MN

Sure. This was exactly the time the union had reached its peak and controlled so much of the industry, and the hiring in the industry, that they could wrench some of these benefits that were just unheard of, and we were like the aristocracy of labor. But at the same time, companies were trying to open up nonunion cold-type shops, computerized typesetting shops, and they tried to funnel work from the expensive unionized hot-type shops to places where they could hire nonunion workers and cut their wages. So under the surface, the union was being undercut.

After two years in this one shop, my employer opened up a nonunion shop, and as the markup person, I learned about it because I could see these jobs disappearing from our work. They’d come back two weeks later or three days later, and they were done, but not by us. So we started investigating.

I got elected shop steward. Our shop steward oddly enough was called “chapel chairman.” And I started investigating this nonunion shop that my boss was trying to build up on the side. Needless to say, when I became chapel chairman, the owner of my shop took away as much as he could of my special over-the-scale benefits and stuff like that because I suddenly became the antagonist. I might have done good work, but he wasn’t going to pay me any extra because we were just at loggerheads.

I brought him up on charges, because the union had a clause that said you’re not allowed to open up a nonunion shop. So we had a meeting before a very high-powered labor mediator in New York, and we won because he was trying to pretend like the shop was owned by somebody else. He said “I used to own it but then I sold it to somebody,” and one of our people said “I know who that somebody is. It’s his brother-in-law.” We were able to expose him. He never thought anyone would know that, so we won.

He then went out of business, took all of his work and funneled it to the nonunion shops. My shop, all of us, were back at a loss at the hiring hall. However, the union had, when it was at its height — and this is just about the same time as my shop went out of business — negotiated a contract that said “We’ll accept computerized typesetting in exchange for a fund that the employers put money into that would guarantee every current member a lifetime wage at union scale.” So theoretically, we were promised that no matter whether we worked or not, we would be getting a paycheck every week.

However, I and some friends of mine felt that that was really not a honest deal because of course, it would only be as good as the ability of the owners to put money into such a fund. If they started doing nonunion shops and went away from the union, they would stop making contributions, and so on paper, we would have such an agreement, a promise. But in fact, we wouldn’t. And that’s exactly what happened.

I also helped to form a caucus to try to organize in cold type shops because my union was very stuck in the old style, they basically sat on their behinds and said “We’ll be okay. We’ll come through.” They didn’t really see the threat of cold type as undermining the entire industry and the entire union.

They were complacent about organizing, and they felt that it couldn’t be done. We, old stodgy white men, were not going to be able to figure out how to organize these new shops. Well, I had some experience in cold type, in computerized type setting, so I joined a group that said “Yes, we can organize. Let’s do it. Let’s try to be a little more aggressive.” And of course, it would mean also, organizing more women and minorities into our ranks because those groups made up a far larger share of the workforce in nonunion cold type shops. It was much more diverse than our group.

So we said “Let’s find some of the people in those shops who can help us with the organizing, and we’ll also go into them and we’ll organize committees to join the union and threaten to strike.” The union had such a promising benefit to people because it could offer them basically twice the wages that they were getting at the current time, if the union could successfully organize the shop.

So my union said “No, no, no. You can’t do that” and part of the reason I think was that we were insurgents, and they knew that we were unhappy with the way they were running the union. They were probably afraid that if we organized the shop, we would organize them into our caucus, and we’d become a bigger oppositional group. So we went undercover. I started getting jobs in nonunion shops and trying to organize people. I was actually offered eight jobs out of eight applications in one day, the first day that I set out because this was the 1970s, the economy was booming, and it was not uncommon to quit a job on Friday and get another one by Monday.

There was ability to be more flippant about things. People weren’t as timid about their work. I went and did undercover organizing and the union actually sabotaged the organizing. In one case, the boss was a former union member and a friend of his called him from the union’s organizing office and said, “This guy’s actually working to organize your shop.” The boss called me in and said “My contact in the union says you’re trying to organize.” And I said “Oh, no. Just like my resume said, I’m just a guy come down from Boston.” And he said “Okay, well go to back to work.”

Two weeks later he called me in and said “Well, my friend says that your name is Michael Neuschatz and you are a union member and you are organizing. I’m sorry to lose you but we’re going to have to fire you.” That happened twice, and I saw the writing on the wall. Our caucus even tried to meet with the official union organizers who were afraid of this whole process and say “Let’s do this together” as a way to get them to stop undermining it, but ultimately they didn’t, and so I ended up leaving the trade and going to graduate school at the end of the 1970s.

I still got some benefits for a few years from this fund, and even today I’m retired, and I get a small pension from my union days. But meanwhile, the union has gone almost completely belly up. It was absorbed by the Communications Workers of America and the branch has just one-tenth of the people that it had before. There are a lot of retired people. I was actually one of the younger ones. So there’s a lot of people older than me, very, very few people in the union, and the pension fund is now almost completely bankrupt. We’ve gotten letters saying that in a few months, they’re going to go bankrupt.

In the end, all these people had a very strong union, but they got caught in this transition. And because the union wasn’t able to adapt and try to aggressively organize the new processes, it closed a chapter both in typesetting history and American labor history.