Union Politics

My experience with our local union was nothing like what you see in movies. All the head busting was done long before I came along, and I don't think it was ever done in our plant. Most Procter & Gamble plants were not unionized, and there was little interest among their employees in organizing themselves. The only reason we had a union was that, when P&G bought the Charmin Paper Company, the union was already there.  From what the old timers told me, they wouldn't have organized either except that their plant manager was a real prick. The previous owners had gone out of business and the plant had sat idle for years before Charmin bought it. Then P&G bought Charmin a few years later, expanded the operation, and I was hired as part of that expansion.

The United Papermakers International was a democratic union that did not have the reputation for corruption or violence that some of the other labor organizations like, say, the Teamsters had. Our stewards and other officers were elected fair and square, and most of them did a pretty good job, considering that they had little, if any, training, and the rank and file seldom came to a consensus about anything. Department stewards were paid ten bucks a month and got their union dues for free, which was another ten bucks a month. If you figured that into an hourly wage for the time they spent, well suffice it to say, nobody was in it for the money.

I was a department steward for about five years, off and on. The first time I was elected to represent the Warehouse Department because the incumbent had pissed a lot of people off and he said he was tired of the job anyway. It was supposed to be a two year term, but I bid to another department right in the middle of it. Years later, in still another department, I was approached by some people and asked to run for steward because I had some experience, and they couldn't find anybody else who wanted the job anyway. After two terms, some other guys approached me and asked me to run for president of the whole local union. I explained to them that, while I was fairly popular in our department, I doubted that I had the wherewithal to win a plant wide election. According to our rules, you couldn't run for two offices at once, so I had to give up my steward's job to run for president. I told them fuckers that, if they wanted to see me become president, they'd better get their asses down to the union hall on election day. Voter turnout was usually light, so a few votes one way or the other could determine the election. They were going to lose me as steward either way, so they had to make up their minds if that's what they really wanted, and apparently they did.  As it turned out, none of them fuckers turned out to vote, and I lost by about that same number. The next day, they were all standing around and grumbling about how they wanted to get rid of our current union president, who had just been narrowly re-elected.  I asked them how they had voted yesterday, and they all expressed surprise that the election had come and gone without them noticing it. So I told them fuckers that they had their chance and blew it, and now I didn't want to hear any more grumbling about our president. I said that I would support him as best I could until the next election, and that they should do likewise. I don't remember if there was another election before the plant closed down but, if there was, I didn't run for anything.