The Alaskan fishing boat plan didn’t pan out. Lara’s fishing season ended prematurely when she suffered a hernia. So instead, we met in New York, where I had an apartment-sitting gig for a few weeks. Later, she went with me to Philadelphia, where I house-sat for another few weeks. Then, in Pittsburgh, after I dropped my dish job in the cafeteria at a women’s college (Pennsylvania: #21), she began inquiring about when I’d be leaving town and where I’d be going to.
I didn’t know yet—and it frustrated her that I didn’t know. Letters with offers of couches and floors had recently come in from Indiana, North Carolina and Maryland. And now that I’d successfully broken the Fundamental Rule, I was keen to dish on a riverboat or a cruise ship. I’d even picked up an application for a dish position with Amtrak.
Just as I never knew when the urge to quit a job would strike, I never knew when I’d wake up and think, I gotta leave this town pronto. Or when someone in town would say, “Hey, I’m driving to another state, you wanna tag along?” Or, better yet, when an invitation would come from far out of left field, like the one Lara herself had given me at the Seattle airport when she asked me to fly to Alaska with her.
So even if I gave Lara a date of departure or named a destination, there was no guarantee that the plan would be carried out. So every time she asked, I continued to answer, “I don’t know yet.”
Then one day, while she was washing our hosts’ dishes, she happened to inquire one more time. Hearing my standard answer—yet again—made her furious. She took the soapy mason jar she was washing and chucked it at me. It whizzed past my head and shattered against the wall.
When she dumped me not long afterwards, I was glad to regain the freedom to whimsically make and change my plans. But I was still slow to understand why any woman wouldn’t want to have a relationship with me.
My dad, on the other hand, had grown to become a Dishwasher Pete fan. He was now telling me tales of how, when asked at family functions about my whereabouts, he took pleasure in saying, “I don’t know. He was in Kentucky or Georgia or somewhere.” Then, turning to my mom, he’d ask, somewhat proudly, “Sally, where’s Pete now?”
After all my hemming and hawing in Pittsburgh, I ended up next in Madison, Wisconsin. Not only was a couch waiting for me, but there was a job in that town at the very top of my To Do list. Of the thousands of letters I’d received from dish dogs writing to tell me about dish gigs past and present, there were more testimonials about a certain Madison dishpit than about any other place. Though each of the letter-writing alumni had dished there at different periods, they all described the job similarly—a loose atmosphere (boom box blaring, beer drinking, pot smoking) and a tight camaraderie (an ad hoc labor union that the dishwashers were somehow involved with).
The famous dishroom was part of the immense student union on the University of Wisconsin campus. This pit had become, in my eyes, so mythical that I was surprised when I arrived at the building’s personnel office. Not only were they hiring, but there were heaps of openings for dishwashers.
After I sat and filled out an application—which included signing up as a member of the renowned Memorial Union Labor Organization—I endured an obligatory interview.
“Why do you want to work here?” the personnel lady asked.
I wanted to reply that I wanted to work in America’s most illustrious dishroom while adding Wisconsin (#22) to my scalps.
Instead, I played it cool and said, “’Cause I need a job.”
“And what days can you work?”
“Any day is fine,” I said.
“Fantastic,” she said. “Because we can use you every day.”
Three minutes later, I exited the building with my schedule in hand, still surprised, but delighted, to have so easily landed what I’d been led to believe was a choice job.
The next morning, I descended the stairs from the Lakeview Cafeteria into the basement of the Memorial Union. When I found the kitchen supervisor, she led me to the dishpit, where I expected to be greeted with open arms by my comrades.
Instead, when we stepped through the doorway, I was greeted only by a wretched stench.
“You’ll have to excuse that smell,” she said. “The food in some of these pans is starting to rot.”
It reeked like a puddle of dumpster juice on a 100-degree day.
Parked throughout the vast dishroom were dozens of wheeled racks that, collectively, held hundreds of soiled hotel pans and sheet pans. Counters and sinks were overrun with dirty pots. Filthy plates were in abundance.
