Three Labor Stories

Tomorrow , I will start a new semester in which I’ll be teaching labor law and workers’ compensation law (it is the 17th year in a row that I’ll be teaching labor law). It is not hard for me to “gear up,” and I have three stories I like to tell to help warm to the task.

The first involves my grandfather, who worked at the Lynch coal mine in Harlan County Kentucky. He died of black lung in about 1970 - just before the OSH Act and MSH Act laws came online (despite decades of wrangling over how to regulate obviously dangerous workplaces, leading to my outrageous, but true, claim that “they killed my garndfather”). During one protracted labor dispute in Harlan County, my mom described a scene as follows: Before my grandfather would go off to work, my grandmother would turn the “cook table” over on its side, and get my mom and her siblings—eventually six, but I’m not sure how many were alive at precisely this juncture—crouched behind the table. Then, as my grandfather left the house, snipers in the treeline several yards ahead would shoot at him. The goal was to terrify rather than hit him (after all, he was valuable quasi-chattel). So, they shot high, and, as a result, bullets would ping and careen around the kitchen, where my mom was sheltering. It wouldn’t have taken much for me not to be able to tell this story: a bullet ricochets a certain odd way and no more labor commentator. My grandfather eventually got all seven of his children “out of” the mines. Though I barely knew him, my love for him knows no bounds.

The second story I like to tell has as its purpose explaining the limitations of a National Labor Relations Board (the regulator of workplace disputes between labor and management) affidavit-driven investigation. Some stories can’t be captured in an affidavit (a written statement to which a witness “swears”). During the 1980s, I worked for the then-exisiting air carrier U.S. Airways. I was a Teamsters shop steward, and we were on the verge of losing our union. As the airline merged with Piedmont Airlines and Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), the National Mediation Board—the labor law regulatory agency in the airline industry—was ordering repeated union elections among the newly configured workers (I contend that the NMB illegitimately ordered these post-merger elections—but that is a story for another time). As the critical vote was being taken in around 1990 (the election that would decide if the union would be “decertified”), the management group was huddled in the operations area, and about 200 workers were in the “ramp ready room” awaiting our next wave of flights. The word “came down” that the vote had gone against the union: unsurprisingly, the huge Piedmont ramp group in the Charlotte, NC hub had voted decisively against union representation, along with PSA cities like Phoenix, AZ. The Teamsters in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Buffalo had lost. As soon as this news had rippled through our ranks (or so the immediacy seemed), the management group walked through “our” ready room and smiled. What did these managers do? Nothing. What did they say? Nothing. The affidavit would say that they simply smiled. And yet the utter malice that dripped from their faces—and the murderous emotional reaction to it in my breast—is a feeling I will never forget. And none of it—the “coercion” or the reaction to it—could possibly be communicated in an affidavit: where a witness orally provides an account of “what happened” and the (typically middle-class) government agent tries to write down all the “facts.”

The third story that I tell also arose from my Philadelphia airline ramp days. Back in the 1980s (during Ronald Reagan’s first term, and during the slide from which labor has still not come close to reversing), the employer insisted upon (and the union acquiesced and agreed to) a two-tier wage system. I made $10 an hour less than a “senior” employee working next to me doing exactly the same work. I have always contended that nothing could be as destructive to worker solidarity as a union’s acceptance of such an arrangement. Those of us on the lower “B scale” were almost perpetually upset. And from our midst arose a leader (I won’t name him because it is conceivable he is reading this post!). This charismatic fellow was a fearsome kickboxer. I myself was a grappler of some ability, but would have been greatly concerned to have encountered him in a dark alley. One night our leader was fired. He had allegedly struck a supervisior in the midst of a workplace dispute. He could not have done so because the supervisor would have been severely hurt, yet was not. The fix was in. That night I was working, and I was a very newly minted shop-steward. I knew of what a wildcat strike consisted (walking off the job without the union’s authorization), and that we engaged in such conduct at our peril (though I did not quite know what that meant). Wanly did I beseech the troops, “Men,” for so most of us were, “do not flee until we have had a chance to negotiate!” But flee the bargaining unit did, and I had my first (but not last) experience with the rolling power of a wildcat strike. Fifteen active flights on 15 jetways (mostly Boeing 737-400s) were simply abandoned. One of the major employee break rooms was instantly destroyed. I support neither those types of actions, nor tornadoes in tornado alley during tornado season. I simply find shelter. Remarkably, in the end, no one was fired. Think about that.

So — these are the types of stories with which I will soon (in a matter of hours) be assailing my new students.