By James C. Moore
"
The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds."—Abraham Lincoln
Daddy
’s old Studebaker was cold. And we were not allowed to turn on the heater while he was out walking the picket line. The four of us, my brother and the two youngest of my four sisters, shivered against the vinyl seats in a steely Michigan winter. Daddy was walking back and forth in front of the Buick plant in Flint, carrying a sign that said his UAW local was on strike. I was not old enough to understand what that meant. I only knew that every 20 minutes he got to take a break and he came back to the car to check on us, start the engine and turn on the heater for a few minutes before he had to go back out in the cold. We were with Daddy because Ma was busy in her job as a waitress. This was not, of course, what my father had in mind when he returned from World War II. Daddy was a farm boy from Mississippi and he wanted to go home and work his own piece of land, trimming it out with turn rows of cotton and beans, and spending his weekends hunting and fishing along the country streams he had loved as a boy. Unfortunately, neither the weather nor crop prices had ever cooperated and years of sharecropping did not get him any closer to his own farm. A friend stopped by to tell him of steady wages and dependable work in the factories up north in Michigan. Ma had grown tired of watching the moon pass through the cracks in the walls of their shack in the cotton patch. Before she married Daddy and left her home in Newfoundland, she had never known there were outdoor toilets or houses without plumbing. She wanted more for herself and her children.
Daddy came up with the money for train tickets and my parents joined millions of others leaving the land of Dixie for the assembly lines of the car plants. They slept on the floor in a friend’s apartment with their two children and Daddy went down to the factory every morning to see if they were hiring. His imposing frame and field hand bulk made him stand out and a foreman picked Daddy for a job on the line. There was no negotiation over his rate of pay. He did not know if there was to be health insurance. Overtime was not a concept he had ever learned with his 10th-grade education. Sick pay was not something he would have ever requested. A job was offered. Terms were dictated, not negotiated. And he bent his back to the work, grateful that he was going to be able to provide for his family.Nothing would have ever improved for my father if it were not for the union movement. Terms of employment would still be dictated by the manufacturers. Organized workers, however, were able to use their strength to improve wages, pensions and health care benefits and job security through seniority. Without the United Auto Workers, there would have been no voice loud enough to tell the auto manufacturers they were often unfair. A dissatisfied worker could easily be fired. There were a thousand more waiting outside the door wanting a job. Justice came only through solidarity. Eventually, assembly line workers were able to afford to purchase the vehicles they were manufacturing. And they could plan for retirement because they were unified in demanding that they share in the financial success they had made possible for the manufacturers.
When he retired in the mid-1970s, Daddy was earning $17,500 a year. I suspect it would have been much less without the collective bargaining strength of the UAW. That winter day, my brother and sisters and I sat and trembled from the chill in his rusty car, Daddy was part of an important movement that has led to greater prosperity for all of America
’s workers. I thought he looked silly carrying a sign through the slanting snow and chanting words that meant nothing to a little boy. But he was being a man by defending principles and demanding fairness from his employer. There is still no one other than the union to speak for the workers of America. Corporations continue to acquire increasing political influence through lobbyists and strategic donations. Federal agencies are making it more difficult to organize. Misguided tax cuts are putting downward pressure on worker wages, and an indifferent Congress allows American jobs to go overseas where workers have almost no rights. The only hope for U.S. labor remains the union. The union movement needs to continue concentrating on organization and unification and growth. And we all ought to be prepared to go back out in the cold. And walk the line. Together.
………….…………………….………….…………..James C. Moore is co-author of The New York Times bestseller, Bush
’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2002) and Bush’s War for Re-Election: Iraq, the White House, and the People (Wiley, 2003). He is currently working on a book about the long-term implications of Bush policies on important American institutions such as unions and the labor movement. It will be published by Crown Books next year. 
