Scott Smith
My career path and life experience have given me the advantage of knowing the value of union contract, and of a strong union: I grew up in a household where unionism was the closest we came to anything like religion. When I was about ten, my dad pointed to our suburban Southern Californian tract house and our new Chevy and said, “If it wasn’t for the union we wouldn’t have any of this.” My first experience with a picket line was when I was five: I was bitterly disappointed when my dad wheeled out of line at the drive-in theatre rather than cross a picket line by the projectionists’ union. As my brother and I wailed in the backseat because we were going to miss Bambi, my dad said “I’m not crossing a picket line for a goddamned deer or anything else.”
My experience as a welder in a non-union shipyard in Newport-News, Virginia in the mid-seventies showed me that the neither the horrors of the industrial revolution nor Jim Crow job segregation were merely history. After many years making good money and benefits as an industrial electrician in the I.B.E.W., my interest in labor history landed me in the graduate program here at the University of Pittsburgh, where I earned my Ph.D. There is no need to retell the horrors of many years working adjunct, especially at Carlow College, other than to say that a union contract would have prevented many of the injustices and humiliations I both witnessed and experienced myself.
Most importantly, I know that union membership saves lives. When my son was almost two years old he came down with Spinal Meningitis. He was so ill that the doctors could not promise he would survive. At the same time, the son of one of the busboys at a restaurant where my wife waited tables was stricken with the same horrible disease. I had union health insurance so my son got immediate and excellent care: he made a full recovery. Without a contract that made healthcare available, the busboy’s son suffered permanent hearing loss and was lucky to survive.
All workers need and deserve representation—it’s a quality of life issue, and in many industries it can literally be the difference between life and death.
--Scott Smith, History
My experience as a welder in a non-union shipyard in Newport-News, Virginia in the mid-seventies showed me that the neither the horrors of the industrial revolution nor Jim Crow job segregation were merely history. After many years making good money and benefits as an industrial electrician in the I.B.E.W., my interest in labor history landed me in the graduate program here at the University of Pittsburgh, where I earned my Ph.D. There is no need to retell the horrors of many years working adjunct, especially at Carlow College, other than to say that a union contract would have prevented many of the injustices and humiliations I both witnessed and experienced myself.
Most importantly, I know that union membership saves lives. When my son was almost two years old he came down with Spinal Meningitis. He was so ill that the doctors could not promise he would survive. At the same time, the son of one of the busboys at a restaurant where my wife waited tables was stricken with the same horrible disease. I had union health insurance so my son got immediate and excellent care: he made a full recovery. Without a contract that made healthcare available, the busboy’s son suffered permanent hearing loss and was lucky to survive.
All workers need and deserve representation—it’s a quality of life issue, and in many industries it can literally be the difference between life and death.
--Scott Smith, History
