, Jack could not make out how many of them there were. Rumor had it they were sending the whole dozen of the Baldwin-Felts men stationed inBluefieldto evict the miners from their company-owned homes at several area mines.

Union organizing had stepped up in southernWest Virginiaafter the nationwide coal strike that winter, but the southern coalfields were still not organized. Those being evicted by the detectives hired by the coal operators had signed union cards. This move, evicting the mine families from their camp homes, was something that Sid Hatfield, the police chief of Matewan, had refused to do. Those were his friends and relatives. Nobody was going to put them out in the mud streets of the camps in his jurisdiction, at least that is what he had been telling everyone for the last week. The people in Matewan who knew what the Baldwin-Felts men were capable of, especially this bunch from Bluefield, and Jack’s father was among those who knew, were sure of one thing—that there would be mine families on the street. The only way to stop the detectives would be to kill them.

From where Jack lay in the attic of the livery, he could now see six big men whose trench coats obscured the Colts they would for sure be wearing. They moved onto the platform, and stood conferring, checking the area around them visually. They reminded Jack of the hawks that sat out in plain sight up the holler, surveying all around them, and then swooping down to grab some critter that never saw them coming. They were in no hurry as they ambled up the street to Jack’s position. Then he saw the seventh. Jack drew a bead on him at the fifty yard distance and started shaking, theWinchestermodel 94 wavering back and forth across the target. The boy hadn’t counted on buck fever, had in the past pulled off a few twenty-two caliber rounds at mine company detectives outside the camp where his uncle lived, and never had a problem. He had never hit one of them to his knowledge, and if he had, he probably wouldn’t have killed him. But he was shooting a forty-five today, and knew that if he hit a man he would likely kill him.

Then the detectives ducked between the train platform and the dry goods store. Jack saw Sid Hatfield come out of the barber shop on the street below. He was wearing both guns all right. Town folk had said that would be the tip-off that Hatfield would settle the matter on the street–if he had both Colts on his hips when the Baldwin-Felts men got there. Not many men could shoot with Sid Hatfield. For sport, he shot coins out of the air with a forty-five. He was the best anywhere in these parts and maybe all ofWest Virginia.

In a few minutes, Jack heard a man shouting. Then he heard Hatfield answer. Then it was quiet. A couple more minutes passed, and Jack rested the barrel of the heavy gun on the wood slat of the attic vent. Then he heard a boom, and all hell broke loose, the shooting so intense it hurt his ears. He aimed where he thought one of the detectives would have to pass, just under the awning in front of the hardware store. It would be his only shot. Then his target was there, not thirty yards away, and Jack squeezed off the shot. He watched as the man’s head exploded and he fell over backwards from the force of the bullet. Jack chambered another round,      and waited in his hiding place, his heart pounding wildly. Finally, the shooting over, he sneaked down through the attic entry, leaving the rifle behind.

The street was full of men—both from the mine camps and the town itself. Hatfield’s revolvers were holstered as he walked among the corpses, checking the hole in each man’s head to see how far off his aim had been. When he got to the detective Jack had killed, he glanced down at the man and then back up the street, trying to trace the path of the bullet. Whoever had shot this one had saved his life.

Jack, Crazy Jack, as he was now known in his role of skilled trades committeeman at the stamping plant, made his way into the machine shop, stopping along the way to answer questions or give greetings. He knew what the call was about—it was Ernie Davis again on the small machines, wanting to make the longhairs go away, to make his son come back fromVietnamalive instead of dead. He saw Hank Schmidt on one of the engine lathes, but didn’t see Ernie.

At the union meeting last week, Hank Schmidt had been recognized under new business. “I want to make a motion,” he had said.

“What have you got, Hank?” the president had asked.

“We got some longhairs in our new apprenticeship class. I want them fired.” All the men knew that Hank’s best friend, Ernie Davis, had lost his boy inVietnamsix months ago. They worked the small machines together, and anybody who passed by couldn’t help notice Ernie, who, ever since the funeral, had spent  everyday cutting air on his engine lathe, staring blankly down the aisle in the tool room machine shop, with a clear view to the main entrance up the long aisle to the offices, like he was watching for the military to come back and tell him it was all a mistake, that Ernie Jr. wasn’t really blown all to hell in a fucking rice paddy not fifty feet from a village full of Vietnamese people, the folks he was sent over there to save from the Communists. His boy was killed by a land mine in a place called Phu Phong, and Hank could often hear Ernie muttering to himself, “Phu Phong, sounds like fucking Chinese food…fucking Chinese food.” And when the longhair apprentices rotated through the machine shop, or were on the die floor across the way, Hank would catch Ernie staring at them for hours, shaking his head and muttering to himself about “the longhair bastards. Got no right to be here…no right.” Once Hank had stopped Ernie with his ball peen hammer in his coveralls pocket, the big, twenty ouncer, the one they used on the heavy stuff, his eyes glassy and fixed on the longhair grinding on the die across the way. Hank had put his arm around his big, hurt friend and guided him back to the bench by his lathe.

            The president had grimaced at the union meeting. He knew what it was about. Everybody knew what it was about. While guys working the lines were getting drafted and disappearing to the country of Vietnam, and kids like Ernie’s were coming home in body bags, the apprentices were draft exempt, just like the pansy-ass, draft-dodger college boys. They were selected through a testing process and were damn bright kids, as bright as any that ever went to college, and this had always been a good thing. The union had fought hard in the early sixties to force this stamping plant to put the apprentice program in place. One hundred and fifty young guys at any given time were paving the future of the plant, ensuring the presence of skilled tradesmen for decades down the road. Hard as it was to get the older guys to accept the apprentices as “draft deferred” while their own boys could be sent to Nam, it was nearly impossible to get them to accept the longhaired young guys showing up in the last couple of apprentice classes as legitimate. They were fair game outside the plant, but the company was pretty proud of its apprentices, assuming ownership of the program after the union had negotiated it into being, and there was little tolerance for harassment under the plant roof. Hell, some of the top management even pulled strings to get their kids into the program, as did the union board and shop committee.

