Saving Harry: Justice, Work, & Unions

By Bruce E. Endy

As an attorney, Bruce E. Endy did a lot of things as a labor lawyer. He negotiated contracts, tried various cases before the National Labor Relations Board, fought against strike injunctions, and fought for the right of workers to organize and join unions. But this memoir doesn’t cover that part of Endy’s life as an attorney. In Saving Harry, Endy focuses on the work he did helping everyday people (the Harrys and Harriets of the world) earn unemployment compensation, receive health care, and get their jobs back.

Each chapter focuses on a particular Harry or Harriet— generally a member of one of the unions Endy represented who was, for a variety of reasons, out of work or in a tough spot. Saving Harry discusses the personal and legal drama of people facing down courts, corporations, and other daunting, sometimes scary, obstacles to finding justice with help from a caring lawyer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483435602

Book preview

SAVING HARRY

Justice, Work, & Unions

BRUCE E. ENDY

Copyright © 2015 Bruce E. Endy.

Cover Art: Laying New Roof at the Academy of Music

By Charles T. Joyce (2002)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3561-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3560-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015912003

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 08/12/2015

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Last Chapter

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

For Susan, Julie, Miguel Angelo, Alex, Katherine,

Eliza, Emilia & Levi

Introduction

W ho is Harry? For that matter, who am I?

Describing Harry is the easier job, for Harry is Everyman or Everywoman. He is every worker who dropped a part, got angry at a coworker, spilled coffee on his computer, called his boss a jerk, or was late for work. Harry has occasionally been unduly absent from work and he has sometimes called in sick more than his share of Mondays or Fridays. On other occasions Harry’s absences are because he has cancer or because his wife or mother has multiple sclerosis. Harry is sometimes loud or obnoxious, and sometimes he is just an independent cuss who doesn’t make friends easily. Harry is often a guy who is simply getting older and who makes more money than a younger worker. Sometimes Harry is simply a woman who is doing a better job than her male counterparts. In most cases Harry has worked at the same job for five, ten or twenty years. In a lot of cases Harry has made a mistake or said something stupid. In every case Harry is in need of a second chance. Sometimes he’s in need of a third or fourth chance. Harry is me. Harry is you.

While I’ve been Harry on occasion, I sometimes had more trouble figuring out who the rest of me was. I grew up in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, a small mill town, about forty-five miles west of Philadelphia. I was born in 1944 and most of what I knew of the world, until I left for college in 1962, was from my experience in this small town. My parents were Jewish merchants in an even smaller, Conservative, Jewish community, made up largely of merchants and professionals. My hometown peers, on the other hand were not Jewish. They were Methodist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Greek Orthodox and a few other denominations that no one really talked about. Actually, no one really talked about religion a whole lot in school or out. But it was clearly part of the fabric of our small town.

In school we started each day with the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. In 1954, at the request of President Eisenhower, Congress amended the Pledge of Allegiance to add under God. Around Christmas, we rehearsed oodles of Christmas carols and sang them melodically at annual Christmas concerts. In high school we took that show on the road and occasionally sang on Main Street while the grade school children lined up to sit on Santa’s lap in the grocery store’s parking lot. The parking lot that served as Santa’s house was also the Christmas tree retail plot. Around this time of year the theme, it seemed to me, was, pretty much, always the same; peace on earth and good will to man.

The themes in our synagogue were different, but not all that different. On the highest of the High Holidays, Yom Kippur, we spent the better part of the day in synagogue, making two points. If you asked forgiveness of God for all of your past sins, both those of commission and those of omission, God might forgive you. But you needed to ask your fellow man to forgive you for those sins that you committed against him, or her, as the case might have been. That lesson was pretty clear. It wasn’t enough to pray for forgiveness. You were supposed to get up off your duff and do something about it in the real world.

The second major Jewish holiday for me was all about freedom and obligation. Passover, celebrated in the spring of the year, retold the story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and the obligation to pass that story down to your children and your children’s children. That holiday ended in a wish that someday all men (and presumably women, too) would be free. The rest of the year the message was similar: seek peace and pursue it, and beat your swords into plowshares.

A little segue. I understood the message, but, in fact, I was not a religious person, at least not in any fundamentalist way. Neither were most of my peers to the best of my knowledge. What most of us were interested in, other than the opposite sex, was winning. We were all taught that winning was important. Winning football, winning basketball, winning baseball and winning in swimming. Winning a part in the play, winning a band competition, winning a seat in the glee club, winning the science competition. Winning, winning, winning. It’s all-American. Also, losing was important, too. After all, everyone can’t be a winner. There have to be losers or what’s the point of winning. The losers have to be good sports and team players. Harry was generally a loser. Not all the time, mind you, but sometimes. And me, I was sometimes Harry, sometimes not.

In the real world, outside of school, I also saw winners and losers. Our family was a winner. We had a nice home, not ostentatious, four bedrooms, but only one bath. My parents worked hard. They owned a small clothing store and both worked there every day except Sunday. My dad bought a new car almost every other year. My dad played golf and my mother played bridge at the local country club, and my brother and I both went to college without the benefit of financial aid.

