Newsday (New York), September 3, 2005, Saturday

Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)

September 3, 2005 Saturday
ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: ACT II; Pg. B04

HEADLINE: On labor's frontlines;
Reminiscences from three stalwarts of union activism

BYLINE: BY PATRICIA KITCHEN. STAFF WRITER

BODY:
On her first day going to work in Manhattan's garment district, Lidia Correa of the Bronx got lost - for five hours. But as she walked up Seventh Avenue one recent sunny morning after 47 years in the garment trade, she was definitely on home turf.
The union activist and former sample-dress maker pointed out blocks where better dresses, coats and children's clothes have been made. And at 32nd Street, she and a friend nodded toward the hotels - the New Yorker and Pennsylvania - where garment workers met during a major strike in 1958 that resulted in, among other things, higher wages and overtime pay.
During that walkout she recalls riding along 35th Street in a garment cart pushed by other workers, holding high a union sign. "I always liked to make a lot of noise," says Correa, 66, who went on to become a union steward and executive board member before retiring in 1998.
While many think of Labor Day simply as the weekend signaling summer's end, there's a value to recalling such moments in the labor movement, moments that resulted in so many workers today having health insurance, better salaries, pension plans, vacations and overtime pay.
Granted, many of those gains have been eroded as union membership - and clout - have declined over the years. But "there's a benefit to thinking about the past as we try to chart our future," says Stuart Eimer, a sociology professor at Widener University in Chester, Pa., with a special interest in labor issues. That's especially true this year, he says, when so much attention has been focused on a rift within the AFL-CIO in which seven unions formed their own coalition called Change to Win. "It's a historic moment," he says. "People who otherwise don't know the AFL from the NFL are suddenly talking about it."
Correa's experience, along with that of Bob Harris, who fought to get fired air traffic controllers back to work, and George McDonald, a longtime newspaper union leader, is representative of work and sacrifice by union members through decades of activism.
Lidia Correa
Correa was just 19 when she joined in with the more than 100,000 garment workers in eight East Coast states striking for better pay, as well as the requirement that union labels be stitched into garments made in union shops.
Correa recalls her mother's angst. Just three months earlier she had encouraged her mother to leave a nonunion job in the Bronx and join Correa's employer as a sewing machine operator. "Oh, my God. What am I doing here?" was her mother's reaction when the strike began. Yet mother and daughter showed up each day to walk the picket lines.
Soon afterward Correa was asked to become an assistant shop steward in Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. (That union merged in 1995 with another to form UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.)
Correa's job over the years with several women's clothing manufacturers was to make up sample dresses for designers, a sought-after position many workers favored over more repetitious assembly-line duties.
She went on to study apparel design at night at the Fashion Institute of Technology and after receiving her bachelor's degree in labor relations from Cornell University extension, she looked into a different field - work in the city's unemployment office. But, she says, "I saw the amount of money they made and said, 'Are you crazy, Lidia?' The salary was not even half of what I was making."
It would seem natural for her to point first to wages and benefits as the key rewards for her union involvement; but no, she says it's the opportunity to be of service that was most rewarding. "A lot of people need help. I felt I could do that." The union, she says, "gave us an outlook on life," one of giving. "That makes me feel happy."
Still, the material gains are not to be minimized. She now works part time in UNITE's Manhattan office, explaining to retirees the union's post-retirement benefits, including English classes, cruises, art classes and volunteer opportunities.
The other day she told one woman who had retired but gone back to work again that her pension payments would be increased. "You see how beautiful it is to come here and know you have a second pension?" Correa said. Some people may not want to join unions today, she says. But tomorrow they won't have a generous retirement plan to fall back on.
Bob Harris
Bob Harris never saw himself as an activist. He grew up wanting to be a pilot and joined the Marines, but a paperwork mix-up sent him to air traffic school instead of flight training. At 25 he was hired by the Federal Aviation Administration and worked 19 years as an air traffic controller at the New York Center in Ronkonkoma.
But then, almost 25 years ago, the strike happened. Members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization walked off the job illegally on Aug. 3, 1981, over issues of pay, equipment and working conditions. Two days later, then-President Ronald Reagan surprised everyone by firing all 11,400 strikers and barring them from working for the federal government, a ban later modified to apply only to the Federal Aviation Administration.
At first Harris and others thought the decree would be tempered so they could return to work. "We had no expectation we would have to look for another job," says Harris. But optimism soon faded. Indeed, says David Gregory, labor law professor at St. John's University, Reagan's heavy hand with the air traffic controllers "sent a signal for the era we live in now."
In time, former PATCO members went on to work as funeral directors, fishing boat operators, taxi drivers, chiropractors and in many other fields. Some got food stamps.