“Not going to happen, Hank,” the president had told him.

“I want to make the motion, and we’ll vote on it.”

The president stared down at the table and then over at Milt Jeffers, who really was the one who should speak on this issue. Jeffers controlled the bargaining issues and the president ran the meetings. But it really couldn’t go to a vote. It couldn’t go that far, because there was no form of valid motion to fire fellow union members because they had long hair. And if it couldn’t be a legitimate motion, then it sure as hell could not be put to a vote.

“We’re going to fucking vote on it,” Hank had said. He was getting agitated, and that was not good. Lately, the union meetings had become incendiary, and at the last, a fist fight had broken out over the apprenticeship program—it was hard to test into the program for the guys in the plant already, and one view was that too many “outsiders,” the longhairs and college kids, were taking slots that belonged to the guys who had put their time in on the press lines. But the contract specified a quota to be hired from within the union ranks, and the quota was strictly observed.

Crazy Jack saw Ernie then, who had been sitting beside his lathe, the chuck spinning slow motion at about a hundred rpm’s. Jack knew he was going to have another problem one of these days—when management got tired of Ernie producing nothing day after day. The tool room superintendent had already given him the warning. “What’s up, Ernie?” Jack asked as he approached.

Ernie looked up and then jerked his head to the longhair across the aisle. “He don’t belong here,” Ernie said.

Jack knew the apprentice. He was old Vinnie’s boy. Vinnie worked in salvage and had always been a good union man, and his son was one of the best kids Jack had ever seen in the apprentice program. He just liked to wear his hair long.

“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch,” Ernie muttered.

Crazy Jack believed him. As he had grown older and lost some of his strength and quickness, Jack had started carrying a gun. He knew what only older guys know—that they become more dangerous the older they get.

Ernie might have been one of millions of lumpy, middle aged guys getting tired with the coming of age and arthritis, weaknesses creeping into their boring, working men’s lives. Ernie was a dangerous man because he had nothing to lose. At least nothing compared to what he had just lost—his son—in a war that even lumpy, tired old patriots increasingly saw as a blunder. Somebody might whip his ass? Bring it on. If he won, he would feel good again for awhile, the other old guys yucking it up with him, slapping him on the back because he had done it, had fought, put his stubbly, old chin and lumpy body on the line. And if he lost, well, so what? Big deal, an old guy getting his ass kicked—that was the expected result. But he still would have done it. Going to send him to prison? He didn’t care. Hell, Ernie was right. Nobody should be able to get out of serving. Kids with the brains to go to college or to test into a GM apprenticeship—hell, they shouldn’t get deferred from the draft. But to have all the bullshit with the war in Vietnam boil down to the length of an apprentice’s hair? “It’s them lying bastards in Washington that make the laws, Ernie….”

“That don’t make it right.”

WCH Contributor Olivia Emisar’s writings are regularly available on her blog.

Americans have finally woken up and they are not going to take it anymore.  It does not matter how many times the Wall Street Banksters and Mitt Romney state that they are ‘Job Creators’, Americans are not buying it.


Speaking of not buying it, they are boycotting products that sponsor the demise of the true job creators, American Unions.


Even bargain hunters on popular websites are passing up dirt cheap deals on paper goods because they are produced by Koch Industries.


Americans have seen their wages dwindle and gas prices rise. Americans have seen the extraordinary effort and mind-boggling infusions of cash in gubernatorial elections across the country that promise to get rid of the only bastion of living-wages that helps rise the poor to the middle-class: Unions.

No, Americans are not accepting that the 1% creates jobs because they have not seen any job creation coming from those quarters.  What they have seen is mass exodus of cash plundered from our natural resources into off-shore bank accounts.


Mitt Romney continues to beef up a non-existent resume.  He calls himself a job creator, but has, in fact, destroyed the livelihood of middle-class Americans by dismantling companies and selling the parts to the highest bidder.  He is in fact, a glorified repo-man.


Who We Are:


We, the people, are the job creators. We are the labor, the sweat, and the sacrifice the 1% will never make. Big corporations are running out of people to exploit. They keep moving from one third-world country to another in search of free labor in which to produce goods with American labels.


We, the people, are the buyers of these foreign made goods because the American economy is 70% consumer driven.  These corporations never counted on a rebellion, or understand that when living wages are scarce, Americans do not spend.


They also did not count on retaliation: Rush Limbaugh has lost millions of dollars in sponsors.  Koch Industries is feeling the wrath of the people as well; from refusing to purchase what they produce to no longer believing there is such a thing as “clean coal.”


What we have done and need to continue doing (suggestions) :

Occupy Wall Street (actually, occupy everything)


**Refuse to purchase any more products made over seas.
**Purchase only what you truly need, forgo the ‘wants’, they are temporary & accumulate in your home.
**Swap or get stuff on Free Cycle. 
**Leave your dollars in your community through Craigslist.
**Bank only in your Credit Union to keep your money locally and support your community.
**Shop locally at independent bookstores, candle-makers, consignment shops, farmer’s market, etc.

**Support businesses that provide living-wages to your Neighbors.  For instance, Costco provides starting wages at $17 an hour and  (promotes) from within. Wall Street has called Costco the Anti-Wal-Mart and resent their success (achieved) by doing just the opposite of what is expected of a corporation. 
Costco offers an excellent health care plan for their employees and we get excellent customer service.  Costco provides products under their label that surpasses quality standards of famous name-brand products.  (No, I don’t have stock or work there)(.)

**Need your car repaired? Find a locally owned shop with a good reputation and forgo the dealership. I know the dealership is local, but at some point, we have to support the smaller businesses.

