National Nurses United

Books_FNL with art 8/20/10 6:03 PM Page 18 Polk lost the campaign, and her job, but not before becoming a staff organizer for the local. It was 1975, plants were closing, and blue-collar jobs were on the decline. Meanwhile, the service and clerical sectors were booming, but the mostly female, educated workers who filled those jobs tended not to identify with the labor movement. As one of the first female leaders of America's most macho union, Polk set out to change that. In election campaigns at Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the University of Chicago, and other state colleges, Polk used her patience, skill, and similar background as a woman with a college degree to build trust with hospital and clerical workers. The previously complacent workers at the University of Chicago stunned management by voting by 87 percent to authorize a strike, eventually winning dramatic salary increases and reclassifications with pay raises for close to 1,000 secretaries. At 29, Polk became one of the local's youngest-ever business agents. She simultaneously fought racism and sexism within her union, authoring and passing a resolution at the 1976 Western Conference of Teamsters that called on the union to launch a national organizing campaign specifically aimed at women workers, combat on-thejob discrimination, and promote women to leadership positions within the union, "as a crucial step in the struggle for a free and egalitarian society." One of the more intriguing parts of the book is its discussion of Polk's sometimes-contradictory lifestyle. Married to a banker that she met in graduate school at the University of Chicago, Polk enjoyed a different standard of living—complete with lavish dinner parties and shopping trips to Elizabeth Arden—than the workers she was helping to organize. She and her husband had struck a deal: He would support her unconditionally in her work, helping out by making phone calls and walking picket lines, if she would keep the union away from his bank. Despite her bourgeois home life, the Regina Polk the book portrays was a committed organizer who worked long hours and put the movement first, even losing a baby to a miscarriage during a particularly grueling campaign. On one occasion, the book recalls, "Regina chased an eighteen-wheeler truck whose driver had 18 N AT I O N A L N U R S E tried unsuccessfully to cross one of her picket lines. With angry Regina in hot pursuit, the driver eventually stopped the truck, got out of the cabin, and ran away from her on foot." Polk chased the driver into a local bar, talked to him, and convinced him to support the strike. A speech Polk gave at a 1981 training for union stewards, reprinted in the book in its entirety, gives a flavor not only of her uncompromising attitude, but of the political climate she was living in, one not unsimilar to today's. "It is not news to you that there is a tremendous wave of antiunionism sweeping the country now," she told the assembled stewards. "You can't pick up a paper or a journal without reading that labor is too big—corrupt, lazy, unresponsive to its members—and that labor is some pathetic dinosaur whose time has come and gone. We hear one pronouncement after another which happily predicts the decline and collapse of the American labor movement." Polk urged the stewards to vigilantly defend their contracts against the attacks of union-busters, whom she called "bastards with briefcases." The 1980s were also a time of corruption in the Teamsters, both real and rumored. In 1983, Teamsters president Roy L. Williams was convicted of conspiracy and fraud along with four other associates, one who was murdered while the verdicts were being appealed. The Teamsters' decline bothered Polk, the book reveals, and she considered setting up a new independent union or joining with another union that represented service workers. Just before her death, Polk was working on setting up job-training programs for thousands of people being thrown out of work as factories continued to close throughout the Midwest. She was heading to a meeting to ask for resources for the program when the small commuter jet she was riding in crashed into an Illinois field. Written in a spare, chronological style, I Am a Teamster is a quick read, and an inspiring tribute not just to this little-known labor leader but to all those who dedicate their lives to helping women find a voice on the job. The book has two minor weaknesses. First, the author sometimes displays a patronizing attitude towards the workers Polk helped to W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 0

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