We had a housekeeper. A single, African American woman, who, I felt, spent at least as much time in my home as I did. Fanny, cooked, cleaned and did the laundry. She was about four and a half feet tall and three feet wide. She forced me to eat scrambled eggs and oatmeal. She bandaged my cuts and cleaned up my mess when I set the den curtains on fire. And in my teenage years we had long talks at the kitchen table about life. I wish I remembered more of what we talked about. In the evenings my father and I would drive Fanny home. It wasn’t far, in our small town, maybe a mile, or a little less. But it was a world away. Not surprisingly our little Pennsylvania town was, practically speaking, segregated by neighborhood. Situated in a valley running east and west, the African American community was, then, nestled along the north face of the valley in what must have been about a twenty-five square block area that was a mixed neighborhood of middle class to poor, and run down, homes. My father and I would drive Fanny up the hill, to her sister’s house. It was a steep climb to a shabby, clapboard house, and we would drop her off, say good night, and return to our comfortable brick home. The drive always made me uncomfortable.

It followed that before 1957, the neighborhood elementary schools were also segregated. It wasn’t until junior high school that the schools were integrated. Even then the classes seemed segregated by curriculum, though not by race. You seldom met the kids in the vocational sections if you were in the college prep.

In the seventh grade I decided that I was a better swimmer than a tennis player. The swimming team met after school in the only indoor pool in town, at the YMCA. To swim on a team at the Y meant that you had to become a member of the Y. So, in the fall of my seventh grade year, I marched into the YMCA to pay my dues and join that august body. The previous summer, honing my swimming skills, I spent days at the Country Club pool and hours swimming lap after lap and becoming nut brown in the process. So picture this little, tanned, Jewish boy, with short, curly dark hair walking into the YMCA with his $5.00 membership fee, and telling the lady behind the desk that he would like to become a member. What race are you? the Christian lady asked. Race, schmace, I was twelve years old, I had no idea what she was talking about. I had no idea that they didn’t allow black twelve year olds to join their Christian club. Flustered, I answered I’m Jewish. Oh, came the reply. That seemed to be all right. I paid my money, got my membership card and got to swim in the segregated pool. In 1960 I listened to John Kennedy’s inaugural address.

I went to college, the University of Pennsylvania, in 1962 whereupon I learned that, as winners went, my family was small potatoes. Penn seemed to burst at the seams with rich, entitled adolescents. Most of the students came from well-to-do suburban school systems. And all seemed better prepared than me for college life. On the other hand, we were still winners.

I watched the Vietnam War unfold. I watched as race riots tore city streets to shreds. I remembered Fanny. I grieved when Kennedy was assassinated. I grew up and learned that the golden rule was honored more in the breach than as a rule. I slowly came to a decision that I would do what I could to help Harry. Did I mention that I read a lot of super hero comic books as a kid, too?

For me fighting injustice meant joining the civil rights movement. So I went to law school and took every course they had on civil rights. I was never a great student, middle of the pack. But I had a goal, two goals, actually. The most immediate one was to stay out of the Vietnam conflict. The other was to do something to advance the cause of civil rights. An opportunity presented itself to combine those two goals: Volunteers in Service to America, VISTA. So, on graduation from Georgetown University Law Center, I took the Pennsylvania Bar Exam and joined VISTA. Whereupon I learned that I was going to be sent to Oklahoma. I can’t practice law in Oklahoma, I told the VISTA managers, don’t you have something in Pennsylvania? It turned out that they did. The long story, short, is that I wound up in Philadelphia at Community Legal Services representing the poor, mostly in employment disputes. In his 1965 State of the Union address President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated a national War on Poverty. That program included both VISTA and legal services for the poor, administered by the Office of Economic Opportunity. Community Legal Services was one of those neighborhood legal service programs. The difficulty with the job was that I was getting burned out. With the exception of certain anti-discrimination rights passed under the fairly new Civil Rights Act of 1964, the poor didn’t have a lot of legal juice. I filed a few discrimination cases and a lot of unemployment compensation cases. It was not the career I had pictured.

Four years into that job I got a telephone call from a law firm, prompted by a colleague and good friend who recommended me to them for a job. The firm represented labor unions and their mostly working class members. It was small, by big law firm standards, only four senior partners and three associates. The pitch from one of the senior partners, Leonard Spear, was We have a wonderful practice representing unions and working people. Unions are able to make a difference in the lives of working people. They fight for truth, justice and the American way against greedy corporations who are only out to screw the working man, maximize profits and pollute the environment. Well, I bought it.

What Leonard meant was, We have stubborn, intractable and often rude clients. We are afraid to send them realistic bills for work performed because when they see what lawyers charge by the hour they think they are being cheated. When we do send them a bill, they will not pay it for months in any event, and after six months or so will ask you to reduce the bill if you want to keep the work. The more enlightened of our clients believe that union lawyers really are doing this work because we love it and therefore we shouldn’t get paid at all. And, by the way, you will never be rich if you join this firm. Such is life.

What Leonard told me in that interview turned out to be mostly true. Unions can and do make a difference in the lives of working people. They are a voice for the voiceless, a defender against the bully, and an entryway into the middle class for the poor. As Samuel Gompers said:

What does labor want?

It wants the earth and the fullness thereof. There is nothing too precious; there is nothing too beautiful, too lofty, too ennobling, unless it is within the scope and comprehension of labor’s aspirations and wants.

We want more schoolhouses and less jails, more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice, more constant work and