**Need glasses? a Dentist? - Get someone that is not affiliated with a national chain and recommended by people in your community. 
**Cookware? Buy and learn how to cook healthy meals at home on cast iron. LODGE is made in the USA by American Workers. 
**Support your community college and pay for services provided by students entering their profession.  They need the practice and the money stays in your community. You save money because they charge less and all the work is carefully supervised by experts in the field: Teachers! (yes, they are licensed professionals, who can teach and do the work themselves)
**What can you get done at a community college? from hair cuts, to dentistry, to automotive repair. You name it. Every community college provides different types of useful training. Support them as much as you can.


Be generous of your time. It feels good.

** Give two hours a week or a month to help a teacher in a classroom. They need you and appreciate you.
**Volunteer with animal shelters.
**Volunteer at your local library.
**Volunteer to provide meals or rides to the elderly.
**Volunteer at the food pantry.

**Again… Volunteer because it feels good to give. In exchange, you are an important cog in your community. Stay connected.  Who knows? Your work ethic, kindness, personality and generosity may translate into a good paying job because people have learned to trust and respect you.

William Trent Pancoast’s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Fried Chicken and Coffee, Night Train, The Mountain Call, Solidarity magazine, and US News & World Report. Pancoast retired from the auto industry in 2007 after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio.

Bill is a WCH Contributor who has allowed us to post this, novel in installments. We expect to bring you a chapter a week.

Bill Pancoast’s Wildcat is a funny, sad, and thoroughly convincing portrait of autoworkers–many damaged by war, broken dreams, or substance abuse–dependent on a General Motors plant in fictionalCranston,Ohio, during the Sixties and Seventies.  After reading this moving novel-in-stories, I once again asked myself: why is the subject of work so often neglected by today’s fiction writers?  Fortunately, we have Pancoast to fill in some of the blanks.                            

 –Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff                                                                                   

Chapter 5.3

Kent State

“Double time,” the lieutenant shouted through the fog, and then wondered at the futility of the words aimed at the platoon under his command. Moments before, Frankie had slipped in one of the snow-covered mud ruts and slid just enough to his right, only a foot maybe, and got under the tank tread. The lieutenant had turned only in time to see the wide-eyed expression of terror on the young Italian-American boy’s face as the tread advanced–Frankie knew there was not time to roll out of the way, and his head disappeared with a tiny pop under the tank tread. Another shell hit up in front of them, and the lieutenant could hear the shrapnel ricocheting off the tanks. Then came the shower of dirt and rocks raining down on him and his sergeant. He took one last look at Frankie as one of the guys pulled him off the side of the road and into the tree line. The noise of the tanks gunning their engines and the smell of diesel and gasoline were momentarily reassuring—these were the things of civilization. The tanks were firing now, but the enemy bullets were a steady rain on him and his men.

After seeing what happened to Frankie, the guys were trying to stay away from the tanks, but one of them had been picked off already by the barrage of bullets. The lieutenant shouted for them to get back down in line. Then came the steady German artillery barrage, one shell dropping every 20 seconds—off to the right, to the left, above center where the road turned, and then one right on top of them, and there were bodies and tank parts flying through the air, and the screaming of men—wounded and dying. “God help us,” the lieutenant muttered, and charged up and out of the roadway, shouting over and over, “Follow me! Follow me!” He jogged along the tree line, motioning for his men to follow. There were hedge rows a quarter mile away on both flanks, and in the darkness the tank commanders could only use their shells as tracers to try to get a bead on the machine gun bunkers. The lieutenant’s hand stung, and at first he thought it was because of the cold. Then he saw the blood. His ring finger had been caught by a bullet and severed just above the second joint. He felt its warm wetness with his thumb and was reassured that his wedding ring was still there.

He pushed the last of his men down the ravine past the tree line. Three days earlier they had numbered thirty-two, including him, but now they were six that he knew of. He hoped there were more than that scattered among the mile long line of tanks, and he turned to roll away down the hill. Then the first of the American artillery zeroed in, and the fires began dancing along the hedgerows. He ordered his men to dig in. They could still sacrifice themselves in the morning if need be.

“Morning, Dan,” a familiar voice broke him from these memories of the war.

“Morning, Fred…How was your holiday?”

“Great. Everybody was here. Keith was back from basic training, and Jim was here from school. How about you?”

“Good…it was good.”

The lieutenant refocused himself on the timecards in the racks along the wall as Fred passed him by. Good? No, it had not been good. Thanksgiving Day had been all right, a quiet day at home with his daughter and her fiancé, and his youngest son Tommy home from college. His oldest could not make it because it was his turn to be on duty as a first year resident. But then it had gone bad. He and Tommy had gone up to the American Legion on Friday about 4:00 p.m. to have a beer. A lot of the guys were there, off work from the factories on holiday, and the place was lively, some of the guys half shot by evening from sitting at the bar all day.

Dan knew them all, knew the WWII guys and their stories, knew the WWI guys and deferred to their age and their war, the Korean War guys, who had kind of had the shit handed to them, and now the handful of newer guys who had served, or were serving, inVietnam. He and Tommy had spent a lot of time there together through the years–shooting pool, eating the grilled burgers with onion as thick as the burger itself when Ralph was doing the cooking, hanging out with the regular guys Dan wanted all his kids to get to know, imperfections and all, the men who had fought the wars and risked their lives for the freedom of America. They were finishing their beers before leaving for home and supper when the news came on the TV at the end of the bar. There were the usual Vietnam scenes, the latest footage of the war, and then came some video from May 4 of that year of the Kent State shootings. After that, some still pictures of that May day on the hill were shown. It didn’t look any different to Tommy than the countless other times he had seen it—kids yelling and giving the troops the finger and throwing  rocks at them. Then came the shots. His roommate had wanted him to come along and play the game of “fuck-with-the-Guard,” but he didn’t want any part of it. He had a project due the next week and besides, he really did not want to take part in what was going on–pure vandalism and some out-of-control stuff. He had been on his way to the library after lunch when he saw some of the kids running up the hill between the library and the dorms and heard the shots. He shook his head and kept on going. It was just unreal to him that the Ohio National Guard was actually firing blanks on a college campus inOhioon a day in May. Then he heard the screaming.

