'An injury to one is the concern of all'
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
I often think about the old Knights of Labor, but especially on Labor Day.
I’m a retired community college history teacher who still packs a union card. (I'm a charter member of American Federation of Teachers Local 1360.)
The Knights “tried to teach the American wage-earner that he was a wage-earner first and a bricklayer, carpenter, miner, shoemaker, after; that he was a wage-earner first and a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, white, black, Democrat, Republican, after,” historian Norman Ware wrote.
The Knights stressed that whatever else divided working people, work itself was what they all had in common. Work was, by far, the most important factor in their lives. Thus, workers should unite as members of the working class, the Knights urged.
Active in the late 19th-century, the Knights were among the pioneers in our union movement. There were even Knights in western Kentucky, where I was born, reared and still live. The Fulton, Ky., group published a newspaper called The Toiler.
The paper and the Knights are long gone.
The union’s basic principle is still relevant, especially since Republicans in Washington, Frankfort and just about everywhere else are waging holy war on organized labor: Working people, no matter what jobs we have, are wage earners first. “An injury to one is the concern of all,” was the Knights’ famous motto. It still rings true.
I spent two dozen years in the classroom. I was a newspaper reporter for almost 13 years before that.
But I was always a wage-earner and a worker first. I belong to the working class just like a factory worker, construction worker, dock worker, sanitation worker, miner, truck driver, carpenter, painter, plumber, electrician, firefighter, grocery clerk, secretary and every other worker.
History is plain about what has most benefitted the American working class: unions and New Deal-style government action on our behalf. A big part of the New Deal guaranteed our right to organize unions and bargain collectively for better wages, hours, working conditions and benefits.
When I was a kid, my maternal grandparents, Susie and Diehl Vest of Mayfield, my hometown, told me how the union and the New Deal made their lives better.
“Bobo” belonged to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers at the old Merit Clothing Co. “Grandadden” worked out of Paducah Painters Local 500, which is still around.
The Vests voted for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt all four times he ran. (FDR and Abraham Lincoln tie as their grandson’s favorite presidents.)
The Vests also voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson both times he ran.
My friend Dave Suetholz, a Louisville labor lawyer who's running for the state Senate in his neck of the woods, just emailed me this quote from Stevenson, who came up short in 1952 and 1956:
"To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines—to realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen—human companionship on the job, and music in the home—to be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father—to know these things is to understand what American labor means."
I was too young to vote for Stevenson, but I cast my first presidential vote for Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968. (I’ve voted for every Democratic presidential hopeful since.)
A senator and vice president, HHH was one of my favorite politicians. Molly Ivins was one of my favorite newspaper columnists. Both of them also knew what helped the working class the most.
“America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions, can do to make a better life,” Humphrey said.
Said the indefatigable Ivins: “Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers (sadly, that percentage has shrunk as so many of our good union jobs have been shipped out of the country) are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Solidarity Forever, my union brothers and sisters, and Happy Labor Day to all!