I HAVE A FREE RIDERS CARD.

Recent news about Volkswagen in Tennessee voting against organizing with the United Auto Workers Union surprised me. Union membership has fallen dramatically and Union Bashing is a favorite activity of the Republican Party, and corporate interests in general. I name the GOP because they traditionally support corporate America over labor, and especially unions. I don't know if there was intimidation involved or not, but it worries me that young people, who have difficulty finding meaningful work to support a family, seem to have no remembrance of what Unions have meant to working people.  My surprise was augmented by watching the Triangle Fire on PBS, about the horrible working conditions women, men, boys, and young girls faced to simply feed themselves and pay for slum shelter.



Corporate America thought it was their right to pay whatever they wanted while they collected millions in profits. Millions in the 1800's was mucho big bucks.  No safety standards or any regulation of the thousands of factory workers who produced clothing, jewelry, pots, pans, you name it, existed. New York was the center of the garment industry.
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The Triangle Fire, where 145 girls perished in a shirtwaist factory, kind of woke up the nation to the idea that working people should have some protections. The girls worked 7 days a week for 14 hours a day. They were not allowed to get up and get a drink of water, nor use the bathroom until lunch time, which they ate at their sewing machines. If they didn't sew fast enough the boss would chastise them.  If they made a mistake,  it came off their meager pay. When fire broke out,  the door to the street was kept locked so no one could sneak out for a moment, and they were trapped on the ninth floor. The bosses got out on the first packed, slow elevator. New York City FD ladders could only reached seven stories high. Those that got out on the fire escape, (some escaped,)  until the fire escape fell to the ground under theie weight.

The shirtwaist factories in NYC went on strike. The policemen who beat girls for striking, arrested them for striking, and falsely arrested them as prostitutes, were now faced with picking up the bodies of girls they had hassled before the strike was settled. The Triangle, did not go union like most of the other shirt waist factories, but Triangle did reduce hours and paid more money. No safety regulations applied to any of them.
I have a Free Riders Card which states:

I am opposed to all unions. Therefore, I am opposed to all the benefits unions have won through the years: paid vacations, sick leave, seniority rights, wage increases, pension and insurance plans, safety laws, workers compensation, Social Security, overtime, unemployment benefits and job security.  I authorize my employer to withhold the amount of the union-won benefits from my paycheck and donate it to charity.

Unions are still needed. In the early 1970's, when the protestors on the streets of Berkeley, were screaming at the cops and calling them PIGS, they were secretly smiling because Sheriff Houchins went to the Board of Supervisors to plead for overtime pay for Deputy Sheriffs,  a first for the Department. The department later unionized and won modern benefits unavailable to them previously.

In the 1960's, just before retirement, the company my father worked for, took many measures to get him to quit so he couldn't collect his pension, including midnight phone calls to my mother, tacks under his tires, etc.  My Dad walked into the administration office with both of his Sons-in-law, dressed in suits and ties carrying briefcases. He asked them to make a formal statement in front of them, never revealing they were not lawyers. The company quit their harassment and he got his pension.

Do we really learn from the past?