Now as he watched the still pictures, he noticed one with a girl knelt over one of the dead students. “Should have shot that bitch, too,” Tommy heard from down the bar. “Fifty caliber is what they needed.”  “Damn hippies.”

Tommy stood up. “What the hell’s the matter with you…people were killed there,” he shouted. They glared at him. Who the hell did he think he was…fucking little draft dodger. What did he know about war? But he was Dan’s boy, and they grumbled into their beers as the lieutenant nodded to the bartender and headed for the door. Tommy stood for a few seconds, then turned and followed.

Outside, the lieutenant said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not? They want to cheer on shooting unarmed kids? Fuck them.”

“The soldiers had a job….”

“They shouldn’t have had live ammo.”

“You don’t understand….”

“…You and that bunch of burnouts in there are the ones that don’t understand.”

“Don’t talk to me like that….” the lieutenant said, putting his thumb on his ring finger as he had so many years before.

The lieutenant and Tommy had never discussed the shooting. They had barely discussed the war, and now they stood squared off 10 feet apart in the gravel parking lot behind the local American Legion Hall, gathering spot of heroes, veterans, and freedom fighters from America’s wars. The lieutenant spat in the gravel. He was secretly glad that neither of his sons had had to go to Vietnam. He had never been the same since he and his men had straggled out of the woods in Germany, and all six of them had been loaded into a truck and moved up to France. They were all treated for battle fatigue and eventually went their separate ways to finish the war. The lieutenant, with the help of plenty of alcohol, spent the remainder of the war in France doing transportation logistics, which he had studied in college. But he had never been right again. Nobody who has been where he was and seen what he saw is ever right again.

He looked at Tommy. He was a good kid. The best of his three children, the most naturally caring, and the one he would most trust with anything. Tommy—he just did what was right.

“So what should they have done?” he asked.

“They should have thrown their rifles on the ground and walked away.”

“…Bullshit,” the lieutenant said and got in his car and drove away, leaving Tommy in the gravelly dust behind the American Legion Hall.

The lieutenant was tired as he finished up the time cards before lunch. And his arm was aching from holding the clipboard for so long, a strange, pulsing ache that went up into his neck. He hadn’t talked to Tommy since the prior afternoon. After he had gone home, the lieutenant had looked through his unit book. Seemed like a long time ago, but it was only twenty-five years since he had gotten out of the service. Twenty-five years andAmericawas already in its second major war, firstKoreaand nowVietnam. Tommy stayed out late, and the lieutenant had gone to sleep thinking that maybe there really was something wrong with this Vietnam War.

WCH Contributor Patrick Murfin’s writing can be found regularly at the blog Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout

The oil portrait of Joe Hill that looked over my desk in IWW General Headquarters.

On November 19, 1915 Utah authorities took Joe Hill from his prison cell, tied him to a strait back chair, blindfolded him and pinned a paper heart on his chest.  Then, in accordance with the local custom a firing squad of five men, four of them with live rounds in their rifles and one with a blank perforated that paper valentine.

No one was better at setting words to popular or sacred songs to use in educating and rousing up workers than Joseph Hillstrom, a Swedish immigrant who drifted into the migratory labor life of the American west shortly after the dawn of the 20th Century.  He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1910 and was soon sending songs to IWW papers, including his most famous composition, The Preacher and the Slave, meant to be sung to the music of the Salvation Army bands that were frequently sent to street corners to drown out Wobbly soapbox orators.

As a “footloose Wobbly” Hill was likely to blow into any western town where there was a strike or free speech fight going.  He was a big part of any Little Red Songbook from 1913 on with such contributions as The Tramp, There is Power in the Union, Casey Jones the Union Scab, Scissor Bill, Mr. Block, and Where the River Frasier Flows.  He also began to compose original music as well, the most famous of which was The Rebel Girl which he dedicated to the teen-age organizer of Eastern mill girls, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. 

Hill also dispatched caustic, if crude, cartoons to Industrial Solidarity, the union’s newspaper, some of which ended up on silent agitators—stickers meant to slapped up in mess halls, in lumber camps, in city flops and beaneries, and even factory floors. 

Joe Hill was often the first fellow worker ready to take the stump at a free speech fight and the first arrested.  He was loved by his fellow working stiffs and feared as an enormous pain in the side of western bosses.

Hill showed up in Salt Lake City where the local copper barons feared he might bring their miners out on strike.  When he showed up at a doctor’s office with a bullet wound, he was arrested and charged with the robbery and murder of a grocer the night before.  He refused to give police an alibi claiming that a woman’s honor was involved.  He was tried, convicted and executed by firing squad in 1915.  He was just 36 years old.

Most scholars agree that it was physically impossible for him to have been involved in the robbery or to be shot by the grocer.  The judgment of history is that Joe Hill was framed.  He became a martyr to labor in no small measure because of his Last Words, a letter to IWW General Secretary Treasurer William D. “Big Bill Haywood, “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize… Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.” That has been shortened as a union motto to “Don’t Mourn Organize.”

He also composed a memorable Last Will:

My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan,
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

My body? Oh, if I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow,
My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my Last and final Will.
Good Luck to All of you,
Joe Hill

In 1971 I was serving as General Secretary Treasurer of the I.W.W. I was a 22 year old kid who often worked in the Chicago office late at night nursing a quart of Meister Brau as I tried to catch up with a backlog of correspondence and reports from delegates around the world.  A large oil painting of Joe Hill looked down on me from across my desk—the same desk Big Bill Haywood had used.  Joe’s blue eyed stare kind of kept me on task.

One day the mail brought a letter with a small manila envelope enclosed marked “Joe Hill’s Ashes.”  It seems that someone cleaning out a closet in Detroit found an overcoat with the envelope in the pocket.  The overcoat had belonged to his father, a local IWW officer in 1915.  For some unknown reason he had never got around to scattering the ashes.

