The transformation of organized labor took place during the Reagan years. We went from something to nothing in the 1980s. They didn't kill us, they just scared us into institutional suicide.

In the year 1980, I was employed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 540 as General Counsel. I got the job the old-fashioned way – through nepotism. My father was then the Regional Director of the UFCW, in charge of an eight-state area. In turn, he basically inherited his leadership position from his father. My local union had about 4,000 members and the region 25,000.

Our part of the union was very aggressive, and we used time-honored tactics to negotiate ever rising wages. We had two principal weapons during those last days of the New Deal’s redistribution of income – the roving picket line and the boycott.

Our first premise in fighting an employer was that unless you could put the majority of a company’s profit making operations on strike, you will get your get your ass kicked in a strike. So we educated our members to refuse to cross a picket line in front of their job sight. Whenever we had a contract dispute at a particular operation, we would send roving picket line walkers to other unionized job sites, shutting them down for a day or two at a time. This allowed our members to get three or four days pay for the week while playing havoc with he employers’ operation, as they never knew where we would hit next.

In our main industry, grocery stores, long before I got out of law school, my father’s generation used that technique to pressure Safeway, Kroger, Albertsons and several regional chains into bringing almost all the stores in our region under a single common expiration date with common rates of pay and benefits, which were the highest in the nation as of the 1970s.

In dealing with manufacturing plants – as opposed to retail stores – we added another weapon to our arsenal, the boycott, and then tweaked that to include advising the general public about the ugly facts of food processing. In particular, my grandfather had won a major fight with a poultry processing plant by distributing what we called the “sick chicken” flyer—verbatim quotes from the daily inspection reports of Federal Meat Inspectors. People are squeamish about what they eat.
During 1980, I got promoted to become my father’s assistant Director and Ronald Reagan became POTUS. For whatever reason, Organized labor just laid down and died after the PATCO strike of 1982 ended in an old fashioned bust-out of the air traffic controllers’ union. At the time, I did not grasp the magnitude of the labor movement’s internal collapse.

But I saw it up close and personally over the next couple of years.

The first sign of the new cowardice hit me right between the eyes in 1983 as I was leading negotiations for a newly organized poultry processing plant in Arkansas owned by Tyson. This facility fabricated Chicken McNuggets for Mickey D’s. Although we had a long-time relationship with contracts at several other Tyson locations in Arkansas, for reasons I could not grasp at the time, Tyson refused to negotiate a contract with the same terms we already had with them at their other plants. In particular, they insisted on making it all but impossible for the union to collect dues through what we call the “checkoff.”

The upper echelon of the International Union understood that this was a declaration of war against us. That was my opening as a junior executive in the organization to get authorization and funding for a reprise of my grandfather’s sick chicken gambit. We used direct mail to blanket certain zip codes all over the country with the juicy quotes from the Federal Meat Inspectors – “Get those rat droppings out of here!” “I told you before. Get rid of those cockroaches!”

This got McDonald’s attention which also got Tyson into a tizzy.

Mickey D sued me – and the union as well – for $40 million each. The leaders of the International Union went ape shit. We surrendered and promised in writing not to organize any Tyson facility for ten years.

For a point of reference, both my father and grandfather took great pride in getting sued, considering it to be but another skirmish in the long war against The Bosses.

Meanwhile, The PATCO strike started at the end of the summer of 1981. I was one of the few officials of another union to appear at the first PATCO rally in Dallas. I got a huge cheer from the strikers when I reported to them that all the officials of the UFCW would stay off airplanes until it was safe to fly again.

Well, it was about a month before we gave up on that pipe dream, as Reaganism – much more than anything the idiot actually did, rolled over the labor movement that had built the great middle class out of the New Deal.

At some time in 1983, I remember attending a meeting of UFCW negotiators and hearing a report from Executive Vice President Allen Lee. He recited the wave of concessions our local unions were giving up all over the country. He focused on the weird “solution” to the problem of employers demanding lower labor costs at the bargaining table – the two-tiered contract, which provided for no raises to incumbent employees, while setting new much lower rates for newly hired employees. I was struck by Lee’s candor as he listed all the harms to the union this shit was doing. “The lower tiered employees will loathe the union for making them second class citizens. We are building our future on a foundation of tissue paper. But under the circumstances, we have no choice.”

This screed is running long, so I will jump to my last anecdote. By the end of 1983, I was sick of the bullshit and I resolved to quit my job with the parent union and go back to my home local union job in Dallas. International President Bill Wynn asked me to come to Washington to talk about my future. He knew my quitting would make a bit of a stir, as I was openly on track to become a Director.

At the meeting in his office, he told me that the problem for the union in Texas and the southwest was that my father had gotten the wages too high. “You see, David, it makes it too hard to organize. If a guy owns a grocery chain and sees that the union contract will cost him 6 million dollars, he’ll just set aside 5 million dollars to fight us.”

Think that logic through.

Not coincidentally, this was the time when union boss salaries started their march into six figures. By the time I retired from IATSE to avoid the jab, I had a job with about one third of the responsibility of my job in 1983 -- my last salary was $130,000. Big shots today routinely make over half a million dollars a year to manage the sputtering nothing of today’s labor movement.

It was not Reagan that broke our back. It was the culture of reaganism that bought off our leadership.