We are all Slave now.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller

Thread One: Unions.

In the summer of 1965, I came home from my freshman year in college. No summer job prospect. My parents dropped me off one morning in a small manufacturing/warehouse district on Long Island, told me to knock on doors and ask for a job. They said they would pick me up when I called from a phone booth (Phone booth?) with a job. On the 4th place I asked, I was told I could be a substitute for packers and order-pullers in a warehouse for glass containers. Each regular employee would take two weeks off in the summer, and I would do his job for those two weeks. I got to know those no-collar guys pretty well. World War II vets. They gave me a lot of crap about being a college boy. I went back to school in September.

Summer of 1966, I went back and worked at the same place.

The Teamsters organized the warehouse in the winter of 1966. The men I worked with raised my situation with the Teamsters, of their own volition, and asked that the business be allowed to hire one, and only one, student, as a summer replacement during the period from Memorial Day through Labor Day. That student would NOT have to pay union dues.

I worked there each summer until 1968. I'll never cross a union picket line, anywhere, ever.

my fam was working class. I surely understand w/o unions we wouldn’t be where we are- I wouldn’t have gone to college as one example. And the UAW created a Michigan where basically unskilled labor could buy a home and a vacation lake home- and many many people did. All positive. As GGG says they just didn’t see they had to change once the stranglehold died.

I have a cousin who had a sweet union newspaper job. He was a print press operator. Every fourth Sunday the paper had to pay him triple time as the emergency guy. He slept on a cot. The 4 people in his position switched off Sundays. Beautiful contract. But people quit buying newspapers. The paper wanted to eliminate 5 jobs- typesetters- they were not going to be needed. No compromise- strike instead. He now works as a short order cook.

Still I would never cross a line. But, tbh, Saigon something or other at 90th and Amsterdamhad a strike going on AND had the best Viet pork chop on the UWS. The picket line wasn’t there that often and we would go if no picketers. Felt bad when the court sided with the strikers and it shut down. Felt bad for many contradictory reasons.