“Some of this stuff has been sitting here three days waiting to be washed,” she said.
“Wow!” I let slip.
Though I’d seen my share of dishpit disasters in the past, this, by far, was the worst. As awestruck as I was to see the mess, even more awesome was knowing that it needed cleaning.
Then I noticed no comrades were in sight.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“A lot of people quit recently,” she said.
I couldn’t possibly be the only pearl diver responsible for this catastrophe. I looked all around the dishroom, but the only sign of human life was the back of the kitchen supervisor as she exited the pit.
On my own, with no clue of where to begin, I held my nose and toured the room. There was a long conveyor dishmachine, a pot-washing machine, a silverware-washing machine and various sinks. Much of the floor space was devoted to the dozens of racks which, upon closer inspection, showed that I wasn’t the only visible living organism.
This was hardly the suds buster’s Valhalla described in the letters I’d received.
Feeling like I’d been purposefully duped, I expected the letter writers to jump out from behind the racks and yell, “Gotcha!”
A cook then wheeled in yet another rack of dirty serving pans.
“Here ya go,” he said, and pushed it over to me.
A quick survey of this newest arrival revealed a hotel pan that was a quarter full with scrambled eggs and another that contained bacon dregs. Since no one had yet told me what to do, I washed a fork and helped myself to breakfast.
A minute later, a guy walked in and started loading the conveyor machine. I went over, introduced myself and asked, “So what should I do?”
“I don’t know,” he said and shrugged.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought maybe there was some sorta system.”
“I’ve only been here three days,” he said, “and I don’t know nothin’ ’bout a system.”
“Well, is there something that maybe needs to be done first?”
“Do whatever you want, man,” he said. “It don’t matter to me.”
I walked over to one of the pot sinks and started draining the cold, grungy water. While I was arranging the dozens of pots, another guy entered. He introduced himself as Matt and said the other disher’s name was Joe.
“Whew!” I said, waving my hand before my nose to state the obvious.
“Stinks, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t believe some of this stuff has been sitting here for three days.”
“Three days?!” he scoffed. “I’d say it’s more like a week.”
“Is it always like this?” I asked.
“Nah, a buncha people just quit,” he said. “And now they can’t find anyone else to work down here.”
Except for a sap like me, I thought, who’d traveled hundreds of miles for the job.
“Normally, seven or eight people work the breakfast shift,” Matt said. “And there’s what—three of us?”
Working the skeleton crew in a smelly dungeon was definitely not the reason why this place had topped my To Do list.
When the sink was full with hot, soapy water, I started attacking the pots. My heroic effort lasted less than half an hour before Matt came over and said, “Dude, mellow out.”
He pointed out that even with a full staff, we’d just keep pace with what was coming in. So with only three people on the job, we were going to fall behind regardless of whether we worked hard or not.
“Besides,” he said, “what are they gonna do? Fire us?”
This dishman made my kind of sense. I left the pots and helped myself to some more scrambled eggs.
Matt explained that, while we did wash the plates from the cafeteria upstairs, we were expected to also wash stuff generated from the adjoining kitchen. That’s where most of this came from. Next door they cooked for cafeterias in dorms and buildings all over campus. After the food was trucked over to those places, all the dirty serving trays and hotel pans—complete with leftovers—were returned to our pit.
After my shift, in the afternoon, I tracked down the office of the Memorial Union Labor Organization (MULO)—the union I’d heard so much about and that now included me as a dues-paying member. The office turned out to be only a desk in the corner of the Teaching Assistants’ Association office. No one from MULO was there, so I left a note saying I’d like to talk to someone about the organization’s history. When I told one of the TAs in the room that I was interested in learning about MULO, he showed me decades’ worth of MULO newsletters and welcomed me to borrow them.
