Our local union picked three of us to see what New Kensington intended to do, so we borrowed Dean's car, three of us, and
went and drove the thing there, and it broke down in the middle of the
night. We set there all night in West Virginia with it pretty cold. I
didn't know how cold; I knew I froze. I knocked on a guy's door to ask
for a drink of water. I went out to get the dipper out of the bucket,
and the bucket and all came up, because there was ice all over the
place. [Laughter] But we finally got there
and met with the head of the Aluminum Council, a fellow Worth Williams
[unclear], and he was nice to us. Told us not to go over there; they were
a gang of communists over there in New Kensington, [UNCLEAR] to stay with the AF of L. But we were permitted to go over to New
Kensington with this provision: that we were fraternal delegates and had
no right to vote on anything that they brought up over there. But they
insisted that we vote right on, although we weren't authorized to. And
wrote up a constitution, elected a head of the Aluminum Workers of
America, which was an international. They intended [UNCLEAR] later on to take in Canada, and they got the thing set up. One thing
that I was primarily interested in in setting up an international was
the autonomy of the local unions. We didn't want to submerge all our
activities under the restrictive head of the international. [Laughter] We wanted to keep as much local
autonomy as possible. And that was my objective all the way through,
writing the constitution, to give every local the right to run pretty
much as it wanted to, and I think we did a good job on the constitution.
Then we came back, and though the union was small—at the time, we hadn't
made much progress in signing up members—we had to sell the idea of
switching over to the local union, and it wasn't too much trouble.
Because they could see the advantages of being in one bargaining unit;
whereas when the union was divided up into activities, then the company
could play the machinists off against the electricians and so on, and
[UNCLEAR]. So we agreed to switch over to the CIO.
And I read or knew the AF of L had impounded &29,000 of New
Kensington's money [Laughter] , because
they were pulling out. And on the floor over there at New Kensington,
they called it. . . . This guy that met us up there, Williams, the head
of the Aluminum Council, they were kind of, you know what you could
think of [Laughter] . And so we came down.
We also had to handle grievance cases in Pittsburgh. We came down from a
grievance case, and he bought a newspaper. And it was on the front page
of the newspaper all they'd called him over there, and we'd had a part
in it. [Laughter] He started to unroll it,
and we talked to him right fast, and he'd roll it back up and he'd
unroll it again. He got away before he read what everybody over there
had called him. But while we were there handling the grievance case, the
president of Alcoa in Tennessee was there, and he said to the executive
vice-president of Alcoa, "What are you going to do about our demands in
Alcoa at Maryville?" And he said, "You've had my last word." He said,
"Well, I have to go home and call a strike." And he said, "Well, you've
had my last word on it." We all had met there together once. So after we
came down, I said, "Don't go home and call a strike. Come on and join in
with New Kensington and Badin, and you won't have to call a strike, in
all probability." "No, I'm going home and call a strike," which he did.
So we went over to visit him.