Editor’s Note from Peter Olney: In early December 2021 I was invited to do a training for the Industrial Division of the Central South Regional Council of Carpenters. The Council is headquartered in New Orleans and has over seven thousand working construction carpenters in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas. The Council also has an industrial division of over a thousand members at paper products manufacturers like Boise Cascade. This was the quarterly meeting of the Council and delegates were present from all five states and all industrial facilities. My friend Jay Youngdahl is the attorney for the Council. For the last post of the year, The Forum has elected to run a very inspiring portion of his remarks from his speech of December 11^th, 2021 to the Council delegates.  We think it speaks of where we come from, who we are and where we can go, of possibilities for the labor movement, and the country.  

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Jay Youngdahl 

Now, when I speak with you at our meeting, I always like to just take a couple minutes and talk a little philosophically about our union movement. I’m passionate – to use an overused word now – about what we do in our union.

I got some of this at birth. I’ve got two middle names.  My name is Jay Thomas Armstrong Youngdahl, and that’s kind of a long thing. The only time I ever used it all was when I was in the Army. Armstrong is after Louie Armstrong because my parents were jazz fans. But Thomas, you know there’re a lot of people named Thomas. But I’m named after this guy named Norman Thomas, who was a politician in the thirties and forties. In fact, he ran for President one time, though he did not get many votes. The reason my parents named me after him was that he came to Arkansas to try to help out the farm workers who worked on tractors and in the fields. He spoke to them in East Arkansas outside of Memphis, at a meeting of the Southern Tenant Farmworkers Union. When the sheriff and all the growers heard he was coming they told Thomas, “You can’t have this rally. We’re not allowing labor unions in Eastern Arkansas.” And Norman Thomas said, “Wait a minute. You know, this is the law,” we have rights. And they said, “Mr. Thomas, you don’t understand what we’re talking about.” So, the sheriff and all the people got him and rode him out of the county, even though that was an illegal thing to do under the law. Norman Thomas talked about this incident, which happened in our Council area, for years. My dad and mom were so impressed. They said, “One of the middle names for our first child is going to be named after Mr. Thomas.”

Today the main point I want to make is about what it means to be in a union. We live in a country today where we can’t even agree on what it means to be American. Of course, we all want America to be great but what’s it means to be great?  You know, we have differences of opinion. We think about the history in all kinds of unusual ways, I think. So, how do we respond if we care about each other? How do we decide what’s great?  How do we decide which of the stories told about our history we should believe?

You know, I was a teenager during the Vietnam war period, and grew up in Little Rock during the struggles for civil rights at Central High School there. How do I think about American greatness or this history when I grew up then? It’s tough and I’m not here to say that it is going to be easy to get to a better place in this country. But I believe that in the union movement we’ve got an answer and a place to start. Because what we do in unionism is we work for the group. We work by the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” You have heard me say before, I worked as a machinist some between high school and the time I was drafted. I was a terrible machinist, but I was trying, and the union helped me. I was going to get suspended for bad work, but the union representative went to the boss and said, “Well wait a minute. He didn’t grow up with machines that much in his life, but he is trying.” Of course, some of us have skills in one area and don’t have skills in other areas. The union works to protect all who are honestly trying.

And so, from unionism there’s a philosophy. A philosophy of community, even for those of us who aren’t good with machines.  And we understand the larger community. We care about our community because you can make a big ol’ salary. You can have good benefits. But if the schools are terrible or if your community’s terrible, it’s terrible for your family. Because the idea of unionism is to think about everybody as a whole, we’re ready when there are threats to individuals and to the community. We’ve got an answer.

Let’s talk about another issue in our country. As we know, relationships among different ethnic groups and nationalities and colors do not seem very good today. But look around this room. What group do you participate in which is as diverse as the people in this room? I mean, maybe Wal-Mart stores in some places but – I have been thinking about this as I look around the room. Think about ages. We have older and younger, and I am the oldest. We have a significant number of women, especially for a union whose members are in construction and manufacturing. Let’s give a round of applause to our union sisters. And, we’ve got people from downtown Houston, one of the third biggest cities in the United States, and we’ve got people from some of the most rural parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. We’ve got African American people; we’ve got Hispanic people. We’re starting to put more and more material into Spanish. We’ve got our Asian brother who’s here, and we’ve got white people like me.

And we’re all about the same thing and nobody is better than anybody else. We’re putting up that drywall. We’re standing side by side.  We’re taking that big ol’ tree, whittling it down to a little tree by cutting it into boards. We’re all doing the same thing. And there just are very, very few places in the United States today where you have this kind of thing where people work together like this. And for me, that’s what America’s about.

That’s what – you know, we called it a melting pot at one point, and that’s what we’re about. But you’ve got to have an initial seed to make the tree grow, and our seed is “an injury to one is an injury to all.” We work together for the common good.

So, thank you very much, brothers and sisters. It’s an honor to work with you. It’s the most prideful thing I do. Talk with you all later.

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