*April 1, 2007*

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*Solidarity for a Change*

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*By Harry T. Cook*

The first time someone called me a “Communist” was 41 years ago when I was involved with the fledgling Pentwater (Mich.) Education Association in what turned out to be a hopeless enterprise of trying to obtain modest salary increases for three of the small district’s teachers – all certified with college educations.

The local board of education was obdurate. After all, teachers only work six hours a day with weekends and summers off. And anyway, their husbands had jobs, so let’s hear no more communistic nonsense about higher wages.

Never one to back off that kind of challenge, I plunged in as an unpaid advocate for what must have been at the time one of the smallest collective bargaining units in labor union history. Of course, that was the trouble. The Michigan Education Association had been around for 40 years by the time of my efforts in 1966, but had acted more as a professional association than a union.

It was when three of its members in Pentwater noticed that, even by the penurious standards of the day, they were being unfairly underpaid, that they began to function as a union. That is, they stuck together; they told the same story and they refused to take “No” for an answer. Actually, “No” was the answer they had to take when all was said and done. So much for my do-gooding

The trustees of the local school board were all of them long-time residents of the village, then pop. 900, and therefore neighbors of the teachers they decided were a rabble being roused by this young, liberal clergyman.

“You, a man of the cloth, a Communist,” one board member said to me in a moment of asperity. I had to ask what of anything I had said and done in behalf of the teachers was communistic. The reply, spoken in the same exasperated manner, was to the effect that teachers were lucky to have such easy jobs and that the board, not the teachers, decided what wages would be, “not like over there in Russia.”

You know already that he eventually got around to telling me that if I didn’t like things the way they were in America (or at least in that small part of it known as Oceana County), I should move to Russia – which would have made sense, I guess, with both /glasnost /and the fall of the Berlin Wall being some two decades on in the hardly foreseeable future.

In the intervening years, I have worked in urban parishes filled with autoworkers represented by the UAW and at a major metropolitan newspaper where for a term of years I was unit chair of the Newspaper Guild Local 22. While I am quick to acknowledge that unions and especially their sometimes entrenched leadership have occasionally forgotten their mission and purpose, I have always been a union man.

Withal, circumstances of my life from time to time have taken me into the exclusive precincts of private clubs and executive suites in which, to be frank, I have made good and lasting friendships which have been mutually advantageous. My participation in the civil rights movement, while including some instances of civil disobedience, has never been held against me at the country club. Nor has my record as an in-the-streets protestor of the Vietnam and Iraq wars – though I have sometimes sensed across the napery and crystal a gimlet eye of faint offense.

It is on the occasions when conviction demands I take the part of workers against management that I feel the gates of privilege close against me. No one calls me a “Communist” anymore, but I am told in one way or another that I should stick to the work of saving souls and stay out of the worlds of politics and business.

Upon my protest that, in the words of John Wesley, “the world is my parish” the knowing heads shake in wonderment that this man-of-the-cloth dares step across the line between religion on one hand and economics and public policy on the other as if they were entirely unrelated.

When in once such conversation I reported that many passages in the New Testament treat of the mandates of economic justice and partake in subversive politics, the rejoinder was that the Bible also says, “God helps those who help themselves.” Of course, nowhere in the Bible does that statement appear.

Meanwhile, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger told delegates to the union’s recent convention that he would not abandon its workers at Delphi. I hope not, given the state of things there. It’s as if General Motors had hired Donald Rumsfeld to manage its lame parts spin-off in which it now has its own chaotic Iraq. To extricate itself, Delphi wants a bankruptcy court to void its contracts with the union. The shareholders, you know.

This is Pentwater /circa /1966 all over again. Screw the worker. Blame the union.

A reporter asked Gettelfinger if the UAW had “proposed creative solutions to Delphi’s labor cost issues.” My answer to that question would have been explosive, complete with spittle on the lips: “THAT’S NOT OUR JOB. OUR JOB IS TO MAKE THEIR WIDGETS. THEIR JOB IS TO PAY US A FAIR WAGE AND BENEFITS TO MAKE THEM. MANAGEMENT’S GENISUES ARE MAKING MILLIONS. WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?”

Gettelfinger, who usually keeps his cool after the manner of the legendary Doug Fraser, responded to the question thusly: “You can’t give them enough; they’re a bunch of hogs.”

What more need be said?

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 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.