Back to Chapter Headings Back to home page Contact Gene Lantz
In my second week in factory work, the Steelworkers Union took us on strike. I was on my 9-week probation, so the union didn't expect me to strike, so I worked the first day. After work, I went to the strike headquarters and asked them if they would defend the probationary workers if we were fired for striking. They explained that they didn't have me covered under labor law, but they would do their best to defend me. So I called up the other probationary worker and the two of us went on strike the seond day. It wasn't much because we were both trainees and couldn't produce much, but I felt pretty good about it, because I was contributing. The strike was solid and we won in two weeks.
There have been revolutionary unions, such as the Industrial Workers of the World in the U.S. and like some communist-led unions in Europe today. But most unions cling to the status quo.
It's a big mistake to assume that America's unions are the vanguard leadership of the working class. They aren't. The union man you're marching with today for better wages may well be your worst enemy tomorrow on an environmental issue. In the past, there have been major strikes conducted by American unions to promote racism! Yes, promote, not destroy! After 1947, union leaders happily joined the FBI in harrassing communists and socialists, and the AFofL was working with the CIA on international issues from the gitgo!
Unions exist because they defend their members against the boss. That's all they do, all they were meant to do, and all they intend to do. Even while they are opposing the boss on shop issues, they will work with him against his competitors. They wouldn't even consider taking an action that might risk shutting an enterprise down. Just yesterday, I heard that a major union here in Dallas was opposing the overall movement to raise wages because, "If they want better wages, they must join our union!"
But even the worst unions are progressive organizations because they cannot be otherwise. They are the main organizational unit of the working class, and the working class is the progressive class. The boss is the enemy of progress and "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I attended union meetings after joining in 1978, but could barely figure out what was going on and generally didn't see any way to help. When the union held elections, I picked candidates and campaigned for them, but I couldn't really find an ongoing role for myself. After two or three years of that, going to meetings began to get really boring. The truth is that unions run on routine. They might have a fight to get a contract, but once that contract is ratified and signed, nearly everything that happens is pre-ordained either by the contract or by an intricate web of national labor law. A good worker usually has very little to do with the union. It's the bad workers who get all the attention.
I appreciated my union and studied up on how things worked and how they had developed. But by 1984, I was beginning to think nothing was ever going to happen. I was mistaken.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the bosses had their leadership and a more-or-less well-defined program. Domestically and internationally, they were aggressively anti-worker. Teamed up with the Pope and the reactionaries in the AFL-CIO, Reaganists were able to shatter their economic rivals in Central America, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. At home, beginning with the PATCO debacle in 1982, unions were being busted and/or pushed backward. The working class, worldwide, started falling backward. American unions were no exception.
A peculiar combination of circumstances gave me my first chance to actually help my union. One of the minor leaders of the union wanted to fight back against takeaways, and he came to my union just when the company had sharpened their knives to cut us. I agreed with the union leadership when they said that they didn't think we'd do well in a strike. We only had about 70% of the eligible workers signed up for the union. Union meetings were usually less than 1% of the membership. A lot of members didn't even turn up for contract ratification meetings.
Nevertheless, our leader thought we could fight the takeaways during a drawn-out period of "working without a contract." So, we rejected the company's contract offer and started trying to figure out what to do. We thought we were inventing an entirely new procedure. In a way, we were, because nobody had even talked about using the time-honored method of "slowdown" in decades.
Just as the fight was getting started, union election time rolled around. So I ran for a minor Executive Board position. We got an old hand-cranked memeograph machine and started turning out literature. On the backs of my long essays about what we should be doing, I re-printed old union songs like "Solidarity Forever."
When we started doing rallies inside the plant, I introduced the idea of singing union songs. I felt great when I noticed people holding my homemade leaflets to get the words off the back. It was the first time I really felt a part of things.
Our main slogan at the beginning was "No contract, no overtime!" Our leader asked us to quit volunteering for overtime until the company gave in. A lot of people, addicted to consumerism, couldn't or wouldn't do it, but I did. As a result, I was fired along with 5 other guys on May 21, 1984. It's very hard, getting fired, even for a good cause. As soon as they finished processing me, I went home sick and went straight to bed.
The next day, at a protest rally in the union hall, I addressed my brothers and sisters for the first time. I told them that I hadn't lost my job on the previous day. I said, "I lost my good job the same time you lost yours, when the company enacted this sorry anti-union contract! If we don't have a strong union, this job isn't worth having!" I felt pretty good about my own role, but when I looked out at the protest rally, only about 300 workers, which meant that about 4,500 were still in the plant working, I was sure that we were probably in for a long and difficult struggle, and that we would probably lose.
This is a digression: My older brother taught me to play poker. After every game, he would tell me what mistakes I had made. If he said, "you played good," then I was overjoyed, whether I had won or lost. We don't control the games we are in, and we don't control the outcomes, but we do control the role that we play in them. In my union's big fight for survival 1984-85, I played good!
