25
MIKEY had sulked when he found out his father did not have the money to send him on his class trip. Over the spring break, the class was going to Washington, D.C., to celebrate the bicentennial year. Mikey did not dare tell anyone at school that he could not go because of money. He simply said his family had made other plans. His friend Scott wasn’t going either. He and some of his friends were driving to Florida. Mikey didn’t understand why his father didn’t have the money. He did not know that his father had been a slave for four years now.
“We have been sold into slavery!” the local representative screamed at the rank and file gathered in the union hall. It was two weeks before Christmas. Nixon had been reelected. The men, still dazed by the layoffs that had come earlier that year, sat tired and confused. In the back of the room was a line of men. Samuel stood in the line. The hall was not even full, but there were not enough seats. At a meeting the previous week, half of the wooden folding chairs had been destroyed.
The men had been called in to view a film, Where’s Joe? Joe was an American steelworker without a job. Joe had not worked hard enough. He had wanted too much money, too many benefits. Joe was on the unemployment line.
“Where’s Hans?” the film asked. “Where’s Oda?”
Hans and Oda had Joe’s job. They had worked harder. They had worked longer, for lower wages. They had sacrificed for the good of their nations.
Finally, the film posed the question “Will you be Joe?” The men had grumbled through the movie, but when the final question was asked, a chair winged through the air, its seat flapping shut, and knocked down the pull-up screen. The men began smashing chairs. They tore the reel from the projector and ripped apart the film, as if Oda and Hans were inside it, living in one of the frames, as if their union president, Petrovich, could be strangled by twisting the film.
If only they could get their hands on Petrovich, they would tear his lame-duck wings from his body. After the men had been laid off, without the consent, advice, or even knowledge of the rank and file, Petrovich had met with management and signed their lives away. He had taken away their right to strike.
The agreement he signed was called the ENA, the Experimental Negotiating Agreement. It would be a way of protecting the men, to keep foreign steel from taking advantage of domestic steel. If there was to be a strike, the Germans or Japanese could make inroads by selling their product more cheaply. Strikes were not only obsolete, they were dangerous. Whether or not the men agreed, their amended contract was binding.
Samuel focused his attention on the representative at the podium. “Let me read something to you,” the man said. “This is a quote, now, not my words. ‘I’d like to see democracy exercised to the fullest extent in our union or any other union, but democracy in the labor movement, as in various segments of life, can be carried too far.’
“I probably don’t even have to tell you who said that. It was Petrovich, the lousy son of a bitch, lame duck. Too much democracy! That’s what he’s saying. Where the hell does he think we are, Russia? Petrovich is Russian. You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying. He’s trying to sell us into slavery, the stinking Red.”
Samuel did not know if Petrovich was a Red. He did know he was a redneck.
During the fall of that year Gerald Thompson, a black staff representative, won a nomination as a candidate for international vice president. The then vice president was retiring. Despite the fact Thompson was backed by the black members of the U.A.W., who numbered one third of the union’s membership, Petrovich invalidated the nomination. It came to his attention that in 1965, while Thompson was hospitalized with a work-related injury, he had let his dues lapse.
“We will fight, fight, fight!” the union representative yelled. “We have a contract that doesn’t say we can’t strike. We’re going to court because that agreement Petrovich made isn’t right and it isn’t legal.”
Before the rank and file went to negotiate its new contract, a ruling was handed down on the no-strike policy. The judge hearing the case said, “In any system of self-government, in theory and in practice even the most precious of rights may be waived, assuming that the system established for making such a decision is followed.”
Because the rank and file had voted Petrovich in, what he did might not have been right, but it was legal. The no-strike policy would be in effect until 1977.
Work or leave. Those were the choices the men faced. How could that be considered slavery? No one forced into involuntary servitude had the option of leaving.
When the contract came back, there was a twenty-eight-cent-an-hour raise the first year, and sixteen cents for each of the next two years. In just fourteen years, steelworkers dropped from first to fourteenth on the wage scale of industrial workers.
The men worked while management continued streamlining the industry, combining and eliminating jobs and starting a “speed-up” campaign. There was no featherbedding. And the men’s loyalty to the 1974 contract was rewarded. Each worker was given a flat one-hundred-fifty-dollar bonus. Management had no hard feelings.
In the bicentennial year, when sixty-five thousand domestic specialty-steel jobs were threatened by imports from Germany and Japan, Samuel knew Hans and Oda were working, and he was glad to be working, even with emphysema. He was glad he was not Joe.
Mikey would not be making the trip, but he was leaving anyway. He was going to graduate the next year, a full year early, and he was going east. Every school he was applying to was in New England.
“Why don’t you apply to some college ’round here? They got some good schools in Buffalo,” Mary Kate had said to Mikey one day while he was preparing to go out on his route.
“Mama, there are no good schools around here. I’m not going to go to a state university. I can get into the Ivy League.”
Samuel asked, “What’s that?”
“Dad,” Mikey said, “everyone knows what the Ivy League is.”
“I don’t,” Samuel said. “Your mama don’t know neither.”
“They’re the best colleges in the country, the world!” Mikey said.
“If you want to go away to school, you should think ’bout going to a black college, someplace like Southern,” Mary Kate said.
“Southern?” Samuel asked.
Mary Kate said, “Yeah, it’s a fine school, and then there’s Grambling, Howard—”
“I’m not going to any black college,” Mikey said, folding the last of his papers.
“He right. He ain’t going to one of them,” Samuel said, coughing. “If he want to get what the white man got, he better go where the white man go.”
Mikey left with his papers.
That night, when Mary Kate and Samuel were in bed, she asked, “Why you tell Mikey what you did?”
“What?” he asked. He had been half asleep, his back to her.
“You not wanting him to go to a black college.”
“Kate, could you see him at one?”
“Well, I can’t see where he want to go. He just want to get away from us.” Her voice was thin, brittle.
Samuel turned to face her. In a wheezing voice he said, “That ain’t true. Don’t you think that.”
“It is true. I worry ’bout him more than any of our children. Him graduating early, he doing that so he can get away. He going to be lost to us,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Hush, now,” Samuel said, his words floating into the shadows of the room. “He going to be all right. Let me tell you something,” he said, reaching out for his wife in the darkness. “He going to be a blessing to us in our old age.”