Since my last post dealt with the local labor situation, I have been mulling over why labor issues generate such little discussion whenever I get together with left-leaning friends. Hell, Tibet (which while serious, is not the number one issue before us here and now) gets more play in some of these circles than issues dealing with the one thing that consumes our precious hours of life, other than sleep for the lucky ones among us.
Since the personal is often the origin of the personally political, I figured that if I examined my own history with organized labor, I may be able to gain insight as to why others are so quiet on labor issues and unions.
In my background, I have several connections to a union. First and foremost, I was born into a labor household. My father voted around 1961-2, along with others, to successfully bring the United Steelworkers into the sheet-metal-finishing plant he worked at in Rancho Cucamonga. From then on, until his retirement in 1997, he was a member of a local of the United Steelworkers of America AFL-CIO. As a result, I grew up exposed to union culture. Don't get me wrong, my dad was not an active union man, so I cannot claim to be something of a union-diaper baby. But every month or so, a multi-page newsletter did come in the mail from the union, and as a boy eager to read whatever came before me, I consumed it and it shaped my mind.
From its pages I learned about union struggle in the past and in the then present. Added to what my parents and relatives taught me, those pages informed me about FDR and the New Deal long before it came up in school. That USWA newsletter also taught me a lot about the burning issues of the early and mid 60s: the War on Poverty, civil rights, minority group struggles, the Cold War, Vietnam and also about those who oppossed progress on most of these issues, our friends on the right. More importantly, it helped to dissolve the ethnic isolation I lived in as a child. My parents kept mainly to family and a few fellow Latino friends, so I grew up with very few non-latino peers. But in those pages, I encountered people from all over the country who shared stories, recipes and other things that I could relate to. Most important, they were union people, like my dad, so they were, in a way, family too. It was testiment to the power of the printed word, TV, while informative, didn't break down the same kinds of walls.
Although at the time, I didn't realize it, I was lucky because it was the newsletter of the USWA, and the USWA was among the more left-leaning unions in the AFL-CIO. If it had been from a different union, I may have been exposed to a more rightist slant. So, to sum it up, I grew up as a self-taught unionist.
However, I was also a child of the unruly 60s and the deeply divided 70s. Unions became associated with George Meany, with the Nixon Teamsters, with Cold War brinksmanship, with support for Vietnam, with Archie-Bunker-like fear and loathing of the Counterculture, with entrenched racism, and ultimately, as Marcuse articulated it, with the old left that must be overcome. I didn't entirely buy into the popular left criticism of the time, but it did temper my thoughts.
My own experience as a member of a union also further tempered my thoughts. When I was employed in 1980 at Chaffey College as an Instructional Assistant in their learning center, I eagerly joined the CSEA, the union for those who were not certificated teachers. I soon found out that that meant being down in the pecking order. And later, when I attained a adjunct teaching position, that also meant being down the food chain from the full timers. What I found is that like all other American democratic institutions, unions are far from perfect. But I did not forget that being part of the union gave me benefits and gave me backing when I dealt with the district. This lesson was reinforced by some years working in non-union retail. I could see and feel my freedom curtailed when working non-union.
So my personal background with unions is imperfect. So what? I am also a student of history. My BA and all of my considerable masters work, is in history. And all of that has taught me that unions are a product of real progressive democratic progress in action. We of the left cannot help but to be involved with bringing democracy to the workplace. It remains the last, enduring work of human liberation. And sure, because unions are democratic, they are inherently imperfect and require constant involvement by everyone involved. That I had to get over, and I have.
But at a price. Like my father, I was not as involved in the union as I should have been, and like my father, I missed out on the opportunity my union afforded me by being too wrapped up in my family and my own life-dramas. It didn't help that I also got caught up in mind-numbing consumerist culture. And to make it more mind-numbing, it was gay consumerist culture. The worst! But gay or non-gay, doesn't a lack of involvement in things that should matter sound familiar? We aren't let down by democratic institutions, like unions, we let them down when we are not involved.
We of the left have got to collectively get over whatever keeps us from being involved in promoting unionization and in perfecting our unions when we are in them.
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