Did the unions build the middle class, and through it, America?
What I can tell you is that the unions in Louisville helped make possible the life my dad lived and the ones he helped create for my four siblings and me.
Did you have a favorite line from President Biden's speech last night? Or maybe one you hated most? Several stood out for me, but this one in particular: “To all the transgender Americans watching at home, especially the young people who are so brave, I want you to know that your president has your back.”
Your president has your back. A line like that change lives. In the way it spoke directly to people listening, who might be feeling as if they were on the outside looking in, it recalled Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1988 DNC. Surely, you remember the one in Atlanta.
“Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects on the corners, I understand,” he said, wrapping up a campaign that snagged 13 states but not the final prize. “Call you outcast, low down, you can't make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass — When you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination. I was born in the slum but the slum was not born in me, and it wasn't born in you — and you can make it.”
Biden has none of Jackson’s poetry, but he gave a better speech Monday than I’d expected. It was subtle, in that it was full of legitimate overtures to the GOP — if you don’t like my immigration plan, fine, he said, let’s pass the parts we agree on — but it was also undeniably and profoundly liberal. It denounced trickle-down economics, insisted we’d pull our troops out of Afghanistan, and called for — let’s face it — enormous tax increases and massive investments … in science, medicine, education, paid leave and so much else.
Can you think of anything President Obama said that was as bold? How much Biden will get through a divided Senate is anyone’s guess for now, but it laid down a liberal marker like we haven’t seen in a president in a very, very long time.
But here I am talking politics, when I told myself I wouldn’t. It was another line from Biden’s speech that resonated with me most powerfully. "Wall Street didn't build America,” he said. “The middle class built America. And unions built the middle class."
My dad, had he lived just seven more months, would have been sitting on the sofa in his den watching tonight — and he would have smiled. John Lindenberger spent 48 years in the Graphic Communications International Union local in Louisville, and served three times as president. He once led the union on a lengthy strike against the Binghams, who owned Standard Gravure as well the newspapers and 84 WHAS. Years later, he told me two things about that: One, that while the Binghams were certainly liberal in their politics, when it came to paying their blue-collar workers, they weren’t much different than any other clan of industrialists. Secondly, that he never felt good about that strike.
In the end, as the union-paid strike benefits began to add up, the suits from the international union came down and took over negotiations. Soon enough, the strike was over and the workers were back on the job — most of them, anyway. A couple dozen or so weren’t called back and were cut loose. “We were right to strike,” he told me, but it never set right with him that the end of those labors was a deal that had some members paying a much steeper price than others.
Still, I found myself nodding in agreement when Biden gave his line about the unions building the middle class. That was especially true in Louisville back in my father’s day. By the 1980s it still had the highest rate of unionization in the South, according to the C-J. Salaries were third highest among big cities in the South, and there had been more days lost to walk-outs among Louisville employers in the 1970s than nearly anywhere else.
In 1982, The Courier-Journal ran a three-part series about the labor climate in Louisville, which lead with a line that soon would become one label Louisville tried for years to shake off. “Louisville is strike city,” the piece began. The Wall Street Journal picked up on that line and soon it was a reputation the city couldn’t shake.
By the early 90s, when I was a student at the University of Louisville, my teacher, the journalist Bob Schuman, would feature that article and the impact it had on the city in his wonderful course, The Press and the City, which charted the impact on Louisville’s development exerted over the years by the Bingham papers.
For me, unions meant a wage high enough that my dad could help raise five kids, send a few of us to Catholic school, live in a nice house, and still retire with a pension and healthcare that kept him in that house and fed and warm and independent till just days before he passed away at 91.
Did the unions build the middle class, and through it, America? What I can tell you is that unions built the life lived by my father — born in the Great Depression, half-orphaned at 5, and raised by his widowed mother and step-father in the projects — and made possible the ones he created for his kids.
Union membership has been falling since about the time of that article, and not just in Louisville. That changed a bit last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. COVID put millions out of work, the union work force shrank only about 2.2 percent, compared to well over 6 percent for workers as a whole. Now unions are about 10 percent of the work force, roughly evenly split between public and private-sector workers.
I’d say that’s a good thing. And, if Biden can find a way to get his big tax-and-spending plans through a divided Senate, that will likely change even more. I wish I could tell my dad how much I am pulling for pulling that to happen in some form or fashion.
Note: Sometimes I really need an editor. That went on for longer than I intended. If you found it interesting, you can do two huge things to help build the newsletter: First, share this link anywhere you can. And second, leave a comment — either here or on social media — telling me and other readers what you thought of the speech, of unions, or of Biden’s agenda in general. — Michael.
Michael, nice story. My feelings on unions have been mixed over the years, and depending on the situation, I feel I can make a case either way, for or against. Having said that, the protection of jobs for hard working people has grown substantially over the last year. I liked what the President said in his speech, and I look forward to seeing action behind words.
Additionally, thank you for sharing more of the story of your father. I never knew those things about him, but that makes sense as he was never one to brag or be the center of attention. I wish I had known him more than as just Mr. Lindenberger from the old neighborhood. He was a good man.
Ken Bramer