LABOR AND RESPECT [M, 9-2-24]

 BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of an Old Man—LABOR AND RESPECT [M, 9-2-24]

 

Labor Day is known mostly as the time for closing swimming pools and to stop wearing white. Stuff for people who care about swimming and fashion. In other words, not my people.

If you stumble into some poorly attended speech in the town square, you might hear that Labor Day was first intended to honor the labor movement and the contributions of laboring people to the building of the USA.

In other words, my people.

I never met my grandfather, my mother’s father, Elmer Pond. He was killed in a coal mine cave-in years before I was born. I miss him. [1]

Grandpa Pond wasn’t just a coal miner. In his spare time, he was a union organizer. He had an Indian brand motorcycle that he rode to get around for his organizing activities on behalf of the UMW, United Mine Workers. [2]

It was a dangerous life, for both his mining and union organizing. Unions were violently opposed by mine owners. By “violently,” I mean violently. If miners tried to organize a union or struck to try for safer conditions and better pay, the company hired “goons” to beat them back into line. I mean “beat them” literally. 

If miners appealed to the law, elected county sheriffs and elected local judges sided with the owners. The more professional and presumably non-political Indiana State Police didn’t even exist until 1933. The goons had a free hand.

The unions worked primarily for safer working conditions. Black lung and cave-ins were a constant hazard, and safety always takes a back seat to profit. But better pay was certainly an issue, also, and, perhaps even more importantly, payment in money instead of script.

Script was “money” the owners used to pay the miners. It was good only to rent mine-owned houses and to shop in the infamous company store, where prices were higher than in regular stores. Shopping there got miners so deeply into debt that they were tethered to the mine owners forever. [3]

The first “record” I ever bought, as a new freshman at Indiana U, was Tennessee Ernie’s “Sixteen Tons,” with its mournful line, “St. Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go; I owe my soul to the company store.” He was singing about my people.

But the union movement wasn’t just about safety and salary and script. It was about self-respect.

I grew up seventeen miles from Ft. Branch, Indiana, where the eponymous Emge Meat Packing plant was located. It was a very successful business. Oscar Emge was an old man when I dropped out of high school to work in a factory, where I was proud to be a member of The International Assn. of Machinists. That was during the time that the Emge workers voted to organize.

Oscar Emge was heart-broken. “They don’t need a union. I’ve always been like a father to them,” he mourned. “I have taken care of them, paid their hospital bills. When they needed something, all they had to do was come to me and ask. And I haven’t resented it. It has given me great pleasure.”

Old Oscar, bless his kind heart, didn’t understand that people don’t want to be taken care of, and it wasn’t about whether he liked it. People don’t want to be dependent. They want to have a say in their own lives and in the use of what they have earned with their labor. That’s what unions are about. His workers respected Oscar, but they wanted to respect themselves, too.

I didn’t know much about Grandpa Pond, except that my mother cried all day each year on the anniversary of his death. But when we moved from Indianapolis to the farm between Oakland City and Francisco, Mother’s home town, I began to hear the stories about him, from Grandma Pond, and from his other children.

The first and constant thing I was always told by everyone in the Pond family: “Don’t go down in the mines.” It was with their encouragement, almost insistence, that I became the first member of the family to go to college. My people.

John Robert McFarland

1] My other grandfather, Arthur Harrison McFarland, also worked in the coal mines, but not as a miner. He was a stationary engineer.

2] I was disconcerted when the 1968 merger of The Methodist Church and The Evangelical United Brethren Church named its new women’s organization the UMW [United Methodist Women]. It took me a long time before I realized that the new UMW was much more powerful than the old UMW even dreamed of being!

3] Script was sort of like Menard’s misleading “11% off everything.” No, you pay full price, then send your receipt to Menard’s headquarters, and they send you “script” that you can use only at the company store.