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June 2, 2017 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
IN MEMORIAM
She eventually left to become
a full time wife and mother. In
the 1960s, she joined the
ILWU’s Ladies Auxiliary, and
served as a photographer for
The Dispatcher, the interna-
tional union’s newspaper. She
also became a committed volun-
teer on the grape boycott cam-
paign led by Cesar Chavez of
the United Farm Workers, and
stayed with that cause for
decades.
Lois was a dedicated volun-
teer signature gatherer for ballot
measures she believed in, going
back as far as the 1940s, and in
the late 1980s, she became ac-
tive in campaigns to defend the
right to gather signatures. On
Oct. 11, 1989, she was gathering
signatures outside a Fred Meyer
shopping center at Southeast
82nd and Foster in Portland, and
refused an order by a security
officer to leave. Lois told the of-
ficer she had a constitutional
right to be there, and showed a
newspaper article about a recent
court case backing that up. A
court had ruled that even though
a shopping center was private
property, it couldn’t ban peti-
tioners, because their public
spaces were the modern-day
equivalent of the town square.
But Fred Meyer had her arrested
anyway, and as she was entering
the police car, she injured her
back. Stranahan sued Fred
Meyer for false arrest. A jury
awarded $125,000 in compensa-
tory damages, plus $2 million in
punitive damages. The trial
judge reduced the total award to
$500,000, but the Oregon Court
of Appeals reinstated the jury
amount. By the time Stranahan
v. Fred Meyer went before the
Oregon Supreme Court in 1995,
the damages were $3.8 million
with interest. Stranahan had
many plans to use the money to
fund causes she believed in. But
the Oregon Supreme Court de-
cided against her, ruling that the
store had the right to exclude pe-
titioners from its property.
Undeterred, she continued
her activism. On Dec. 1, 1999
— her 80th birthday — she and
350 other union activists
boarded a chartered train to
Seattle to take part in the largest
labor demonstration in decades
— a protest at the World Trade
Organization summit.
In the late 2000s, her health
worsened, but her spirit re-
mained: Friends say that in the
hospital, Lois would grill the
nurses about their union mem-
bership, and she once was said
to have gotten rid of a doctor
who was insufficiently pro-
union. Health difficulties
prompted a move to New Jer-
sey, where her daughter Judith
Karen Stranahan — a union
railroad conductor — could
look after her. She spent the last
decade of her life there, and died
peacefully at her daughter’s
home in Edison, New Jersey.
She was preceded in death by
her siblings and her husband
Jesse, who died in 1998. She’s
survived by her daughter, and
numerous nieces, nephews, and
extended family. She’ll be
buried at Willamette National
Cemetery, 1180 Mt. Scott Blvd,
Portland, next to her late hus-
band Jess. A graveside service
was held May 25.
to be paying huge college debt
on a high school graduate salary.
Which means, according to one
study, many people end up pay-
ing like a third of their income,
without the college degree. And
thirdly, the kinds of colleges that
people from professional fami-
lies go to are often quite differ-
ent from the kinds of colleges
that blue collar kids go to, and
are much less likely to lead to
high paying jobs. The diver-
gence between incomes of high
and low paying college gradu-
ates has very sharply increased
in recent decades. So many peo-
ple graduate from college and
end up earning not a lot more
than non-college graduates.
Do you think Americans are
class conscious? No. Every-
body knows that classes exist,
but there’s a serious social taboo
towards acknowledging they
exist. Trump is so unbelievably
good at channeling the resent-
ments against the cultural elite,
because he has been conde-
scended to his whole life. He
made his name as a boy from
Queens having people from
Manhattan look down their nose
at his garish Atlantic City re-
treats that were clearly not in
“quiet good taste.” So people of-
ten say: “How can a rich boy
who started out with $14 million
from his dad connect with the
white working-class?” The way
he connects with them is that he
feels equally condescended to,
and has for his entire life.
There’s an argument you hear
a lot that working people who
vote Republican are dupes be-
cause they’re voting against
their own economic interest.
What do you make of that? I
think that’s another example of
condescension — that these
poor ignorant peasants have
been duped by the business
elite. I don’t think they are
duped by the business elite. I
think that these voters feel like
neither Democrats nor Republi-
cans have offered them anything
substantial when it comes to
providing the kinds of solid sta-
ble middle-class jobs that their
fathers and grandfathers had.
