From the Vault of Art Shay: Labor

By Art Shay in News on Nov 21, 2012 7:20PM

Hoffa was not a man of prayer but he was persuasive. He was immensely likable. When Stallone made a thinly-veiled biopic on Hoffa called \<em\>F.I.S.T.\<\/em\> it was laughed at by the critics&mdash;I think because he made his Hoffa character obnoxious. \<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine ran my letter to this effect and Jimmy\'s wife and daughter had letters in \<em\>Time\<\/em\> the next week saying I was right.\r\n

Former Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa and me outside his home near Detroit in the 70\'s. He warned me not to stand \"too close\" to him because he felt himself a target-coming back from prison and reentering the labor wars. Three months later he disappeared and his body was variously rumored to have been ground up in a dog food machine, or buried under the end zone of a new football stadium. I covered one futile farmyard dig. He was full of Detroit lore, passing a Fox & Hounds restaurant he pointed to an Oldsmobile. \"Henry Ford II was having lunch here one day with some of his younger geniuses. He casually said, .\>\"Why don\'t we have a car competing head to head with that Oldsmobile?\" His ass-kissing boys then proceeded to design, promote and fail with the Edsel. So said Jimmy Hoffa.\r\n

The last Union survivor of the Civil War, 108-year-old bugle boy Albert Woolfson, had (when he was 15) played Mess Call for President Lincoln at a New Jersey camp. Here in Duluth in the 50s he is delivering a tirade against his son in the background. \"He\'s only a kid of 85 and he\'s dang lazy already and won\'t do the chores,\" he griped.\r\n

At an obscure Sears warehouse near Chicago\'s Midway Airport, shooting for \<em\>Fortune\<\/em\> magazine, I documented the new system the company had installed&mdash;automated clothes racks&mdash;infuriating the union by having to fire obsolete workers. I had been at Ford in 1953 when they automated an entire assembly line, and it was now run by three guys, not 43. \r\n

Auto companies, copying the Japanese who had copied our \"just in time\" techniques&mdash;everything arriving on time to be assembled&mdash;went a step beyond and automated their assembly lines, largely dehumanizing them. Striking the first real death blow to the union\'s hegemony of the first part of the century.\r\n

Plagued by strikes since the 1930s, companies like Sheboygan\'s Kohler used tear gas to get the strikers off company land. Strikers fought back, wearing gas masks from WWI.\r\n

In 1954 the then owner of Kohler, Herbert V. Kohler, points out for me and the readers of \<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine, a couple of bullet holes from a long ago strike in the 1930s. He never had the holes repaired in the bricks or doorways \"because I wanted to remind the people of Wisconsin how serious both sides were.\" In the end, arbitration prevailed.\r\n

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art reminisces on the labor movement.)

Chocolate and economic junkies awoke to the news last week that Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes were about to disappear because Hostess would rather liquidate its assets rather than negotiate an end to the strike by 18,500 workers of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. The last time that union was in trouble was when a tee-shirt company averred it couldn't get their whole name on a tee shirt in time for the annual picnic at the agreed on bargain price. There's an ongoing local run on the empty-calorie cakes possibly because Twinkies were invented in Chicago. Going out of business is the extreme expression of strike disapproval by management." We'll show ‘em-ism." You want bigger paychecks? How about telling your families from now on there's gonna be zero paychecks you stupid wiseasses. It's what President Regan did to the air traffic controllers, who were left to control the air in their home neighborhoods. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So said Lord Whatshisname.

Politics and labor are the two engines that drive most of our country's news. They are so intrinsically important and so dull that most of us turn first to the sports and show biz pages where life is simpler and more explicable and professional ranting is recognized as an art, especially on TV. Witness poor Mitt Romney, who still issues proclamations of hate and blame from his political grave. Atop heartfelt statements averring sadly in an unaccustomed wise and true aphorism, that "Ann would have made a great First Lady."

Having accompanied labor maverick and fellow handball player Jimmy Hoffa as he left his Michigan home, the little Caesar, on his comeback into labor from prison, muttered, "Stand a little behind me, Art, I'm a floating target right now."

Jimmy disappeared a few weeks later—long believed ground up in a restaurant meat-chopper and buried under a new football stadium's end zone, or worse. I had covered his career from the beginning and had once played a few losing points of handball with him against a prison wall in Pennsylvania. His right hand, as are the right hands of most tough union guys, was deadly. Hoffa could kill with either hand and the word was he had done so.

I watched in respectful awe as Spielberg wriggled a conclusion to his Lincoln movie. It was a post-assassination speech warning the nation that a big union of enemy hordes was about to begin.

In another big-buck movie, Flight, Denzel Washington, an alcoholic pilot, sweats tears with us during a federal hearing that praises his having saved 100 lives during an almost-impossible aerial maneuver- but losing six lives while doing it.
And a likable young black attorney, smart as a whip, defends Denzel against the unseen pilot's union- whom I ran into time and again on the plane crash trails for Time-Life. They are tougher than ever. The producers must have traded on Denzel's reputation to keep the Union in the background of impending lawsuits by aggrieved families and pissed off airplane manufacturers whose products were made to seem, for a while, pervious to Sandy-like air turbulence.

"You can't move me, I'm stickin’ to the union," ran the old marching song of labor back in the day. It struck terror in the hearts of bosses and company owners and it’s only setback in recent years occurred in the miracle of Wisconsin politics, with voters reversing the autocratic ouster of union influence in state labor contracts. Not yet a trend, but a slight comeback for the decaying union movement.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.