American Rights at Work

Remembering Studs Terkel

Tula Connell — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:22:15 -0500

What bitter irony. Studs Terkel, who gave voice to working people throughout his life, passed away yesterday, just days before a potentially historic presidential election. Should Sen. Barack Obama win on Tuesday, his victory would be a sweet vindication for Terkel, whose affinity for America's workers would be reflected in the policies of an Obama administration.

Terkel, 96, has been renowned for his compilations of oral interviews with famous and mostly not-so-famous Americans. He has talked with thousands of people about their experiences on the job, serving their country in World War II, their perceptions of race and most recently, the challenges of growing old and facing death. One of his most famous books is Working, in which more than 100 Americans share their hopes, dreams and daily struggles on the job.

In April 2006, Terkel received the Lifetime Achievement award from the workers' advocacy organization, American Rights at Work. After accepting the award, Terkel said:

What brings workers together can be a belief, a hope of improving the climate and community at work--the spaces where so many of us spend so much of our lives. Respect on the job and a voice at the workplace shouldn't be something Americans have to work overtime to achieve.

Born Louis Terkel, he grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in an environment filled with workers, union organizers and other progressives who gathered in the lobby of his parents' Chicago rooming house. Starting his career as an actor, disc jockey and radio and television personality, Terkel ultimately turned to documenting oral interviews in a series of books. In Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Terkel elicited first-hand experiences of workers as varied as bus driver and strip miner, policeman and film critic. Blacklisted in the 1950s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Terkel went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and a National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Terkel, who has been called a "guerilla journalist" and a man "whose name is synonymous with Labor Day," sprinkles his conversation with references to the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and American revolutionary Thomas Paine--yet has the unique ability to engage people in a way that draws forth the hopes, dreams and heartfelt experiences of everyday Americans.

In July 2005, I was honored to interview Terkel, and in his inimitable style, his conversation ranged from erudite quotes from the classics to conversations heard at his local bus stop. In remembering Terkel, there's no better way than to hear him in his own words. Below is the excerpt from that July 2005 interview.

"The thing that's so ironic, is we are stuck with what I call national Alzheimer's disease. The general American public, through no fault of its own, but through the media--which is laughingly called, absurdly called, obscenely called--liberal media, which is a joke, of course. But the point is that because of that, day after day after day, putting down of labor organizations, or not mentioning them led to the children not knowing a thing about it.

How did the eight-hour day come into being? It began in Chicago and four guys got hanged for it--the Haymarket affair in 1886. What were they fighting for? The eight-hour day.

There's no knowledge what the labor movement did for the lives of people. Social Security came out of the New Deal, and the minimum wage idea, and the idea of national health, these all came out of [labor]. And that's all being dismantled by what we have now. And so part of it is not knowing the past. No past, therefore there is no present and no future.

What was the first thing Ronald Reagan did as president of the United States? In 1981, he broke the air controller's strike. You know what they were striking about? It wasn't about pay. It was about R and R, rest and recreation. So the issue was passenger safety, right? And Ronald Reagan said, 'No,' and four out of five Americans applauded.

You start wondering, 'Wait a minute. Are we a necrophiliac people?' And you start thinking some more. 'We're the only industrialized country that still has the death penalty, right? We're the only industrialized country that does not have national health insurance.' So one is death, and the other is life. And so you start thinking, 'My God, have we become so perverse?

If so, then all my books are junk? Because my books depended on the sense of decency of ordinary Americans and their native intelligence and it's under assault today as never before.

[Americans' sense of decency and native intelligence are] there, but the information has been siphoned through--we know what it's siphoned through: Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh. And thus we have a certain kind of news filter to it. Right? It becomes entertainment, it becomes banality, it becomes nothing. And there's no past. The big thing is to revivify in one way or another the past and to show how we came to be.

So that's part of the problem facing labor, to reacquaint these people with what happened. The new members are fresh and they have grievances and we've got to hit that and reach as many as possible--caregivers and…maids and get all the people who never thought of organizing, organized. And that's what the oral histories I write are all about, I hope--to recapture our history. And I think we can do it--provided we…stick together.

Whatever split there is has to be healed--immediately. Because we agree on the big thing. Basically, it has to be under one big tent. I like the phrase 'under one tent.' And so, that's pretty much the ticket."

This is a cross-post from the AFL-CIO Now blog.

Greedy Troglodytes Attack Teachers

Tula Connell — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:45:54 -0400

What is it about teachers that reactionaries don't like?

Maybe it's because an educated electorate poses a threat to those who seek to control the public—"Danger: Educated Union Member" is one of our favorite phrases—and so teachers pose an easy target for the antediluvians among us. (Remember John Stossel's ABC trash piece, "Stupid in America"?).

