Microdosing Many Mondays: 6/19/24
Happy Juneteenth, dear readers. I hope that we all take the time today to reflect about why this holiday is so important to our country. A holiday that we weren’t even taught about in school. Not back in the 80s and 90s, and not in central Illinois.
Have I ever told you guys the story about how I started a petition to get Juneteenth honored as a UAW Chrysler paid holiday? How my job was threatened by both the union and the Human Resources department of the company because of it? Nah, of course I haven’t. Because we’re supposed to do what we think is right, and we’re not supposed to do those things for attention, but right now I’m working on a memoir about my time working as an elected union steward in the UAW, and this is one of the stories you’ll read there.
It was in 2020, when the Covid pandemic first wrecked chaos on us all, and just after the public murder of George Floyd. As a well intentioned straight white guy, I was ready to march on Washington to demand the civil and social changes needed to finally work to eradicate racism. Plus, at the time, I was married into a mixed race family, and the effects of racism in America was a real thing that touched my family’s dinner conversations, especially then. That summer in 2020, I joined Black Lives Matters protests, and was, like most times in my adult life, ready to do anything I could to help bring positive change to my community.
As June of 2020 rolled around, and we all went back to work wearing masks at the Toledo Jeep Plant, there were a lot of my union brothers and sisters talking about how Juneteenth should be a UAW holiday, and me being elected by those people to be their union steward, I felt an obligation to take those ideas to my union leadership which promptly asked, what is Juneteenth again? And besides, we’re one year into a new bargaining agreement with the company. We have to wait until next negotiations in 2023. Bring it up then.
Now, as an avid reader of U.S. labor history, I knew that companies and unions had reopened contract negotiations in the middle of the agreements many times in our storied labor history. I felt this was an important enough cause that the union should demand the company to negotiate this now. Other major companies were announcing that they’d made it a paid holiday in their corporations, finally making concessions under the intense levels of activism that had spread worldwide. The time seemed like right now to make it happen.
So, after brainstorming with a couple of other unnamed union stewards and brothers and sisters, about how to get this idea some attention, we decided to start a petition on change.org and it just so happened that I was the guy amongst us that knew how to start a petition. So I did, under the group name ‘Toledo UAW Strong,’ and it only got 2,200 signatures.
What the petition did do, was get the attention of a local news channel that was looking for Juneteenth stories, and they called me asking for an interview. I didn’t want to be the awkward white guy spokesperson on this issue, so I reached out to my local union’s civil rights committee. You know the UAW was perhaps the biggest supporter of Dr King’s March on Washington, right? That the UAW has a long history of fighting for civil rights? So, yes, UAW locals, regions and the international level all have civil rights committees. I hoped someone from the civil rights committee would take the opportunity to spend time on the news educating us all on why this should be a UAW holiday.
What happened next is one of the worst things about being in a bureaucracy. The UAW has a chain of command, and polished professional spokespersons that say strategic things and make strategic decisions, and I was told to not do the interview, and to drop the petition that was not sanctioned by the international union. I didn’t listen.
I knew that it was beyond a doubt the right thing to do. How am I going to claim that Dr. King and Walter Reuther are my heroes if I’m too cowardly to do the right thing? Those two men did the right thing so often that one of them was assassinated and the other survived two attempts on his life. Nobody was going to threaten my life over this, just my job, so I called the news back and gave one of the worst most awkward interviews I’ve ever done. The reporter showed up with a microphone taped to the end of a six foot long mop handle, you know, for social distancing, and I was a little scared about how I was going to take care of my family if this did wind up getting me shit-canned.
And the next day I got called to my union chairman’s office, where I got on the phone with a local rep that told me that they were getting phone calls from our regional office asking who the fuck I was, and why I had so much ambition to decide what our union should do. You don’t break chain of command in old school unions and you never speak to the media unless authorized to do so. I knew the rules, but I also knew that no social change had ever once been brought about by following them. And I explained that I meant no disrespect but I felt it was the right thing to do, and promised I had no ambitions to ever run for any union office again. I was a year into a three year term as a union steward. The pandemic had just happened. Some things had happened at the Jeep plant that I’d been accused of stirring up, and I was already burned out from hundreds of phone calls and texts a day. I’m an introvert by nature, not a people person.
Later a high up HR person from the company asked me some questions. Nothing more. Except it was serious enough questions that my union chairman and another committeeman had to be present while the company investigated me putting them in an unfavorable position in the local media. They have corporate policies prohibiting that, too, and in the end, I kept my job, and we didn’t bring about any change.
Then, next June, in 2021, President Biden passed a proclamation making Juneteenth a national holiday, and in 2023 contract negotiations, the UAW did negotiate for, and get Juneteenth designated as a paid holiday in the big 3 of U.S. automakers. Those UAW brothers and sisters are enjoying their first paid Juneteenth holiday today, in 2024. I didn’t have any influence over any of that, except helping to elect the international leadership that negotiated the contracts. And that wasn’t the last and only time my job was threatened. Let’s just say I spent a few years of sleepless nights trying to figure out how to dance the fine line of doing the right thing and keeping my job. But this is one of the times I’m most proud of. I was right. It was the right time to do it. I’m just small potatoes even in Toledo’s small potato media influence sphere, and I never wanted any attention for myself for it, I just wanted to do the right thing in that moment in time, for those that had elected me to be their steward.
I’m not going to share the news link. But that interview is still out there on the internet and not hard to find. But I will tell you that the change dot org petition is still active. I never took it down.
And I know this column is typically a newsletter to update you weekly about my independent writer life, but I don’t want to put any more me into the weight of this story today. Just know there’s way more stories like this in my lifetime, and that despite seemingly little success in bringing about change in my community, I’ll never stop trying. I hope you won’t either.
I hope this story will inspire others to stand up for what is right even when our voices are small. Even when the organizations and corporations that employ us disagree with us.
Happy Juneteenth, dear readers. I hope we take the time to honor the weight of what today is to all of us as a country. This day is more important than the 4th of July to many Americans.
Here’s two quotes from two of my biggest heroes, and a photo of the petition.
One of the most courageous humans to ever walk the planet.
The man that unified the UAW and became its first and longest international president.
Happy Juneteenth.
Solidarity Forever,
Dan