A few days later several fellow workers took the ashes down to what was then still called Waldheim Cemetery where we scattered the ashes around the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial, which was surrounded by the graves of dozens of unionists, anarchists, Socialists and Communists including Emma Goldman. We sang some songs and went on our way, convinced that we had given Joe a last farewell.

Not quite.  In 1988 the Postal Service discovered that it was in possession of anther envelope containing Joe’s ashes.  It had been intercepted by some vigilant local postmaster in 1915 for suspected subversive content.  The envelope was sent to the National Archive, but eventually claimed by the IWW.  The ashes were divided into several small packages.  At the suggestion of Abby Hoffman the British labor troubadour Billy Bragg reportedly ate a small bit.  Other packets were scattered to the air in Canada, Nicaragua, and Australia.  Some of those sent to his home country of Sweden were scattered but some were buried in the wall of a union hall in Landskrona.

The final packet was taken in 1989 by legendary IWW editor, artist and poet Carlos Cortez to be scattered at the dedication to the six striking coal miners killed by Colorado State Police machine gun fire in the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre.

Joe would have approved of it all.

Bob Simpson is a Social Media/Writer at Webtrax Studio, studied Urban Education at Catholic University of America, and is a regular blogger at “The Bobbosphere.” 

How does a person of faith live a purposeful life in a world gone wrong?  Where does a

moral vision come from, a vision that can thrive despite the inevitable blows that fall upon it?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since Addie Wyatt, the celebrated South Side Chicago labor leader died in March of this year. I read several of the obituaries about her, but none of them really explained the road she traveled to become an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, a founder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, an international vice-president of the United Food and Commercial Workers(UFCW) and aTime Magazine Person of the Year (1975).

She was a very unique and talented person, but throughout her life, she had the solidarity of others to draw strength from. Great leaders need great people to work with them if they are to accomplish their goals. The obituaries I read in the mainstream media left out that she not only shaped social justice movements, but that she was shaped by them as well.  After reviewing her life and accomplishments, I don’t think Addie Wyatt would want to be remembered as a one woman show.

Faith and solidarity were her tools for greatness. The young Addie Wyatt found these tools within her family, at her church and in the harsh realities of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Born in Mississippi, she first lived on a quiet residential street near gardens, fields, chickens, hogs, and  fruit trees. Her dad was a tailor and her mom a teacher.

The Depression hit when Wyatt was still a small child and her parents heard that there were more opportunities in the North. It was a rumor that proved to be illusionary for the Wyatt family. When the family moved to  Chicago they found that work was scarce and and pay was rock-bottom. Housing and food were expensive so they had to rely on the solidarity of their extended family: staying with relatives and moving frequently. Her father would work for 50-60 hours a week when jobs were available, but still could not support his spouse and their 8 children.  He turned to alcohol in his anger and frustration, further complicating the family’s already perilous existence. Addie Wyatt grew closer to her mother and grandmother:

“They were loving women, they prayed together and they shared together and they raised us together. We had very little economic security. There were times when there was no money in the house. At the age of eight I started making little paper flowers and fiber glass flowers and sold them. I also made candy and wrapped it in little papers and sold it. I sometimes brought fifty cents or a dollar into the house. I know now this was like ten, twenty, or twenty five dollars, but I didn’t realize it then.”–Interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

As a member of the Church of God, Wyatt came to know the importance of both faith and solidarity. Like many black churches then and now, faith in God also meant faith in the people around you, faith that as God’s children, they would come together in what Dr. King later called “a beloved community.” In practical terms, this meant pooling both material and spiritual resources to survive the ongoing economic calamity that was compounded by the entrenched racism of American society. Her particular church practiced an equality among men and women. Women were encouraged to be leaders in all aspects of church organization. Based on her family and church experience, Wyatt came to know the power of women’s leadership and solidarity. These experiences would later form a basis for her work in the labor and feminist movements.

After attending high school, getting married and having children, Addie Wyatt applied for a job at the Armour meat packing company as a typist. What she didn’t know at the time was that Armour did not hire black women for their front office. She was hired, but when she went to work on Monday, she was given a uniform and a cap and sent to the canning department. She joined the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) union after learning it was responsible for her benefits and grievance protection.

She stayed at Armour 3 years, was fired from a job at a hatpin factory for union organizing and then found a job at Illinois Meat in 1947. She was once again a member of  the UPWA, but reluctant to become deeply involved because of her church work and her community activism in her Altgeld Gardens neighborhood. But the UPWA was very unique and its leaders would soon recognize Wyatt’s strong character and leadership potential.

The meatpacking industry is not for the faint of heart. The work of slaughtering and dismembering large animals takes a toll on the human workers too. Upton Sinclair’s famous book The Jungle, written in 1905, exposed the brutal dangers of the work, the unsanitary conditions and the contempt that meatpacking owners had for their own workers. A strike for better wages was crushed in 1904 and  another was crushed in 1921. The big meatpackers used ethnic differences to divide workers. At first it was by nationality and language, but especially after 1921, when a large number of black strikebreakers were hired, the division came by color.

Typical early slaughterhouse 

Children of meatpackers search for food scraps

When the UPWA was born in the 1930’s during the depths of the Depression packinghouse organizers confronted the problem of ethnic and racial division head on. The communists, socialists, IWW members, independent labor militants, New Deal visionaries and class war hardened CIO evangelists had learned a hard lesson.

