A Union Organizer is Born in North Carolina!
During conversations with friends, I found myself blurting out, “What they need down here are unions.” —Phil Cohen.
WAR STORIES By Phil Cohen
I returned to New York in 1979 after a year of traveling across Asia, accompanied by woman named Faye. I found an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, a working-class neighborhood bordering Long Island City, and resumed driving taxis. But my new friend was a country girl and terrified of the urban environment.
After six months she relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but we remained in touch. She portrayed Chapel Hill as an idyllic, laid-back college town surrounded by beautiful countryside. I was weary of walking down the street surrounding myself with three feet of energetic chainmail, holding a weapon in my pocket, always braced for confrontation. The thought of living someplace rural and close to nature became ever more enticing. I finally decided take a chance and resume what had been, at best, a tumultuous relationship.
Migrating from job to job, I was surrounded by coworkers who were paid minimum wage, treated like garbage, and yet proud of their circumstances. Grown men were called “son” by people they addressed as “sir” without giving it a second thought. During conversations with friends, I found myself blurting out, “What they need down here are unions.” I had no involvement with political or social causes as yet, but the words tore themselves from me time and again.
During the fall of 1979, I landed a job as a city bus driver in Chapel Hill. My years as a professional driver had actually counted for something. I could once again look in the mirror and feel like I had a real job, earning something that resembled a man’s wages.
The Transportation Department employed about a hundred drivers and maintenance workers. It also had a union—Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1565. The local was utterly worthless. Most Southern states had laws prohibiting collective bargaining agreements for municipal employees, meaning you could have a union, but not a contract. The ATU thus viewed our situation as hopeless and provided no service—except for collecting weekly dues.
Local 1565 was founded and run by two women who saw the labor movement as their personal hobby. They cherished the symbolism and reveled in the bureaucracy but were clueless when it came to actual representation. Management therefore had no accountability regarding employee treatment and engaged in blatant favoritism. Reasonable policies were replaced by the irrationally stringent when least expected. Drivers were fired without cause while the union leadership did nothing to intervene. They held monthly meetings, cackled over their minutes and reports, and engaged in lively debate about the rights of working people.
Over time, I came to know and care for some of the senior drivers who had been with the system since its beginning. My most poignant observation was watching the lights slowly flicker out in the eyes of good people, as they gradually succumbed to the grind and capricious whims of others.
Two years after my arrival, drivers were gathered around the garage superintendent as yet another policy change was unveiled. I observed the demeanor of my coworkers, the look on their faces, their body posture. A voice welled up from deep inside saying, someone’s got to do something about this. I scanned the faces and eyes of everyone in the room, trying to recognize who that person might be—so I could approach them afterward. My gaze finally turned within, and I realized that person was me. At the time, I wished it could have been someone else.
I got myself elected chief steward and took over the business of reorganizing the local and representing employees, leaving the otherwise ineffective president in place as a figurehead to handle uninspiring administrative duties. She resented and opposed my initiatives, but I neutralized her influence whenever and however necessary.
I studied the town’s personnel ordinances and grievance procedure, using them in place of a contract. Alliances were forged within the Transportation Board and Town Council. I enlisted support from the Rainbow Coalition and turned the struggles of transit workers into a media spectacle, generating statewide coverage that lasted for years.
The Town’s grievance process was obviously structured differently than within a collective bargaining agreement. The aggrieved employee met first with the department head and could appeal the decision to the town manager. The final recourse of unresolved cases involved a report from the Civilian Review Board, which senior management and politicians wished to avoid at all cost. Grievants could elect to be accompanied by a coworker at meetings—meaning they could bring their union rep.
I began every grievance by writing what amounted to a brief and mailing it to local politicians, Transportation Board members, the personnel director, and the press, cultivating support before the first meeting.
Transportation management and eventually city officials found themselves dragged to the bargaining table despite the absence of a legal mandate. They served within a public arena, and we had acquired the leverage to portray key individuals as either part of the solution or part of the problem. Numerous terminated workers were reinstated and the reams of policies and procedures we negotiated resembled the language portion of union contracts. I had in essence become the business agent of Local 1565, without ever having heard the term.
While two-thirds of the bus drivers had become union members, the Maintenance Department remained in its own separate world. The eight mechanics felt indispensable in regard to maintaining the town’s bus service and enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect with management. While not opposing the union, they didn’t believe its services were relevant to them. That all changed in late 1986 when their superintendent found a better job and his replacement was hired.
Jack Moran was a retired Marine captain who’d enlisted as a private twenty years earlier and risen to his ultimate rank by virtue of one attribute: He was the Corps’ champion heavyweight boxer, successfully representing them in bouts around the world with fighters from other agencies. Moran expected to whip his department into shape through military discipline. His demeanor was consistently abusive, bullying employees with threats of termination and physical violence, while disregarding safety regulations in favor of efficiency. The mechanics had a collective awakening that suddenly they needed the union and began approaching me.