HIGH SPEED RAIL

Last night, I attended a candidate’s night in Valley Springs. Speaking was Jack Uppal and Will Moore, both Democrats, running for the same seat in congress. Since Will is my brother, I naturally was there to support him. He stepped in the race when there was no one running on the Democratic ticket. Now, Uppal has joined the race and it was interesting to see the difference in the two candidates. Will is running as a “hard-hat” and actually wears one during his presentation. Uppal is a retired CEO of a big company, currently the anti-thesis of the type of candidate we want. Well, maybe, maybe not. I liked Uppal. Both candidates had good points. Also speaking was an old friend, Tom Aja,  involved with the labor unions. He  is working to make sure working people have a voice through their unions. The Chamber gives a voice to small and large businesses, corporations have a huge voice, but unions should not?  That is what Republicans are pushing, to eliminate, the voice of unions. Realize, I’m talking about the GOP higher-ups, not my Republican friends on the street.
Much of the discussion was about high speed rail coming to California, something the voters voted for and the GOP is pushing to reverse?  Why?  Money, money and more dirty money funneled to GOP lawmakers from automobile interests and big oil. They don’t want public transportation. Just like Shell Oil and Goodyear  Tires  bought up every company building a decent start on mass transportation. They trashed those companies, like the Red Car. They wanted the gas guzzlers, tire burning, and cement barons to be  king in California. So, now the same interests are attacking high speed rail, which will be built with union labor.
Don’t be fooled. Truck traffic is choking highway 99 with billions of  imports coming into our ports.  Having high speed rail will get the goods to market  better and faster and safer. It’s a people train. We can eliminate high-octane expensive flights to Los Angeles from Modesto. Rail will be  faster and quicker than the drive to Sacramento, and the two-hour park, inspection and wait to get on the plane.  High speed rail will give food vendors like dairy, nut growers, vegetable and egg, snack vendors, soft drinks, and coffee an uptick. It will bring huge benefits and jobs to Californians during the building of it. Those wages will be taxed. Those workers will spend. Then 120,000 estimated permanent jobs to maintain and run public transportation. And, remember, the naysayers will tell you it is too expensive to SPEND that kind of money. It isn’t an expense, it is  an INVESTMENT.  When you invest, you get a return on your money. It will keep giving back to the public for many, many years to come, just like the Bay Area BART system is doing now. The same anti-voices were present in the 1960′s when BART was proposed. I know, I was there. And, my candidate brother was too. He worked on BART’s infrastructure.

THE IRISH, MORE THAN BLARNEY

Being part Irish, I learned more about them from books and history than my own parentage. My father would sometimes say, "Greetuns', greetuns and salutations," when  he was in a good mood. And he'd say, "mournin' boys" to my girl friends, which kind of embarrassed me as a teen. We got the great big "eye", a television set, when I was about 16 and he didn't let me watch old British films because they aggrandized the British. (I really understood that after I read Trinity.)
He believed in political debate at the dinner table and never let us forget that the working man had to fight for every right he ever had and if it weren't for the unions, we'd all be working in sweatshops.
"I've worked all my life, and I never had a day of sick leave, and I've been plenty sick,"  he would say.
Even so, he was grateful for seniority, the right to organize and ask for pay increases, the right to complain if an individual thought he was fired unfairly. They won pension benefits, and health care, which in my father's time was simply a nurse on the job to report and treat injuries and provide a record that injuries happened on the job so the union could investigate if any safety rules were ignored.  They won the right to have written evaluations and records of their work so the boss couldn't lie about a man's worthiness. Companies didn't just roll over an capitulate. They fought it tooth and nail, and had other ways of forcing an older man off the job so they wouldn't have to pay a pension.
In my father's case, he worked for Pacific States Steel Company. They didn't like guys who wouldn't tow the line or complained to their union about infractions of the union rules and safety violations. He suffered through many attacks;  acid in his locker which ate holes in his clothes. Tacks under his tires, which gave him flat tires. His lunch sandwiches filled with sand; midnight phone calls and threats to my mother. (This happened in the 1960's.) They finally quit the harassment when the bosses had a meeting with the union and my dad appeared with my husband and my brother-in-law, both dressed in suits and ties carrying brief cases looking like lawyers, and holding a tape recorder. My dad got his pension of  $98 a month. When he died, my mother got $76 of that which was considered very generous.

My husband's job as a cop was subject to the whim of the Board of Supervisors. In the forties, cops would be fired if they tried to organize into a union and were told so. In fact, at one time you had to be a Republican and join the Masons to become a cop. Later, you had to be a Republican and a Mason to get a promotion. During one bitter strike by a local cannery in Alameda County, CA. cops were instructed to beat back the protesters with their batons even though the cannery workers had the right to protest. Even forming a deputy sheriff''s association was done with trepidation. Deputies served at the whim of the Board of Supervisors. They could not negotiate for better pay. They did not receive overtime pay. Eventually they received compensatory time, but certain bosses wouldn't sign their comp time cards and refused to give it to them. Other supervisors would come on the job and say, "You-take your vacation this week." Just like that. You took your time, with no opportunity to plan, and you were grateful that you got vacation at all.

The Irish were very much at the forefront of unions and union organizing. They suffered so much from the British, they made sure it wouldn't happen in their adopted countries, US and Australia. So, Happy St. Patricks day, and here be a Salute To The Irish, by gorrah!