“The first accomplishment was the bonding together of different nationalities. They didn’t even speak to one another. At Squires we had the Irish, Italian, Greeks, Portuguese and others. It was through the organizing committee that they were approached They were hesitant at first, because the one didn’t trust the other…There was fear of being discharged to make room for one of the other group.” –William Hosford (UPWA member)

In Chicago, the situation was even more complicated. Ethnic and racial conflict in 1919 had led to a deadly race riot, a civil war instigated by whites between the black and white working class on Chicago’s South Side. Distrust ran deep after the blood that had flowed. During the 1930’s Black Chicago developed a well deserved reputation for social and political militancy in the struggle against white supremacy in the city. The communists were probably the best organized group pushing for multi-racial working class unity. When the UPWA established itself in the Chicago stockyards and huge meatpacking plants, black workers immediately became a dynamic and powerful force within the union. The slogan of the UPWA was “Negro and White, Unite and Fight,” showing how the rivalries among European ethnic groups were fading as they came to see themselves as “white people.”

Depression Era Chicago stockyards revolt

Much of the pressure on the meatpacking companies came from actions within the workplace using slowdowns, sit-ins and mass rallies. This culture of direct shop floor democracy was carried into the the organization of the union itself, and the UPWA became one of the most democratic unions within theCongress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the labor movement as a whole. Their democratic tradition was put to the test during the Red Scare of the Cold War that followed World War II. The CIO was torn apart through government repression and internal power struggles about the presence of  communists in the labor movement. The UPWA had communists among its leadership but emerged  with its militant democratic traditions largely intact.

UPWA mass meeting

 The leadership of the UPWA knew that freedom is a constant struggle and undertook a unique strategy of encouraging leadership to come from the rank and file workers through labor education classes and regional conferences. Union leaders like the socialist Ralph Helstein and the communist Jesse Prosten were especially concerned about promoting people of color and women within the union. Racial and gender job discrimination in the industry was still a major problem and the owners liked it that way because of the bitterness and strife that it sowed. Discrimination meant division and divisions among the working class could be fatal to the union’s success.

Addie Wyatt attended one of the conferences in the early 1950’s and described it this way:

“At this conference we were told that our talents and skills were needed, and the leaders urged women and blacks and Spanish speaking people to become involved. Well this was a good sign to me because nowhere had I seen the picture that I saw at the union meeting, at the union conference — blacks, whites, Spanish speaking people, men and women, young and old meeting together, talking about their common problems. This was a very impressive sight. So I went back after that conference, recommending to the women that we ought to find a woman to run for vice president of our local union.”— Interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

UPWA: Unity in diversity

No one wanted to take such a big step so Wyatt reluctantly agreed to run, sure that she would not win. Not only did she win, but when the president of the local resigned, she moved into the top spot as president. Now with a house full of kids and leadership of  her Altgeld Gardens community group, she was now head of a UPWA local with all of the heavy responsibilities of grievance handling and negotiating. Eighteen months later, she was hired by the UPWA to become a paid union staffer for District 1 which included responsibilities for a 5 state area.

Addie Wyatt, with her already formidable experience as a woman of faith and solidarity was now a leader in a union which took those values very seriously. The union leadership had faith that with dedicated  organizing, white workers could learn to abandon racism and that men could learn to respect and value their women co-workers. The union leadership believed that solidarity among working class people could bring about long overdue social changes and that the union’s job was not just to fight for better wages and working conditions, but to help build a better world. The union went beyond short term pragmatism and the model of business unionism favored by most of the US labor movement. The UPWA had a a moral vision and they were not afraid to share it.

Packinghouse workers had come a long way since the days of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. 

Of course some workers blissfully ignored the union’s brand of social unionism and others were openly hostile. It became one of Addie Wyatt’s jobs to uphold the union’s moral vision in her practical day to day work. She traveled to the predominantly white locals of Southern Illinois under the direction of Charlie Hayes, the first black UPWA midwest district director, and later a member of the US Congress.

In the those days of Jim Crow accommodations,  Wyatt could not always find restaurants or lodgings because of her color. She sometimes ate a dinner of crackers, cookies and lunch meat in her car. But her steadfast work representing the often suspicious and distrustful white workers made a difference. During a long bitter strike she traveled all over the region organizing soup kitchens and Christmas parties for the children. That made a huge difference. Straight forward and respectful, she was also no pushover and her persistence and patience was legendary. The walls of Jim Crow began to crack even in the Dixie-like conditions of Southern Illinois.

UPWA mobilization meeting

Wyatt was very sensitive to what would some have called the “triple jeopardy,” being black, female and working class:

“I find myself as a black woman oft times fighting on three fronts — the worker’s front, the black front and the female front — trying to overcome all of these pressures. And I got a three fold impact of all of these discriminations “isms.” Sometimes I think it’s much more difficult as a black woman, because we have to carry the burden of all these problems. It isn’t always easy for women, and especially for black women, because we have the white male, the white female and the black male all three looking down upon us, and we black women are on the bottom rung.”— from the interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

The UPWA did not confine its anti-discrimination efforts to the workplace. The union was one of the most fervent supporters of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 led by Dr. Martin Luther King and was the only union to take part in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Addie Wyatt was tasked with raising money for the bus boycott from the predominantly white locals in the Midwest.

 While most unions were content with an anti-discrimination clause, the UPWA was pro-active and assertive, both for the practical necessity of multi-racial unity, but also because of its core moral vision. Although the Chicago locals with their large and militant black membership were a driving force in the union, the UPWA as a whole was majority white and white workers took part in the anti-discrimination efforts. Wyatt was appreciative of white support for the black freedom struggle:

“[W]hen you think in terms of the white people, there are decent white men and women. Had it not been for some of them we never would have broken through and come out of the degradation of slavery that we’ve come through.”–from the interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

Wyatt had the honor of meeting Dr. King personally when he came to Chicago to accept the donations that UPWA had collected for the Montgomery struggle. She reports that in private King had a great sense of humor and a relaxed unpretenious manner. He spoke at the 1957 UPWA national conference and Wyatt followed up with more invitations to speak.

