Robert Richman, 1948-2025
At my grandma’s funeral, years ago, the priest said something that stuck with me. And I don’t usually go for this sort of thing. But he talked about the work, the drudgery, of raising kids: bedtimes, bathtimes, breakfast and out the door to school. And again and again. And, he said, we don’t consider it heroic because it’s just expected of a parent. But it is heroic.
My dad was a hero. He worked. A lot. For us. He worked a couple decades at a job he hated. He worked through late shifts, schedule changes, transfers and as much overtime as he could gobble up.
And he always had a second job on top of that. Some of them were cool. He worked at Bellerose Lanes bowling alley. That was fun for me. I wound up joining a youth league. Still have never scored a turkey. He was also an ice cream man! That was a special thrill. However old I was – 9? 11? – to be handling the cash and handing out the treats to the customers.
And, of course, he drove for car services while there was still money in it. When Uber destroyed that business, he finally retired for good from all work.
When I say he hated his job, I mean that he hated the bosses, the bureaucracy, the reassignments and shift changes. He loved issuing tickets. Many times I’d be driving with him and he’d notice, “That’s not a legal parking spot,” clearly itching for his ticket book.
“So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV
And now for something…not entirely, completely different. I’ve signed a contract with SUNY Press to deliver a collection of essays next year for publication in 2026.
Call for Proposals
Continue reading ““So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV”
Searching for Ludwig Lore
I’m back in FOIA hell.
Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put you in a ridiculously long queue to meticulously review the file. Years later they’ll tell you that you can get a pdf copy of the file for 80 cents a page (there are often hundreds if not thousands of pages). In the alternative, you can absurdly travel to College Park, MD to view the files on one of their computers and email it to yourself! I’m lucky that I began researching We Always Had a Union in 2006, but I regret that many of the names that I encountered during my research are in the dreaded “third tier of processing” with a decade-long backlog.
“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”
The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse.
I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political or social democracy without a strong labor movement and worked his ass off towards that end. Which is to say, it’s the sort of thing I would have written if I could have been arsed.