The breaking point for maintenance workers came when Moran began forcing them to spray toxic chemicals with the garage bay shut to keep out the winter cold. I was shown Material Safety Data Sheets emphasizing these chemicals should only be used in open, well-ventilated environments. Mechanics complained of headaches and irritated eyes.
“If you ain’t man enough to do your job without crying like a little girl, you don’t belong here,” was Moran’s only response.
The mechanic who often spoke with me on behalf of his coworkers was named Bennie. He worked all day at the garage and then through the night in his private repair shop, hardly ever sleeping. He was thirty-five years old with all-white hair.
“Are you ready to file a grievance?” I asked.
“The sooner the better.”
I used several vacation and sick days to type a detailed account of the facts for circulation to all the right people. Bennie and I met with Transit Director Bob Goddard, realizing his repudiation of the man he’d recently selected to run the maintenance department was unlikely. Two weeks later we received the expected response stating that the problems would be investigated but Moran was otherwise an asset to the Transit System.
Bennie told me Moran was amused by what he considered to be a meaningless charade, declaring, “There’s nothing I love more than a good grievance!”
“Well, he hasn’t seen one like this,” I replied.
The meeting with Town Manager David Taylor took place on June 16. I had thoroughly prepped all of the mechanics and brought them with me. We sat in a semi-circle across from Taylor’s desk. I presented an overview of the situation and then began asking individuals to describe their experiences and observations:
“The air gets so thick in there when we’re working with hazardous chemicals and Mr. Moran keeps the doors shut, I can hardly breathe sometimes. I had to miss two days of work last month it made me so sick.”
I presented the Safety Data Sheets to the Town Manager and then distributed copies to the mechanics, confirming these were the chemicals in question.
“When I complained about this on a particularly bad day, and brought Mr. Moran one of the Safety Data Sheets, he handed it right back to me and said, ‘If you don’t quit whining and get back to work right now, I will whoop the goddamn snot out of you like the little sissy you are!’”
“These men cannot continue working under these conditions,” I said once the rounds had been made. “We’re all hopeful that you realize the gravity of this situation and decide upon a remedy. But so there are no surprises, there’s a message the mechanics need for you and the town to understand about their position.”
As had been prearranged, I turned the floor over to a maintenance technician named Garland. “If we can’t sort of straighten this out and make things right,” he awkwardly began, “the entire department will call in sick every day during July Fourth week.” This would essentially cripple the transit system while the town was being flooded with parents visiting university students—Chapel Hill’s image would be on full display. Buses can’t run safely and efficiently without daily upkeep by professionals. Mechanics with their skills and experience would be extremely difficult to replace.
On the evening of July 1, I received a phone call from Garland: “Jack Moran’s been fired! I was there when he got the news. He just stomped upstairs to his office and slammed the door. Next thing, you could hear him throwing furniture around the room and cussing at the top of his lungs. When he finally got in his car and left, me and a couple of the guys went up to his office and he’d totally trashed the place.”
The mechanics were astonished and overwhelmed with gratitude for what we’d accomplished. Every man signed a union card and elected Bennie as their shop steward. A week later, Bennie pulled me aside and handed me an envelope saying, “We all took up a collection and wanted you to have this.” I slipped into the restroom to view the contents and discovered $400.
Drivers often had their personal car repairs done at the bus garage by off duty mechanics for a reasonable price. But from that point on, my money was no longer accepted. When my transmission died, it was replaced for free with a junkyard unit.
I began thinking that I should be doing this as a career but had no relationships within the greater labor movement. On impulse one afternoon, I picked up the phone, called the North Carolina AFL-CIO in Raleigh, and asked for the president. I didn’t realize at the time that the odds against him taking a cold call from a stranger were a million to one. But he picked up and introduced himself as Chris Scott. I gave him a rapid-fire, ten-minute summary of the last seven years and he offered to schedule a meeting.
Within a week, I was sitting in AFL-CIO headquarters. “There are very few people in this world who are natural organizers, but I believe you’re one of them,” Chris told me. “If you prepare a resume, I’ll start passing it around with my recommendation.”
A year later, I met with Ernest Bennett, assistant Southern director for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU.) Ernest was in charge of internal rebuild projects and was intrigued that I had rebuilt my own local without any assistance. He bypassed the usual progression of responsibilities for new staff and hired me as a lead organizer. I spent the next thirty years in the field, directing rebuilds at dysfunctional locals, training new leaders, defeating union-busters, negotiating and enforcing contracts.
Over the years, ACTWU underwent several reorganizations and is currently known as Workers United, an affiliate of SEIU.
Phil Cohen spent 30 years in the field as Special Projects Coordinator for Workers United/SEIU, and specialized in defeating professional union busters. He’s the author of Fighting Union Busters in a Carolina Carpet Mill and The Jackson Project: War in the American Workplace.