TRANSCRIPT:

I worked in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning. That was my first job when I got here, working in the print shop that no longer exists because everything is now so different. At a time when a the woman who ran the print shop for the University of Pittsburgh was a single mom of three kids, the daughter of a steelworker who knew what unions could do for workers

And she was trying to get Pitt– to get a union organized ticket for people like us and she was far from alone. So when I first got to Pittsburgh, which was in the fall of 1977, I needed a job. I got hired there and started to work using the skills I had learned as a printer in New York and got to be a part of supporting this woman, who was younger than I, but who really needed this job because she wanted her kids to be able to go to college.

She had three sons, and the only way that she knew that she was going to be able to give them a college education was to be an employee at the University of Pittsburgh, and at that time, employees at the University of Pittsburgh had the right to free tuition or reduced tuition, I’m not sure which, for their children if their children got in the school.

So that was her focus. Brought me right back to where I had grown up. Her focus was on her kids, on doing a good job at work, which she did. She ran that office. She was great. And knowing that you needed a union to be able to do that. So I felt really at home right away, could use the skills I had as a printer, as a graphic artist, in that case, and working alongside somebody who was trying to do the same kinds of things that I thought made sense in life. We lost that unionizing drive. I never saw a more vicious anti-unionism than I did when Pitt came out against that drive. The more the drive grew, the more vicious they became. The more they threatened people, the more they intimidated people and memories of that make me feel especially excited about the successful faculty drive for a union at Pitt, much more recently among whom the the activists were Marcus Rediker in the history department at the university, and they had managed to organize a union there and now graduate students in so many places are organizing unions. It’s a very different time than it was back then. Back then, the industrial unions were strong in Pittsburgh.