For the next few days, I dished mornings and read the newsletters during the evenings. Despite the gigantic amount of cookware and dishes that needed to be cleaned, it may have been the least stressful job I’d ever had. Since no one expected us to clean everything, Matt and Joe and I could work as slowly as we wanted. And whenever another rack of hotel pans was rolled in, we’d break from whatever work we were slowly doing, grab our forks and pore over whatever still-warm breakfast items were on our menu. It was the best Bus Tub Buffet I’d ever attended.
Still, where was all the camaraderie I was reading about in the newsletters? In the 1980s, almost every president and vice president of the four hundred–strong labor organization came from among the dishroom workers despite the dishers’ making up less than 5 percent of the total membership. In that decade, the dishwashers challenged groups of other workers to games of softball and soccer. They even walked off the job once to protest the asbestos-covered pipes right outside the pit.
Reading about the past made me nostalgic for the dishpits of yore. I missed the glory days, even if I’d never experienced them in the first place.
Going back even further through the newsletters, I discovered that the dishwashers had been instrumental in the union’s founding! In fact, the group’s very first president came from the pit. And it was a key, radical act by a dozen or so dish dogs that galvanized support for the fledgling organization.
On Thursday, March 9, 1972, dishwasher/budding-labor-activist Elaine Koplow stopped by the dishpit and found the crew shorthanded. To help out, she clocked in, then dove in. When the kitchen supervisor, Rose Bass, entered and saw Koplow doing some unscheduled dishing, Bass accused the dishwoman of having purposefully clocked in in order to create a disturbance. Koplow denied this. The two then exchanged heated words.
The next morning, a suit entered the dishroom and asked Koplow, “Are you Elaine?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I’ve heard you’re a damn good little worker,” he said, “and we’re going to take care of you.”
“Then I knew I was fucked,” Koplow later recalled.
He summoned her away from the dishes for a meeting upstairs with management. There, she was falsely accused of having been loud, profane and abusive to Bass. She was also told she lacked a positive attitude. Formally, Koplow was charged with “disrupting normal work activities” and suspended from her job for ten days.
After the meeting, Koplow returned to the basement pit and reported her sentence to her fellow workers. Their response to her was automatic: “If you’re not working, we’re not working!”
Before departing, they posted a sign on the dishroom door.
Afternoon Shift:
Elaine was suspended.
Go to Jerry & Arlette’s house.
The afternoon shift followed the morning shift’s lead; later, the evening shift did the same. Nobody punched in. Nobody worked.
The entire dish staff met that evening. They agreed to remain on strike until Koplow was reinstated to her job. The dishwashers had another agenda in mind as well: to kick-start the stalled negotiations for a labor contract between MULO and the university.
After picketing for a couple days in front of the Memorial Union—carrying signs like “Your Dishes Are Washed by Scabs!”—the pearl divers then called for a boycott. Students and faculty were asked to not patronize any of the building’s units. On a campus that was a hotbed of the late 1960s/early 1970s student activism, a single glance at the picket line was all that was needed to send the sympathetic longhairs in the opposite direction.
For two days, the boycott showed signs of success. Business at the Memorial Union was visibly down. Finding willing subjects to cross the picket line to work as scabs in the dishroom proved so difficult that management personnel had to be pressed into dish duty. But the schmucks couldn’t hack the work. Soon, the few meals that were still being served in the Lakeside Cafeteria were being eaten from paper plates! All the while, the university was losing scads of income as it continued to pay cooks and cashiers to prepare and serve food that went unpurchased and uneaten.
On Thursday night, MULO held a general meeting of its members to discuss the union’s official position on the wildcat strike. An overwhelming majority voted in favor of a resolution that called for the reinstatement of the dishers without any disciplinary action. They also authorized a MULO-wide strike vote.
Less than a week after a lone dishwoman was wrongly disciplined for insubordination, the university now faced losing hundreds of student-workers to the strike—an event that would certainly shut down the entire Memorial Union. Management—who’d all but fired the dishwashers—were now eager to negotiate.