Dr. King responded by saying,“Addie, I’m coming because you called me, and I know you wouldn’t be calling me for just anything. You know how busy I am.” Wyatt was later jailed in Selma for her part in the voting rights protests of 1965 where many people were badly beaten and Viola Liuzzo was murdered. She was with Dr. King when he came to Chicago in 1965-66 in his open housing campaign which was met with the contempt of Mayor Richard J. Daley and the rocks of white racist mobs.

 
Dr. King on the streets of Chicago

 The UPWA mobilizations around racial discrimination inspired union women to take on gender discrimination. This was during the 1950‘s when feminism was supposedly “dead.” Black women were especially prominent in this effort. Although not as successful in fighting the entrenched sexism in the industry, women were able to make material gains, gain more confidence in their own power, change male attitudes and help to plant the seeds for the feminist revolution that would explode in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

 Wyatt was one of the leaders of this movement within the UPWA and as in the battle against racial discrimination, she took women’s concerns outside of the workplace and into the larger community. In 1961, President Kennedy, under pressure from women’s groups, created the Commission on the Status of American Women headed up by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt asked Wyatt to serve on the Labor Legislation Committee of the Commission. The Commission published a final report, but more importantly, brought women together  and established important connections that eventually led to the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.

 Wyatt participated in the early meetings of NOW, but  not satisfied that the organization could adequately promote the interests of union women, went on to help found the Coalition of Labor Union Women(CLUW) in 1974. CLUW’s early years were difficult because of major disagreements among union women about how to move forward. Many of the more radical rank and file women objected to the domination by union staff people and officials like Wyatt. Coming out of the women’s liberation movement and the rank and file labor revolts of the time, they envisioned something that was (ironically) more like UPWA in its most militant period.

Wyatt’s work in the labor movement had become more difficult as well. Out of the  killing floors of the USA’s meatpacking industry had been born the UPWA, a working class organization for human rights that helped change the face of a nation. Although largely ignored by the history books, the work of Wyatt and the other UPWA activists was vitally important to the black freedom movement and later the women’s movement.

But by the 1960’s, the meatpacking industry was changing. The big companies were facing new competition as they deployed new technology.  The big plants in Chicago with their largely black workforce, the heart of the UPWA’s progressive base, were shut down. The union became more white, more rural and less numerous. The UPWA’s social mission needed dues money and activists and by 1968 the UPWA was in grave financial difficulty. A series of mergers with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the Retail Clerks union brought what remained of the UPWA  into the United Food and Commercial Workers. The old UPWA’s shop floor democracy and vibrant social mission became lost in the shuffle of union politics.

Then in the 1980’s, an all-out assault on packinghouse workers by the owners resulted in a bitter lost strike in one of the union’s flagship locals in Austin, Minnesota and was accompanied by severe concessions across the industry. Today with a largely immigrant workforce, conditions in some of the USA’s meatpacking plants are scarcely better than what Upton Sinclair described in his 1905 novel The Jungle.

Police use teargas in the tragic 1980′s Hormel strike in Austin MN

The United Packinghouse Workers of America was a brief and shining moment in American labor history, but it casts a light on where the labor movement stands today. Topdown narrow “pragmatic” business unionism  proved to be a poor defense against the corporate assaults on the working class that began in the late 1970’s. The UPWA social militancy couldn’t do it alone, but maybe they showed the broader labor movement the way to a better future.

Can US unions adopt a  democratic rank and file driven culture to overcome the cruel assaults on the US working class and help make a radical societal transformation? The grassroots working class revolt that began in Wisconsin last year and continued with the emergence of Occupy Wall Street suggest that may be a possibility.

Addie Wyatt retired from the United Food and Commercial Workers in 1984. She had seen both inspirational victories and heartbreaking defeats, had her personal triumphs and made her personal mistakes, but her faith and solidarity remained unshaken.

With her husband, she plunged full time into her work with the Vernon Park Church of God, a church with a social as well as a spiritual mission. The corporate assault on the working class had deeply wounded Chicago’s South Side with lost wages and lost jobs, causing mounting social ills. As usual, these wounds were felt most grievously among communities of color. When she and husband retired from the ministry, they then established a community center close to her home. In 2002 she reflected on her life’s work:

“We now have a family life community center where young people and seniors can come and interact with each other, where they can feel wanted, loved, and appreciated, and where they have an opportunity to express their Godgiven talents, and to know their purpose for being here, and to help others. That’s been a great joy which we have shared in the labor movement, in the women’s movement, in the civil rights movement, wherever we go, and I don’t separate them. We don’t, because it’s the total package that God has given us.”— from the interview with Joan McGann Morris

Wyatt had returned to her spiritual roots in Black Chicago, still living a life of faith and solidarity.

 Addie Wyatt passed away on March 28, 2012.

Sources Consulted

 The Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, 1924-2012 by Ronnie Reese

 Addie L. Wyatt Biography at JRank

 Video Oral History Interview with Addie L. Wyatt by Julieanna Richardson

 Rev. Addie L. Wyatt Interview with Joan Morris

 Addie Wyatt Interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

 UFCW Commemorates Black History Month: Celebrating Our Own by Leilah

 The King Philosophy by the King Center

 Negro and White: Unite and Fight by Roger Horowitz

 Out of the Jungle by Les Orear

William Trent Pancoast’s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Fried Chicken and Coffee, Night Train, The Mountain Call, Solidarity magazine, and US News & World Report. Pancoast retired from the auto industry in 2007 after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio.

Bill is a WCH Contributor who has allowed us to post this, novel in installments. We expect to bring you a chapter a week.

I used to tell Bill Pancoast that he was going to get his ass kicked if he didn’t shut up. I’m glad he didn’t listen to me. Wildcat is the story of the auto industry no one ever believed when I told it. Fiction is fact.           

 –Ken Kreiger, retired autoworker, 41 years service

Chapter 5.2

The Mathematician

In high school, Dana was on the math team, one of only seven members the year he was a senior. Algorithms, calculus, trig functions, and advanced geometric configurations were the language he spoke best. His high school math teacher said that Dana had one of the best analytical minds he had ever seen and should apply to both Case Western and MIT.

