Vote Union-Go Union-Picket Lines Mean Don't Cross

From The ALH  Archives- Vote Union-Go Union-Picket Lines Mean Don't Cross 

By Brad Fox, Senior

My son Brad Fox, Junior a stringer here just as  I had started out in that position long ago and mercifully done recently wrote a archival caption dealing with series of civil disobedience acts by veterans at the White House in the time of the Obama Administration during one its periodic escalations of the troop levels, read war, in Afghanistan. He noted that I had covered that event for this publication and, oh, that I had been arrested that day along with the veterans since the mounted D.C. police usually cool and experienced in such demonstrations went a little whacky, started pushing people around.

That arrest, that standing in solidarity with my brother veterans, who were also hand-cuffing themselves to the White House fence, that not crossing the line, or in that case crossing the line, the police line to do that act of solidarity was not learned from anti-war demonstrations. Although it has come in handy in those situations as well. My learning curve about acts of solidarity were learned as a kid when my father was a union organizer for the electrical workers, the IBEW.

Specifically learned when I was maybe a sophomore in high school and he took me out to Springfield in Western Massachusetts where the IBEW local was on strike against Monmouth Electric (since swallowed up into GE) in a bitter action that would not be resolved for something like two months, partially in winter I remember standing on the line one very cold morning with the wind blowing down from the Berkshires and the Connecticut River. This site had been the scene of a bitter IBEW union organizing effort maybe ten years before the time I am talking about both because of management’s position but also a significant although minority of workers who were something like afraid of the union because they might lose their jobs or other considerations.

My father told me that those ten years had changed most of the workers’ positions on the union. He pointed out to me several who had endlessly argued against the union drive holding their own. Holding their own against a band of thugs, scabs, a rightful name for such vermin, that the company had hired to take the places of the striking workers. My father said to me more than once during that campaign, usually when we were driving home for the day -picket lines mean don’t cross. That advise has stood me in good stead since then and in a funny crossover from the day of the veterans’ protest and CD action-join the picket line.