The success of teachers' unions also draws particular ire from the anti-education crowd.

This week, you may have seen full-page ads in USA Today or teevee spots on CNN and Fox attacking teachers. The ads are part of a $1 million advertising assault on teachers' unions launched days ago.

Two questions emerge.

Who would spend this amount of money trashing teachers? And who stands to make tons of money off this campaign?

The second question is the simplest to answer. The egregiously misnamed Center for Union Facts is the money-making entity pushing the campaign. The organization is another front group by sleaze propagandist Richard Berman. Among Berman’s list of hatchet jobs is a PR campaign through his American Beverage Institute to slam Mothers Against Drunk Driving on behalf of the alcohol industry. Via the Center for Consumer Freedom, Berman wielded a literally toxic campaign for the tuna industry to encourage pregnant women to eat tuna—never mind the mercury. (AFT's NCLBlog also points out Berman's attacks on Robert Redford here.)

Berman regularly reproduces organizations with innocuous-sounding names to perpetrate the opposite of what they seem.

As a result, Berman makes money. Lots of it. He runs five campaigns out of his offices in Washington, D.C., with backers paying "huge fees" to his lobbying firm, according to the Union Busting Network at the non-profit American Rights at Work. Citing USA Today, American Rights at Work notes Berman's company has 28 employees and earns $10 million a year, but "only Berman and his bookkeeper wife" know how much of the $10 million ends up in their own pockets. Or as the Las Vegas Sun puts it:

[Berman] never discloses his financial backers, allowing large, mainstream companies to fund him without having to associate their brand names with his sharp-elbowed approach.

At the Conservative Leadership Conference in Nevada last October, the Las Vegas Sun notes that when Berman described the tactics behind his teacher attack campaign, he approvingly quoted mobster Al Capone: “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.”

In Ohio, where Berman is aiming his "gun" at the Columbus Education Association, the association sums up his mission:

Not enough Columbus City teachers have been fired between the 2003–04 and 2006–07 school years to satisfy the Center For Union Facts. The anti-labor group posits that it is too easy for many Columbus City School teachers to obtain a continuing contract (known as tenure in other states) and they are therefore able to escape the accountability and scrutiny of the evaluation process.

Berman's sights clearly are off. Columbus was one of the first National Education Association (NEA) locals to host a Peer Assistance and Review Program, winning a Saturn Award for the program and becoming a centerpiece in former NEA President Bob Chase’s concept of “New Unionism." The program involves intensive hands-on training, conferences, evaluation and mentoring to ensure the highest skill levels among teachers. Further, as Columbus Education Association President Rhonda Johnson stated:

I find it highly ironic, that on the day that this smear campaign begins, the [Peer Assistance and Review Program] panel is meeting to consider whether to make a recommendation to the Superintendent to non-renew 4 intern teachers and to receive reports on three experienced teachers whose [Peer Assistance Review] consulting teachers have grave concerns about their classroom performance.

AFT President Ed McElroy describes Berman as "a shameless lobbyist who has shilled for pesticide, alcohol and tobacco companies."

Berman has a record of using hidden funders to attack groups that contribute a great deal to society. Now, he is coming after teachers at a time when most Americans support education and want to make improving education a top national priority.

The groups funding Berman have lots of money to spend. As part of his teacher attack campaign, he's inviting nominations for a contest to determine the nation's worst unionized teachers. The "winners" will be offered $10,000 each if they permanently resign or retire from any career in education—if they sign a release agreeing to have their name and the reasons for their selection published by the group.

This leads us back to the first question: Who would spend this amount of money trashing teachers?

Behind Berman's Center for Union Mis-Facts, are an array of organizations, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that have an ideological and pecuniary axe to grind. They hate unions and more importantly, the workers who join together in unions to assert their rights as human beings are entitled to decent wages, affordable health coverage and retirement security.

The Las Vegas Sun puts his attack on teachers unions in perspective, saying it is "really a small front in a much bigger battle over the future of the labor movement and its role in American politics."

It’s not clear Berman cares at all about education policy. His real target is the broader labor movement offers profiles of anti-union organizations with details on their lobbying, litigation and media outreach, as well as their connections to each other.

The Sun article goes on:

If the public doesn’t trust the teachers unions, he reasons, surely they won’t trust steel workers or other unions that don’t have such a seemingly beneficent pedigree.

Berman wants lots of money and will do what it takes to keep the feeding at the pig trough. Those paying him to do their dirty work don't want us, as individuals, joining together to face the boss, the Big Business employer, the corporate conglomeration that profits when we don't challenge a wage system that means we must work two and three jobs to support our families, or go without prescription medication so we can pay the rent.

Workers in unions challenge that ideological mindset every day. And that's why Berman is being paid millions to go after us.

This is a crosspost from Firedoglake.