On Friday night, dishroom shop steward Bob Liek met on the Memorial Union’s fourth floor with personnel director Tom Cleary. According to Liek:
Right outside the student union is the library mall and that was the main gathering point for the demonstrations. The anti-war people would meet there before they marched. That particular night, there was a big demonstration scheduled. As we were negotiating, there was a build-up of students in the library mall. Looking out the window, you couldn’t even see the ground from the student union. People were spilling into Langdon Street and up State Street—there were thousands of people there.
I told Cleary, “Look, I can go outside right now and talk to the demonstrators out there and in ten minutes they can come and take this building down brick by brick.”
Now, that wasn’t true at all. They were out there for a demonstration against the war in Vietnam and were definitely not thinking about dishroom workers at the student union or anything like that. But in the university’s paranoid crazed state at that time, that was a critical threat to them. So Cleary hopped on the phone with Chancellor Young and came back and said, “Okay, we’ll meet your demands.”
Koplow and the others were then reinstated to their jobs. The wildcat strike made such a big impression on the building’s other student-workers that, a month later—with negotiations on the labor contract still stalled—more than four hundred MULO members staged a general strike of the Memorial Union. That strike ended with MULO signing its first contract with the university—a labor agreement that would remain in place for decades, right up to my own stint in the dishroom. And it all came together thanks to that walkout by those dozen-odd heroic dish dogs.
One morning, when Matt had the day off and Joe failed to show, I had the pit all to myself. I loaded plates in one end of the conveyor dishmachine and then plodded thirty feet to the other end to unload them. Then I’d plod back to the front to load it again.
Whenever a rack of hotel pans was rolled into the pit, I grabbed my fork and went to see what was for breakfast. After being disappointed by vacant hotel pans each time, I told the next cook who appeared, “I hope that one’s got some grub in it.”
“Nope,” he said. “No more leftovers.”
He explained that the kitchen supervisor had ordered all leftovers to be tossed out before they reached the dishroom. The rotting food was a health hazard.
After I resumed running the dishes through the conveyor machine, another guy walked in and started unloading the dishes from the far end. We worked like this for about ten minutes before he came over and said, “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
“I have?”
“Yep,” he said. “You left a note on the MULO desk saying you wanted to talk to the president.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I did.”
“Well, I’m Benjamin,” he said. “MULO president.”
Since the golden days of the dishpit had long passed, I was pleasantly stunned to learn that MULO was still headed by a dishman.
He admitted that it was a low point for both the pit and MULO.
“When I first began working down here a few years ago, it was still a happening place,” he said. “Now they can’t convince students to wash dishes.”
As we chatted, another rack rolled in. Benjamin instinctively turned to check it for available eats. I told him about the kitchen supervisor’s edict.
“She can’t do that!” he said. “It’s in our contract. We have a right to those leftovers!”
As soon as he said that, I recalled having read in the old MULO newsletters that the dishroom’s right to leftovers had been negotiated into that very first contract between the labor organization and the university in 1972.
“The dishwashers fought for that right a quarter century ago!” I echoed.
“Well, it’s still in the current contract,” he said.
Ben went straight to the kitchen supervisor’s office. He threatened the kitchen supervisor with filing a grievance. She folded immediately, telling him she’d reverse her decision. Within minutes of her bowing to the pressures of the labor organization’s president, leftovers reappeared in the pit. Benjamin and I continued our conversation while snacking on pancakes and sausages.
If I’d felt nostalgic about yesteryear’s dishroom, now I felt proud. Though the dishpit and MULO were both down on their luck, I was eating free grub, thanks to my predecessors.
When I quit, I felt obligated to honor the memory of those pearl divers who’d passed through that pit before me. So I taped a piece of paper to the front of the Memorial Union. On it, I’d written:
On this spot in March 1972,
fifteen dishwashers fought for workers’ rights
by staging a successful wildcat strike.
And I, for one, thank them.