PAGE 2 | October 16, 2015 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
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Beyond ‘Wages, Benefits and Working Conditions’
In post-war St. Louis, two vision-
ary Teamsters put their union in
service of the community
Bob Bussel — the director of
University of Oregon’s Labor
Education and Research Center
(LERC) — is the author of a
just-released book, Fighting for
Total Person Unionism: Harold
Gibbons, Ernest Calloway and
Working Class Citizenship. Pub-
lished by University of Illinois
Press, the book is about two
leaders of Teamsters Local 688,
a St. Louis warehouse union
which had 10,000 members and
a social agenda. The Northwest
Labor Press spoke with Bussel
by phone about the book.
Who were Harold Gibbons
and Ernest Calloway? Gib-
bons was a top aide to Jimmy
Hoffa and a prominent labor lib-
eral. Calloway was head of the
St. Louis NAACP. Together
they fashioned a visionary form
of social unionism that they
called ‘total person unionism.’
What’s total person union-
ism? It was their conviction that
workers were not only eco-
nomic beings but social beings.
They were interested in using
the knowledge and power that
workers had — to act as effec-
tive citizens in the community.
Because you could only im-
prove working class life so far if
you have the greatest conditions
where you work but live in a
community where public insti-
tutions and infrastructure are not
in good shape.
What kinds of things did
Teamsters get involved in?
They took the idea of shop stew-
ards and said, “Let’s do this in
the community.” So they took
different wards of the city, and
recruited people to be “commu-
nity stewards.” They would so-
licit grievances from members
that lived in those wards, and
then would have meetings to
discuss what they wanted to
work on. They worked on im-
proving public transportation,
rat control, public health. They
were involved in fights for bet-
ter public housing, better public
education. They did a lot of
work on juvenile delinquency
prevention, along with things
like broken sidewalks and traffic
lights. They were really trying to
fashion a way in which worker-
citizens could improve the qual-
ity of life in their neighborhoods
— and negotiate at what they
called the community bargain-
ing table with the power brokers
of St. Louis. They would some-
times launch city-wide cam-
paigns, and they really did es-
tablish a strong sense of worker
participation as citizens. Work-
ers would go out and investigate
these grievances, publicize
them. They would go to court.
They would mobilize politically.
What were their biggest suc-
cesses? Well in the 1960s, they
had the trade-union-oriented
war on the slums, to assist
groups in St. Louis that were
fighting for better housing and
against racial discrimination.
They also built senior citizen
housing. They even briefly man-
aged St. Louis public housing in
the late 1960s, working with
striking public housing tenants.
They were very ambitious in
saying unions and union mem-
bers should play a larger social
role. It was about showing what
the working class could do.
They wanted workers to say
“We’re as good as anybody
else.” They even established
what they called the Health and
Medical Camp, 30 miles out of
St. Louis, where workers could
leave the city and have almost a
country club experience. It had
a lake, a golf course, family
recreation. The sense was, “If
our bosses can enjoy these
things, we should be able to en-
joy them too.”
Are there any lessons for to-
day’s labor movement from
their experiment? Well you al-
ways have to be careful about
transplanting history from one
soil to another because the con-
text changes. But I think this no-
tion of unionism that’s con-
cerned about the total person has
real potential.
Book talk and signing
■ Eugene: Tuesday, Nov. 3, 4:30
p.m., Wayne Morse Commons, Knight
Law Center.
■ Portland: Thursday, Nov. 5, 5:30
p.m., Room 302, UO White Stag
Building, 70 NW Couch St.