Harris and his wife Joan ended up buying a Dunkin' Donuts franchise in Rocky Point, where he experienced a different kind of stress - that of running a small business. "If you don't make the donuts, and if you don't sell them, you don't have the money to buy what you need," he says.
A longtime union member who had never been particularly active, he joined with other fired air traffic controllers in lobbying Washington to get the hiring ban lifted. "There wasn't much going on and we had to do more on our own behalf," says Harris, who went on to head Controllers United, a grassroots group.
In his years of lobbying - and well over 50 trips to Washington - he met or worked with high-level movers-and-shakers, including labor union leaders, members of Congress and White House staff.
Finally, 12 years ago, news broke that 115 members of Congress had signed a letter to then-President Bill Clinton urging him to rescind the ban. "It was a very lifting moment," says Harris, when network news picked up the story.
The ban was lifted that August, 4,500 fired workers applied to return, and 18 months later the first of what ended up being about 800 rehires started reporting for retraining.
In 1997 "my turn came," says Harris, who already had sold the donut franchise. The Selden resident returned to his job in Ronkonkoma and now, at 67, is starting to think of what his next step might be. (Part of the agreement allowed those rehired to work past the mandatory retirement age of 56.)
As for the Harrises' personal battle, "you do what you have to do to survive," says his wife, who accompanied him on many of those lobbying trips.
Harris says it was a difficult but rewarding road. It's not just about the goal, he says. It's also about the traveling.
George McDonald
It's hard to imagine how the fate of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News could be related to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
But, had it not been for that attack, George McDonald might have had a career in professional baseball instead of becoming a union leader. And some people, at least, say that at critical times he played a key role in keeping both of those papers afloat.
In May 1941, the Brooklyn native had a promising tryout at Ebbets Field with the Brooklyn Dodgers. But in the wake of the Dec. 7 attack, he joined the U.S. Navy, and after the war, took a newspaper mail room job. That led him to high-level union leadership roles and a seat at the table where several of the city's major newspaper strikes were resolved.
"Without him, there would be at most one" daily tabloid in New York, says Theodore Kheel, a labor attorney who advised McDonald in his role as president of the Allied Printing Trades Council, an umbrella group of 10 newspaper unions.
Indeed, McDonald recalls the "biggest win" - the resolution in 1991 of a '-day strike at the Daily News, then owned by Tribune Co. (which now owns Newsday). Tribune threatened to close the paper if a buyer wasn't found. And in a whirlwind few days of negotiating that March, McDonald was among those who worked out labor agreements with British media mogul Robert Maxwell, paving the way for Maxwell's purchase of the paper.
McDonald, 82, even remembers sealing one agreement over a drink on Maxwell's yacht, moored in the East River. (It was from that yacht that Maxwell disappeared months later in the Canary Islands.) And he remembers being called at home when the long strike was first sparked by a seemingly minor incident at the paper's Brooklyn plant. A foreman had reprimanded a union member with an injured knee who refused to stand while preparing newspaper bundles for the wire-binding machine.
McDonald got his start in the mail room of The New York Times back when, he recalls, there were at least eight major dailies in the city. He worked as an inserter, tying papers into stacks as they came off the press to be handed off to waiting delivery trucks.
Work started about 9:30 p.m. for the early press run - and after a break, picked up again at 12:30 a.m. for the late edition. He remembers, still, the changing tide of the 1948 presidential election. When McDonald went out for supper after the first press run, Harry Truman was losing. When he returned and picked up a paper from the later run, "Truman was out in front."
McDonald went on to become business representative and then president of New York Mailers Union Local 6 - then president of the Allied Printing Trades Council, as well as head of several state labor organizations. Stepping away from his official roles in 1996, he still works four days a week as an adviser at Kheel's law firm in Manhattan.
They were "exciting years," he says. And, despite overall industry declines, he says he's proud of the jobs that were saved.
Sure, you have to be shrewd when it comes to negotiating, he says. But the key thing is to stand by your word. "When you make a deal, you make a deal."
Union dropoff
From a high of 35 percent of workers in the 1950s, union membership declined to 20.1 percent in 1983 and 12.5 in 2004.
Below, a breakdown showing percentage of workers in each age group who belong to unions:
16 to 24 - 4.7 %
25 to 34 - 10.6 %
35 to 44 - 13.7 %
45 to 54 - 17 %
55 to 64 - 16.8 %
64 and older - 7.5 %
U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS

GRAPHIC: 1) Photo by Jason DeCrow - Lidia Correa participated in a landmark strike in 1958, and later earned a labor relations degree at Cornell. 2) AP Photo - Garment workers from eight states rally at the Garden in 1958. 3) Newsday Photo / Julia Gaines - Longtime newspaper union leader George McDonald, above, is credited with aiding the survival of two of New York's tabloid papers; 4) he and Bertram Powers, at left in top right photo, march in a Labor Day parade in New York decades ago. 5) AP Photo, 1981 - At right, air traffic controllers picket in Ronkonkoma in 1981. 6) Photo by Bridget O'Brien - Below is Bob Harris (with wife Joan) of Selden, who was one of the air traffic controllers fired by President Reagan, but eventually rehired. 7) Cover Photo by Jason Decrow - Lida Correa