Things Overheard on the First Day of College
1. “Dude, our dorm is, like, the loudest dorm on campus. We were playing Blink 182 really loud all night long.” 2. “Excuse me. Can you tell me where room L77 is?” 3. “So, my mom called me this morning at, like, a quarter to seven, and she’s like, ‘I just want to know how your first day of school was,’ and I was like, ‘Mom, give me some space.’” (Whining italicized.) 4. “Is room L77 in the basement?” 5. “They’re selling dorm posters by the bus stop. I got this cool ‘Scarface’ poster.” “Cool.” 6. “Are you looking for room L77, too?” 7. “Cute shoes. Are you a biology major?” 8. “If we can’t find room L77, does that mean that class is cancelled?”
Pages From a Worker’s Life
My studies have provoked in me a keen interest in the Trade Union Education League, and its founder, William Z. Foster. The T.U.E.L. was a rank and file movement in the 1920’s to organize millions of workers in the basic industries along industrial lines (that is, in “one big union”). Where this differed from the Industrial Workers of the World was a dogged insistence on working within the existing AFL craft unions and “amalgamating” them. Foster seemed to be a tireless organizer as well as a savvy strategist, but his own beliefs eventually became muddled by the Stalinist party line so that the “real” Foster, in his later years, is something of an enigma. I sought out Foster in his own words. The only book of his that remains “in print” is “Pages From a Worker’s Life,” from International Publishers. One of the great things about International is that the […]
Searching for Comrade Obermeier
On September 9, 1947, federal agents stormed the offices of Hotel & Restaurant Employees Local 6 and arrested the president of the union, Michael J. Obermeier, on politically motivated immigration charges. Obermeier had been the president of Local 6 for the last ten years, and a militant union leader for food workers in the city since 1922, having organized hundreds of hotels and restaurants and thousands of poor, immigrant, minority and female workers in the hospitality industry to fight for respect and dignity on the job, higher pay and lower hours. The Red Scare was the perfect pretense to chase troublemakers like Obermeier out of the industry, and the Taft-Hartley Act (passed two weeks earlier) already laid a legal framework to remove Communists from union office, but Obermeier was an even easier target because he had not entered the country legally in 1913. Despite his German translation and propaganda work […]
Living on in the Archives
History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.” The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American […]
“…and Sweet’s the Air with Curly Smoke…”
I called it a year (and four days) ago. The President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, has resigned. I’m reminded, at this time, of my friend and advisor Josh Freeman who was cool to the movement to oust our Queens College President, Allen Lee Sessoms, back in 1999. What comes next is not necessarily better, he reasoned. It’s not hard to imagine this episode being used in the right-wing assault on the Ivory Tower. Those lefty professors are out of control. They have no respect for their university presidents, or any attempt to establish “standards.”
“It’s Educational!”
I’m back from Amherst and I’m really excited. The Master’s degree that I’m working towards seems so besides the point. I hate the idea of ever having to stop going to ULA. The real value of the program is the ability to step back from my day-to-day work and see the forest from the trees. I found the Labor Education class that I took to be a stumbling, fumbling frustration for nine of the ten days. This morning, however, I think I came to an epiphany, while I sat quietly and reflected on the readings and discussions. It’s too soon to tell, but it might have been a life-changing event. We read a lot about Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, the open learning center in the South that trained CIO organizers, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In his book, “The Long Haul,” Myles talks about movement periods […]
In the Papers
Amherst is one of those funny, left-liberal college towns. The cover story of yesterday’s Springfield Republican had a hysterical sob story profile of some of the town’s poor maligned conservative minority. “In Amherst, I can’t watch a production of ‘West Side Story’ but I can see the ‘Vagina Monologues’ at the high school and watch a junior throw up her arms like (Olympic gymnast) Mary Lou Retton and shout the c-word,” said fifth-generation Amherst resident Larry J. Kelley. Meanwhile, back in New York, Newsday has begun trying to turn the public against next year’s citywide hotel strike. Our friend Kate Bronfenbrenner weighs in: Hotel workers say they are not afraid to walk out. The last New York City hotel strike, in 1985, lasted 27 days. “This is a union that knows how to prepare a strike and knows how to win,” Bronfenbrenner said.
Pro-Union Bumper Stickers on Toyotas
We have a great mix of people at the ULA program here in Amherst. That’s one of the biggest appeals that this program held for me when I applied. In my narrow corner of the New York labor movement, I’m just not likely to make friends with Machinists and Auto Workers, nor with Canadian trade unionists or union activists from the South. My brother Dave Rossi, a Canadian Auto Worker (he’s the guy with the cheerleader on his shoulders in this picture; no, he did not throw her in the air), can get pretty riled up when he sees a pro-union bumper sticker on the back of a Toyota or a Honda. In an atmosphere where everyone is boycotting something (don’t buy Coke, don’t shop at Wal-Mart, avoid Poland Spring water, cancel your Verizon cellphone contract, etc.), it’s easy to feel a little outraged when your comrades buy a non-union […]
Scholastic Update
I forgot to mention that I’m away at school in Amherst this week and next. In a stab at credibility as an actual UMass student, I try to do as many “regular student” things on campus as possible. So, yesterday, a few of my union brothers and I went to a Minutemen basketball game (they beat St. Joe’s 68-58). I’ve never been to school where there were cheerleaders before.
“…We Got Ideas, To Us That’s Real…”
I’m back in New York after ten days in Amherst, for the summer residency of the ULA Labor Studies program at UMass. The program is fantastic. The campus is beautiful. The curriculum is vital. The faculty is brilliant. The student body is awesome. The community of students is really the reason to enroll in this program. It’s a great mix of union staffers, elected officers and rank-and-filers (many of whom are having their tuition paid for by their employers!). THis is exactly what I wanted: the opportunity to step away from my work twice a year and see the forest from the trees; to make the connections between public sector and private, the building trades and the service sector, globalization and our CLCs and global federations. Just one example of why I’m glad I met all these people these last two weeks: the Machinists in the program were great guys […]