Private: The Summer and Winter of Yesteryear

by Reuben Guttman, partner, Guttman, Buschner & Brooks, PLLC; Guttman is a member of the ACS Board of Directors.

In the suffocating heat of a Washington, DC July, my thoughts drift back 30 years to a sweltering Beaumont, Texas summer. A fried fish sandwich and a milkshake at the “Pig Stand,” the smell of hydrocarbons wafting from nearby petrochemical plants, and talk of football – at any level – was Beaumont back then. 84 years after Beaumont’s 1901 Spindletop gusher gave rise to the formation of Gulf Oil and Texaco, it seemed that nothing in Beaumont had moved it forward to a new identity. It was a city stuck in time.

The biggest event in Beaumont during that summer of 1985 was the strike by several hundred black women at the A.W. Schlesinger Geriatric Center. The strikers, ranging from cooks to nursing staff, were fighting over an attempt to roll back the average wage from $4.10 to $3.90 an hour. Fresh out of law school, I had been assigned by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to assist the strikers. Our office was a wooden structure with two small offices and a multipurpose room used for union meetings, press briefings, and cooking gumbo. It was in that office that I first met Cecile Richards and Kirk Adams who were SEIU’s organizers on the ground. All of us were in our 20s. Cecile, of course, would later become president of Planned Parenthood and speak at the Democratic National Convention. Kirk rose to become an International Executive Vice President of the SEIU.

Although I had worked with SEIU though law school, the summer of 1985 was for me a crash course in the working person. In this case the workers cleaned bed pans and cooked food for the elderly; they set work aside for Sunday church services and rose to the occasion as organizers and press spokesmen during the Schlesinger labor dispute. I learned that dignity, intelligence, and perseverance are not traits reserved for those who wear a suit and tie. As the strike turned into a lockout and dragged through the heat of the summer, from that small union hall I learned to view things from the lens of workers, not just from the technical vantage point of a labor and employment lawyer whose analysis of case law is akin to dancing on the head of a pin. I learned for myself – but of course had to explain to others – that justice under the law and fundamental fairness are not necessarily the same thing. At the end of the day, neither Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act nor the National Labor Relations Act offered any relief for the Beaumont strikers. There was law but no rights under it.

For SEIU and labor, the Beaumont strike had broad implications. How does a union advocate for low paid workers in a service economy when the risk of a back pay award is not crushing to an employer and where workers can be replaced without difficulty?

The union pulled out all stops. It brought in John Lewis – then an Atlanta city councilman – to speak at a rally. He told strikers that being called an “agitator” made him think of the “agitators in the old washing machines that stirred up the dirt.” The union organized a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage in Beaumont to $4.10 an hour. The union asked the mayor of Beaumont to intercede in the labor dispute and when he failed to do so, it initiated a recall ballot. After the union demonstrated the ease by which an initiative or referendum could be achieved, a wave of other initiatives followed, including one from realtors seeking to eliminate property transfer taxes. Soon the Beaumont strike made national headlines with USA Today running a cover story entitled “Democracy Comes to a Texas Town.” None of this ended the labor dispute. By the fall of 1985, the union had been broken.

I moved out of Beaumont and back to Washington, DC, and by the winter of 1985 I was assigned to a janitors’ strike in Pittsburgh where 600 janitors were striking because the building owners wanted to cut their wages from $7.50 to $4.50 an hour. As a city, Pittsburgh was in marked contrast to Beaumont. In the winter of 1985-1986, cold winds whipped down the Ohio River engulfing the city’s golden triangle. In the bitter cold, strikers built shanties outside each of the buildings that they cleaned. One worker died on the picket line of a heart attack, and we all came together for a memorial service. I had it in my mind that this dispute would be historic; I took black and white pictures, some of which ended up in Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library. Through my camera lens, I came to know the faces of the strikers while my camera was a catalyst for conversation and further understanding.

As a labor dispute, Pittsburgh was an extension of Beaumont; employers were cutting wages and benefits not because it was necessary but because they could. And of course there was no legal proscription against this conduct. By the winter of 1985, I had learned quickly that labor law was not about fairness, it was about process. And it was not even about process delivering a fair result; it was merely about process delivering a result absent the type of strife that would interfere with “commerce” or the business of America.

The Pittsburgh janitors held out for three months and in the end, a strategy that failed in Beaumont worked in Pittsburgh. A press campaign was successful. And when we wrote the mayor of the city, Richard Caliguiri, and asked him to mediate a resolution, he surprised us when he invited the union and the employers to his conference room and over a period of weeks – with his cajoling – the dispute was resolved. Caliguiri, of course, understood the difference between a fair resolution and a legal remedy.

After the Pittsburgh strike ended, I represented union janitors who lost their jobs when Mellon Bank terminated their contractor because it signed the very agreement that ended the Pittsburgh strike. That dispute was resolved after the general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint. For working people, it was one of those rare occasions where the legal system worked.

By some accounts the Pittsburgh strike and the Mellon Bank dispute were the beginning of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors Campaign. I will leave that determination to others. Suffice it to say that three decades later, the faces of the Beaumont and Pittsburgh strikers – the ones whom I represented and saw through the lens of my camera – are imbedded in my psyche. They remind me of why I practice law, the challenges that one faces when he or she represents working people, and why at the end of the day it is worth it and, of course, necessary.

[photo by Reuben Guttman]

Labor and Employment Law