I remember my grandfather as both a brilliant intellectual and a humble, caring man. He grew up in Puerto Rico, and served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war he moved to New York City where he found work as an electroplater at a factory making Goody hair products. He handled toxic chemicals with little to no safety protections. Because of these working conditions, he started attending labor organizing meetings in secret. He was afraid of being branded as a socialist and facing even more discrimination. However, he did find a way to publicly advocate for his fellow workers when he became the head of the local electroplating society. My grandfather lived at a time when a hard day’s work was rewarded with a fair wage, and he was able to rent a house in Queens, provide for my grandmother and put my mother through college. He also helped my grandmother, who emigrated from Guatemala, through the arduous process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Over the years my grandfather’s health deteriorated due to industrial toxins in his liver and complications from the malaria that he contracted while serving in the Philippines during the war. However, he stayed with Goody for 35 years, eventually becoming a respected supervisor. At his retirement he was given an engraved company watch, which was later passed down to me. After retirement, he used his savings to buy a small plot of land in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. He taught himself everything he needed to design a house, from architecture to plumbing, then worked alongside local Mayan builders to construct...
My grandparents, Serge and Charlotte Zweibel, fled Austria for the remote island of Tahiti in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis. My grandfather’s employer, an international shoe company, made my grandparents’ relocation possible. The company’s benevolence allowed him to provide for his family and keep his wife and her parents safe during the scariest and most uncertain of times. After several years, my grandparents decided to move to the United States so that their children – my mom and my uncle, both born in Tahiti – could get a good education. It took them years to get through the U.S. quota system and into the country. They drove from New York to California in 1950, selling Tahitian wares as they went. They settled into a small apartment in a good school district until they could afford to buy a house. My grandfather took a bus across town to a factory every day until he saved enough money to open his own shoe store, where he, my grandmother and a small, close-knit group of employees worked seven days a week for decades. My grandparents’ journey and their labor taught me the importance of responsibility, striving for more, and treating people well. In their eyes, there was always something else they could do through hard work, foresight, the kindness of others (and a little luck) to improve their own lives, the lives of their children and the lives of others. They are now long gone but their lessons and legacies endure. Vicki Shabo is the Vice President of the National Partnership for Women & Families Photo via Flickr user Pierre...
My grandfather, Stanislaw Glazewski, was a laborer who came to this country from Poland in the early 1900s. All of my immigrant grandparents were peasants and laborers, not literate in their own language, who came here looking for work and opportunity. We don’t have many things to remember them by, but I do have a copy of my Grandfather’s Declaration of Intent to Become a Citizen. When he signed it in Brown County, Wisconsin in 1919, the form required him to swear that he was not an anarchist or a polygamist. He and all his sons eventually became steelworkers, at Republic Steel in South Chicago. Steelworkers worked in constant heat and around dangerous equipment. They had to fight for basic rights and protections and for good wages. Family lore suggests that my grandfather was part of some of the large strikes at Republic Steel, however no one remembers the details. I think of my family’s ascent into the middle class and of what became possible for families with good, union jobs. All of my grandfather’s children had houses, many of their children went to college, and their grand-children hold a myriad of professional jobs, from teachers, to business owners, to nonprofit managers, to IT specialists. When I think about the way my grandfather worked—hard, in dangerous situations, but with the benefits and protections of collective bargaining—I am struck by the potential of what one or two generations of good, stable income can do for a family and for subsequent generations. Amy Smoucha is the Managing Director of Jobs With Justice Photo of Stanislaw Glazewski’s Declaration of Intent to Become a...
When I began work in the lab at the Constellium Rolled Products plant in Ravenswood, W.Va., the guys who’d worked with my grandfather there before he retired called me Hoot. It had been their name for him. So it was an honor to inherit it. And their granting me the moniker they’d first bestowed on him made me feel embraced by the union family at Constellium. This is what my grandfather, Luther Howard “Hoot” Gibson, had always told me that he cherished most about work: the extended family it gave him. He was proud of his labor as a maintenance man at the plant and proud of the aluminum he helped produce. Most important throughout his life, though, has been the fellowship with his United Steelworkers Local 5668 brothers and sisters. In so many ways he taught me that while it’s important to do any job well, real job satisfaction comes from building bonds with co-workers. He constructed enduring relationships with union brothers and sisters, friendships that would stand the tests of time and travail. I was born in 1990, so I was just a toddler when my grandfather and his USW brothers and sisters struggled through a lockout that began at the Ravenswood plant on Halloween 1990 and that would become so historic in the labor movement that a book would be written about it. During 20 long months without paychecks, my grandfather and his fellow Local 5668 members stood together. They gathered community and political support. They enlisted the USW headquarters to back them with lawsuits, NLRB petitions and international pursuit of the aluminum plant’s main investor....
Dr. David Weil, Administrator, Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor describes how his grandmother Rose, and grandfather Abe, who both worked in the garment industry have influenced his...