Trump offered them jobs. The
only party that’s been offering
these blue-collar families jobs is
the Republican party. They’ve
been saying, “through supply
side economics we’re going to
unleash the economy and give
you jobs.” I think that has been
shown to be inaccurate, but at
least they’re talking about jobs.
If people’s chief concern is that
they feel the American dream is
slipping from their hands, De-
mocrats have only themselves to
blame if these people don’t vote
for them, because they’re not
talking about that. I think before
Trump, these working class peo-
ple felt that neither Democrats
nor Republicans cared a whit
what happened to them eco-
nomically. At least the Republi-
cans were showing them some
respect for their much more tra-
ditional values than are common
among the cultural elite, so they
voted Republican. I don’t think
it was stupidity. It was very un-
derstandable, given the way
they were being treated by both
parties.
Lois R. Stranahan
Feb. 1, 1919 - May 17, 2017
Lois Redding Stranahan, a tire-
less fighter for trade unionism
and economic justice, died May
17 at the age of 97.
Lois was well known in the
local labor movement, together
with her husband Jesse Strana-
han. For many decades she was
a presence at picket lines and
union meetings, gathering sig-
natures on ballot measures, and
promoting the union gospel of
solidarity.
She was born Lois Redding
on Dec. 1, 1919, in Mena,
Arkansas, and grew up there as
one of six children in a farm
household. She met Jesse Knee-
land Stranahan while the two
were attending a summer labor
school at Commonwealth Col-
lege in Mena. At the time, Jesse
was a reporter for a CIO news-
paper. They married on Sept. 13,
1940 in Pocatello, Idaho — en
route from Arkansas to Portland,
his home town. In Portland, he
worked the docks as a member
of International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU) Lo-
cal 40. She worked as a waitress
and helped organize for Wait-
resses Local 305.
When the United States en-
tered World War Two, Jess ini-
tially stood as a conscientious
objector, but later served the
U.S. Army on an ambulance
crew in Europe. Lois, mean-
while, went to work in a Swan
Island shipyard building Liberty
Ships as a welder and member
of Steamfitters Local 235.
After the war, Jess went back
to working on the Portland
docks, and became a prominent
local union officer. Lois went to
work as a telephone operator,
where she was one of the found-
ing members of Communica-
tions Workers of America Local
7901, taking part in a 1948
strike against the Bell phone
system.
...Class Cluelessness
From Page 2
the divide? My goal is less to
spark empathy on the part of the
cultural elite then to send a mes-
sage that people who have jobs
like plumbers, electricians, radi-
ology technicians, these people
don’t deserve empathy — they
deserve respect. The work they
do is important. The life you live
would be impossible without it.
It’s as important as the profes-
sional job. They deserve respect,
and they’re not getting it. You
have Hillary Clinton calling
these people deplorables —
racist, sexist, and homophobic.
And Barack Obama in 2012
saying they are bitter people,
clinging to guns and religion.
Those are very condescending
comments, very unselfcon-
sciously delivered.
One “clueless” question you
get into in the book is “Why
don’t laid off Rust Belt factory
workers just get retrained as
computer engineers?” It’s a
typical example of class clue-
lessness. The cultural elites are
busy announcing that because of
globalization and automation,
we’re going to have a knowl-
edge economy. Well, excuse
me: Who is going to maintain
your bridges, who’s going to
give you electric power, who is
going to give you your mammo-
gram? That is patently false.
That is such a clueless thing to
say. People hold blue-collar jobs
because they think those jobs
are important and they don’t
want to be pencil pushers. And
my response is: These jobs are
important. Going to college is a
very different proposition if
you’re from a blue-collar family
than it is for people from a pro-
fessional family. First of all, it’s
three times as hard to get in,
says one study. And even if you
do get in, it’s a far more risky
economic proposition because
you may feel so culturally ill-at-
ease, and you may be so poorly
prepared academically that
you’re much more likely to drop
out, in which case you’re going
ONLINE EXTRA
This interview has been edited for
space. See the full interview online at
http://nwlaborpress.org/
2017/05/white-working-class/