To begin with, I didn't let our little handful of "firees" wander off. Instead, right away I organized what I called the "firee committee," and got myself elected recording secretary. I probably could have been president, but I didn't want to be the figurehead. I wanted to be the person organizing the activities. When another big group of people were fired in June, we had a sizable committee and we were already playing a major role in the fight.
We made a point of being at every meeting, and we made sure everybody knew we were there. We organized event after event. The first one started out as a watermelon party, but quickly morphed into a "labor fair." We had dancers, a yard sale, clowns, speeches, and a half dozen other activities. Elaine and I brought the first union T-shirts into my union. As time went on, we threw parties, sold pecans, and even had a snake show! Best of all, we picketed. Through the winter of 1984-85, we picketed the plant every Saturday morning with signs that said, "no contract, no overtime!" Of course, it was pretty disheartening to see our old friends and many of our top union leaders cross our pickets to work overtime, but we persevered. We also went downtown to picket the company offices, and I made sure that newspersons knew about our struggle.
I taught a lot of people to sing union songs, and "Solidarity Forever" became quite popular in the union. I found that I was the only one who knew how to make leaflets, so I was called up to help with the union propaganda effort. My clerical skills began to come in handy because the union was forced to collect dues by hand. Normally, companies collect dues for unions and forward them monthly, but this company was out to break the union!
Eventually, my being the only member with typing and computer skills paid off. I invented a program to keep track of dues receipts on a Commodore 64 home computer. It was the first computer in my union and probably the first computer in any union in North Texas. Not only did we have accurate records, I could even make graphs showing how dues collection was going by department. When we felt we were strong enough in critical departments, we went on a one-day strike and achieved the best contract in the industry! We did all this with barely any participation from the membership, and we only had 70% in the union to begin with!
In November, 2017, I published 52 short videos that had originally been shot during the 1984-85 struggle of UAW 848 against LTV Corporation. The videos show some of our pickets, fund raisers, rallies, and a lot of interviews. Interviewees are union leaders and a bunch of us firees. All of them are on the "genelantz" channel of YouTube. This one gives kind of an overview from our main leaders during the middle of the struggle:: https://youtu.be/a3X22nxmLoc.
After that, my reputation was established. I took over the Organizing Committee and brought our membership percentage up to 92%. Leadership then got the idea and instituted formal procedures that brought it to 98% last time I looked. I started a regular union newspaper "The Organizer" but was then re-assigned to edit the old union newspaper after it began publication again. I organized the archives of the union and put 26 scrapbooks together. In 2015, I'm Chairman of Retirees, Editor, and Archivist of my union. That gives me a seat on the union Executive Board. I also sit on the Dallas AFL-CIO Executive Board and the Texas AFL-CIO Executive Board. I am most proud of being the President of the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans.
I didn't win every battle in the union movement by any means, but I played well.
By 1987, my local union really seemed on top of things. We had the best contract in the industry, membership was up to around 95%, committees were functioning, and I was editing one of the few regular labor newspapers in the state. The challenges all seemed to be somewhere else. That was the year that National Jobs with Justice was formed in Washington, DC. Five of the strongest of the progressive unions formed JwJ, and I have a feeling that Lane Kirkland and the old guard of the AFL-CIO didn't like it much.
While most unions tended to be conservative in their actions, JwJ went out and blockaded an airport by jamming cars into the toll booths. Here in Texas, they organized a giant demonstration in, of all places, Nacogdoches, in support of a small group of cafeteria workers who wanted to organize. It was mostly the Communication Workers, but Elaine and I were (finally) allowed to bring a bus load of non-CWA supporters. After that, we started trying to form a chapter of JwJ in North Texas. The CWA leaders finally relented, and we held our organizing meeting in my union hall in January, 1990. It came after a long strike of Greyhound workers where Elaine and I organized a bunch of support at rallies every Friday night, so we already knew most of the activists in North Texas.
Above is the Battle in Seattle, 1999
Jobs with Justice gave us the ability to go everywhere the action was. If there was no action, we could create some. At first, most unions and the AFL-CIO didn't cooperate with us (unless they needed some help) but we soon proved ourselves valuable to the entire workers' movement. After the big progressive change in AFL-CIO leadership in 1995, Jobs with Justice was as much a part of the labor movement as anybody!
I continued to lead JwJ until around 2015. By then, I was convinced that the AFL-CIO was doing what it should have been doing all along -- consequently JwJ was no longer needed. Rosemary Rieger took it over, then let it go when she left town. It became a non-profit 501c3 organization closely allied with the AFL-CIO. That's pretty much what I intended for it.
Back to Chapter Headings Back to home page Contact Gene Lantz