I have related on this board bits and snatches of my personal history as the son and grandson of bigshots in the long disappeared Amalgamated Meat Cutters union.

From 1977 through 1980, I was General Counsel of Local 540. Our International Union merged with the Retail Clerks International Union in 1979, the culmination of decades of conflict between the unions over who represents grocery store employees and who negotiates their union contracts. We represented most of the meat department employees while the Retail Clerks union represented what we called the font end. Our members had significant bargaining leverage due to the perishable products they prepared for sale. Therefore, my predecessors negotiated better pay and benefits for our meat department membership. The Retail Clerks had far more members per store, but we had tens of thousands of packing house and other food processing operations under contract and the merged organization called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union was home to a major cultural conflict.

We were hard-nosed union guys. They were mealy-mouthed dues collectors. They fit into the 21st Century decades before it happened. The evidence I have for this biased assertion is my final conversation with the first President of the UFCW, Bill Wynn. "You see, David, the problem is your father got the wages up too high. It makes it too hard to organize. If a guy who owns a grocery chain looks at the union contract and sees that it would cost him six million dollars, he'll just set aside five million dollars to fight us."

So the top guy figured that getting our members more pay was the wrong way to go. The union grows from "organizing" -- i.e. recruitment of new members. So what's in it for those new members? Not money.

Forty odd years later, how's that working out? The current membership is 1.3 million, the same number we had when we merged in 1979.

I had already quit my job as Executive Assistant Regional Director. That was why I was in Wynn's office, talking Big Picture shit with this guy wearing enough gold jewelry to disrupt the world market in precious metals.

I had quit for a far more selfish reason -- I did not have any desire to live like a Retail Clerk representative at any level.

My father announced his retirement in 1983. He then made a deal with Bill Wynn to have me take his place as Regional Director of our Meat department region. But his Retail Clerk counterpart threw a monkey wrench into Dad's scheme. He retired too. Which put Wynn in what he said was an awkward position. There was a "policy" of merging the meat and clerk geographical regions when their directors retire. Wynn said this made it impossible to promote me because it would put me in charge of some 35,000 grocery clerks in addition to our 25,000 meat members.

Yeah, right.

So the new "deal" was for me to be the Executive Assistant to the new Director for two years. At that point I would become a Director, somewhere, to be determined later. This all rubbed me the wrong way for multiple reasons, but I was determined to make the best of it.

In November of 1983, the New Boss paid a visit to Dallas. She was a First 2-fer. A woman and gay.
She was the supervisor of the clerical staff in the Washington office. She had never negotiated a contract or made an organizing house call in her life. She was a pre-woke woke union executive.

I tried to make the best of it. We had a one-on-one chat in which she told me that she was a stern task master. I resisted the temptation to click my heels and I straight faced the whole conversation.

There were more gems of corporate bullshit -- here is the capper: She said she was not making a total move to Texas and she would be commuting from her home in Washington, flying in on Monday mornings and back home on Friday nights. "So I would like for you to move your residence to somewhere close to the airport so you can give me a ride to and from the airport."

I should have quit on the spot.

But I did not want to embarrass my father.

January 2, 1984 -- Her first day on the job. We started the day with the first joint staff meeting of the clerk and meat field staffs. Our guys were appalled at the heel clicking mentality of our new co-workers but I got through the day with minimal discord.

About 5 o'clock, the new Director and I had a private talk about what was going on out in the 10 state field we were responsible for. Our local in Alexandria, Louisiana was on strike against Kroger and we needed to get involved to settle it, if possible.

I told her that I had talked with the International Director of Collective Bargaining, an old friend of my father and me to see if he could get to Alexandria that week.

"You did what?"

"I called Allen Lee to see if he could help us with Kroger."

"It is the Director's prerogative to call the Washinton office."

"Excuse me?"

"David, you are not to call the Wahington office ever again."

Correct. I quit the following morning after telling my Dad that I tried.

But I did not go to war at that point. It took even more ugly shit.