Pharaoh Won't Read Your Emails

On Friday I went to a program at Cooper Union marking the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. My wife, Betsy, gave the opening remarks, as she works at CU and happens to be the president of the staff union. The program lasted three hours, a little long, but had a handful of outstanding moments.

My maternal grandmother and all her sisters were teenage seamstresses in this NYC, only one generation removed from the brave young women who went on strike, who took regular beatings from police, thugs, even prostitutes hired by the owners. Despite their struggle, Triangle was never unionized, and never made any safer, and then it burned in less than 30 minutes, while many were trapped inside, killing 146 (mostly women) from smoke inhalation, burning alive, and jumping from the 9th story. Most of the victims were teenage girls and women younger than 23.

I give Betsy a hard time about some union issues and I tend to think this is because I grew up in a union household (I.B.E.W. local 3) and largely wanted to rebel against it. Unions squash ambition I liked to think. Unions demand groupthink I liked to say. I was a member during my early years, forced into it, really, by the circumstances of the hard economy of the early 90s. What jobs were there for artists anyway. A man I used to work with, Walter from Ghana via England, used to ask me why I was a white collar guy pretending to be blue, to which my young shoulders shrugged.

He told me his story, how he wanted to be a finish carpenter in England, and was the rare black man in the carpenter's union there, but they would never let him out of rough carpentry, and eventually left for the U.S., where he ended up being a handyman for my bosses in an electrical distribution warehouse in Manhattan.

But how I seriously digress, and want to steer this back to my point, which is to show you the video I recorded of Cecil Roberts of the United Mineworkers of America, speaking on Friday night. My awareness of him was remote at best, but in seeing him speak, as a union evangelist, I must admit to getting spirited chills.