His dad had laughed at him. “Hell, you’re an idiot! College? You can’t even build a fucking dog house,” he had shouted at Dana, referring to his attempt to build one so he could get a dog when he was eleven years old. The old man had bought him a four by eight sheet of plywood and some two by fours and nails and set the wood up against the saw horses in the corner of the garage. Dana drew a picture of the dog house and would go out to the damp, dark garage everyday after school. He even cut the two by fours in half to make them easier to deal with, but the handsaw kept getting stuck in the plywood.

It was about this time, after the dog house defeat and after his mother left home, that Dana started walking with his head down. Folks mistook him for a wizened old man when they saw him shuffling along, never looking up, like he carried a great weight on his thin, young shoulders. It wasn’t until he met algebra a couple years later that he snapped out of his physical slump and began walking upright again. He might never have a dog, but math was something that felt good and true, just like he imagined it would have felt to have a dog when he was eleven.

He had been somebody for a while. He always got the top scores in math on the Iowa Basic Skills Tests, and scored in the top one tenth of one per cent on the Merit Scholarship tests. He would be a professor, maybe, or a scientist. But his dad just laughed at him. “Shit, boy,” he would holler at him and hold out the big roll of money he carried in his pocket at all times, “Here’s what it’s all about!” And the old man would point out the back window of the dilapidated farmhouse to the junkyard he had made out of the forty acres he had inherited when his dad died.

Dana’s dad was rich. He worked second shift, seven days a week at the stamping plant and ran the junkyard during the day. When the boy was a senior in high school, his dad gave Milt Jeffers $1,000 to get Dana a job when the company was hiring again. Sure enough, by the fall of 1967, Dana had been hired, and had become a full-fledged autoworker. Once again, he started walking with his head down.

Then in the spring of 1970, he found love, got laid, got married, and he straightened up again. She was a kindly, plump girl, as happy as Dana was to have found someone, and she didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t check into going to college part time and studying math. There certainly couldn’t be any harm in it. So he had enrolled in the regional Ohio State campus in calculus, and was scheduled to start in the winter quarter of 1971.

But then had come the draft notice just before Thanksgiving in 1970. “Viet fucking Nam,” he had muttered over and over as he and his wife sat at their little kitchen table, and he drank beer for only the second time in his life.

“It’s time for bed, dear,” she had finally said, as midnight approached.

“Viet fucking Nam,” he had answered and passed out on the table.

Dana started walking with his head down again. He would never be a college professor. He would never win the Fields Medal. He would never do anything but stack five thousand fucking door support panels every day for the rest of his life. His fate was unthinkable, and he hatched a plan, which, if successful, would not only keep him out of Vietnam but put him in college fulltime on the way to fulfilling his destiny as a mathematical genius.

He would get hurt at work in order to make his plan a success. If he were permanently disabled, he could collect Workman’s Compensation benefits, or even Social Security disability benefits. For days, he imagined the various ways he could get injured—get run over by a tow motor, get his foot caught in the conveyor track, get crushed between a rack and the press, get his arm tangled in the parts conveyor–he would figure something out. But after a week of flirting with tragedy and death, Dana had gotten nowhere. He always stopped at the last moment before walking into the aisle in front of a vehicle, and the one time he forced himself to carry through, he got honked at and told to get the fuck out of the way. Another day he tried to cut his hand off in a press, but only got grease on his shirt before he pulled his arm away. Disabling himself was proving to be more difficult than he had imagined.

Finally, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Dana decided to walk into a scrap chute. He didn’t know how badly he would be hurt, but some of the guys who had fallen in got pretty fucked up; one had been killed, but Dana was sure that could not happen to him. Right after lunch, he abandoned his post and walked across the aisle to the quarter panel line. Phoomph. He fell faster than he had thought he would. Immediately he was struck by the putrid smell. Then he felt the sharp scrap pieces cutting him. He cried out, but it was too late. More pieces came down on his head, cutting his scalp. Then he got stuck, and the slime from the panel lube was suffocating him as he struggled. Finally, after a full minute in the bottleneck at the bottom of the chute, he came piling out onto the conveyor belt in the basement. Shit, he told himself, this was really a bad idea. He was coated in blood from head to foot. He tried to get up and off the moving conveyor belt, but kept slipping and cutting himself even more. Then his conveyor hit the main conveyor. He had to get off this thing. Hadn’t anyone seen him fall, he wondered? He made one violent lunge to try and roll off the thing and onto the concrete floor six feet below, but his leg was stuck. Dana realized he might die! And he wasn’t ready to die. Better to die inVietnamthan in this stinky, slimy pile of scrap. He passed other conveyors feeding into the main one, like so many small streams feeding into a river. And the conveyor was getting wider. Shit! The baler house was only another thirty yards away. He pulled himself up and looked ahead at the scrap metal feeding into the compartments and being squashed into two foot cubes. The noise was deafening, and he knew that no one could possibly hear his yelling and crying, yet he kept it up, tugging at his leg, which was held fast with the frayed wire of the conveyor belt deeply entwined in his blue jeans. He

forced himself onto his side to try and get his pocket knife out. He was on the final uphill run to the baler house. Then he felt the pain. A panel stuck along the side of the belt sliced him, and he looked down, his crotch already red from the gushing blood. He lay back and waited for death, suddenly feeling calm. Let death come, he told himself. Maybe he could get a dog in heaven, or puppies even.

Up in the baler house, Howard belched and said, “I got all the cans?” They were tidying the place up for the next shift, and Howard was getting ready to toss the day’s beer cans into the compacter when he saw a big red thing on the conveyor. It was a body! Howard hit the E-stop and yelled for the others, then called the maintenance base to get some millwrights over to get Dana unstuck. Hell, he wasn’t going to wade onto that stinky mess. He didn’t have to—the conveyors were maintenance work. It was a millwright job, not his classification.