CHAPTER 12: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (excerpt)

“Cross that line! Cross that line,” five thousand people roared as dozens of red-shirted Staley workers led the huge crowd down Eldorado Street and toward the west gate. As the workers turned into the driveway, they saw a long row of police roughly fifteen yards behind the yellow property line. The first workers stepped across the line. Gary Lamb recalled: “Dike [Ferris] was first, and I was second, and I had no idea who was behind me because I was looking at the police ahead of me. That’s a feeling I’ll have forever, when I walked across the Staley West Gate, turned around, and saw all the people coming over. It was a feeling of, ‘My gosh, I am not alone! We do have friends!’ Not only our own members, but a lot of other friends who realized our situation, and were there to help.”

Lamb, Ferris, and the other Staley workers stopped three feet short of the police line and turned to face the cheering crowds. They held their arms in the air, linked hands, and joined the crowd in chanting “We Are Union!”

For most of the workers, it had not been an easy decision. “To tell you the truth,” said Dick Schable, “I think people were afraid.”

For Gary Lamb, a father of three who had twenty-seven years in the plant, the idea of blocking Staley’s gates had previously been unimaginable. “I liked working at Staley. We cared about the plant. We felt we had ownership in that plant. That was my life.” During the year of the lockout, Lamb thoughtfully considered how he had benefited from the struggles of the previous century’s labor activists--good wages and benefits, better working conditions, and a decent life for his family. Lamb reflected on his decision to risk arrest on June 25th:

Once we got into it, I couldn’t stop. I was committed to what I did because I thought it was a worthy struggle. The more you learn about labor history--people died fighting for the eight-hour day. We didn’t earn those benefits. Others who came before me earned them through struggle. It was payback time. I had to stand up and be counted. And that feeling went through the whole rank-and-file, not just me... On June 4th the people walked across the line and sat down on my behalf. Dave Watts had told us right before that, ‘You don’t go. None of us [Staley workers] go.’ I watched that and I felt like I should be there. It’s my job. They’re getting arrested for me.

Lamb described how the solidarity with his union brothers and sisters bolstered his courage that day, in spite of the enormous financial risk:

I took a lot of direction off Dike Ferris. I knew him the best of anybody because we worked in the tin shop together, and Dike said he was going to do it. Dan Lane said he was going to do it. So, on that day, I saw Dike and asked him, ‘Are you still going?’ Dike said, ‘Yup.’ As we walked across 22nd Street], Dike said to me, ‘You know, we could get fired for this.’ I said, ‘Believe me, I know it! It could be the end of the benefits and everything. But we got this going, we might as well not stop now.’

The lockout had also been a transforming experience for African American workers like Frankie Travis, who joined his fellow union members in leading the marchers across the line. Asked about the risk he was taking, Travis quickly responded, “I don’t what you mean by ‘risk.’ I don’t have a job. I’ve been locked out for a year. Somewhere in life you have to make a stand. Today’s a good day to make a stand. Through solidarity, I’m here.”

When Dick Schable decided to cross onto Staley property, he was influenced by the memory of his daughter Beth, who had died from cancer three months before the lock-out, at age twelve. Schable described how Beth’s eight-year battle with cancer had influenced his and Sandy’s union activism:

We found [cancer] right before she went into kindergarten. She had her leg amputated when she was five... She fought for everything... [It had] a lot to do with the reason I stood up so much and fought so hard for the union... [Beth] taught [her mother and me] how to live, I guess you could say. She probably set a standard for us, just by the way she lived her life and died... I’m sure the fact that she was never willing to give up...and believed that you should stand up for the right things...had an impact [on us.]

Tammy McCartney was nineteen years old when she was hired in 1990, joining four family members, including her father. Two months after the lockout, Staley notified her that it was downsizing and that she and 195 other workers had been laid off. So when McCartney decided to sit down on June 25th, she understood that she wasn’t risking arrest for herself: “I did it because there are men that have been there twenty and thirty years that deserve to go back into that plant and get their jobs! I did it because there are people who went in there and went through hell so that others could come in there and get a good job, with good benefits. They don’t deserve rotating shifts, with their benefits cut after twenty years... If you give your life to that company and that plant, they owe you something back!... It was the principle of the thing.”

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