Reagan Broke Them

Unions have gone out of style, lost to public life. Most americans are probably glad or more likely they don’t care, don’t think about a union.

I worked in a union shop for a few years. I didn’t like it, did not like paying dues. I liked the pay and tolerated the steward. As a young man, a boy of about eleven, I heard tales of union days. I recall this because of reading Senator Webb’s book. He talks about the military. About his memory of things that I experienced. I can’t match my memory and his. The times, the places, yes, but not the meaning. Perhaps his family times were as my uncles would have said too easy. The military was an escape from hard times. To get out of the mine, the mills, sometimes you had to take up pussy work. Work like that found in the factory or military. Easy work, suited to city, to suburb, to pussy unions like those at the Ford plant. Not work like this. Work that lasted a full day, in its day. Days that began in dark, took place in darkness, ending long after dark. Those are the days my uncles talked about. This talk usually took place after beers on the river bank. The only bank most of them ever saw, or used.

My people lived in the valley. The Ohio valley, bounded by small hills and hollows. Bounded between three states, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. The rich people lived in Pittsburgh. The regular people lived in the hollows. The miners and mill workers called their lessers “hoopies” since they made barrels for booze. Hill made wiskey. Tax free and tasteless. At least that is my memory of the mason-jar wiskey. Strong, without any reason.

One day on the bank, an uncle told me something quick, almost secret about the mills. I was young, maybe ten or eleven, years before my union days. He told me that even though the unions weren’t as strong as they were, they were still better than anything else. He wanted them to strike more. I suspect I wanted them to do more, or strike for more, but that will be another story. Anyhow, he mentioned, quickly, something that I have always remembered. Remembered, felt I should do something about, but didn’t, haven’t, can’t. He told me, between sips from a canning jar full of home made wiskey and store bought beer, that the good thing about the union is: “you can keep your job even if your wife doesn’t sleep with the foreman.” Then another uncle told the joke about the meaning of “forplay” is that you get your wife after the boss and shift foreman are finished with her. They didn’t laugh. It wasn’t common that they would tell a joke and not laugh. Jokes always meant laughing. No matter how many times the joke was told, men laugh when they’re fishing or just talking in a garage or on a river bank. That story has stayed with me. I never could ask my aunt, any of them about this. I’m not sure I could take the answer.

I imagine that in our republics halls that a deflecting response must be

“things aren’t like that now, not anymore.”

To this I say: Yep, and there is a reason things aren’t like that anymore, because my uncles and their kind changed it.

Not Reagan. In his world we would still have foreplay.