A GOOD, STUBBORN IRISHMAN

A GOOD, STUBBORN IRISHMAN
By Dick Meister

He was one of the last of the old-line labor leaders who once had great
influence in San Francisco and other major cities. He was Irish-Catholic,
of course, a resident of the city's principal working class district, and
from one of the blue-collar trades.

His name was Joseph Michael O'Sullivan. He had been president of San
Francisco's Building and Construction Trades Council and for four decades
head of its main carpenters union local.

He died two decades ago, all but forgotten then and all but forgotten now.
But those who would truly understand the history of San Francisco and in
particular the key role organized labor has played in the city's
development, must pay attention to the memory of Joe O'Sullivan.

He was a very good man. He also was a very stubborn man. I remember, for
instance, that time back in 1976 when he insisted on going to jail.

O'Sullivan and three other construction union officials had been sentenced
to jail for having led a strike by municipal craftsmen -- who, as public
employees, supposedly did not have the legal right to strike. O'Sullivan --
then aged 74 and ailing -- didn't have to go to jail, since union lawyers
were certain they could overturn the sentences, as they ultimately did.

The other union officials were content to have the lawyers handle the
matter through court appeals, but O'Sullivan refused to be "a damned labor
bureaucrat." He preferred to be a labor activist, and so turned himself
over to the San Francisco County sheriff for a five-day stay behind bars.

O'Sullivan thought that was a small price to pay for the badly needed
opportunity it would give the city's unions to bounce back from the severe
beating they had suffered in the craftsmen's strike. Surely, he thought, the
unions would mount a major campaign to protest the jailing of one of their
best known and most respected leaders over one of the most fundamental of
labor rights, the right to strike.

That would draw maximum attention to the injustice of a court ruling which
had denied that fundamental right to thousands of working people. It would
show that the unions still were capable of the militancy which had earned
San Francisco a reputation as one of the country's premier "union towns."

And it would be an ideal way for the unions to seek the support essential
to restoring their former influence -- the support of public employees and
others in the heavily non-union white collar occupations that had come to
dominate the city's economy and that of so many other cities as unionized
blue collar occupations once did.

But the unions allowed Joe O'Sullivan to enter jail, and to leave jail,
quietly and alone.

There were no protest rallies. no demonstrations, no marches, no angry
speeches, no picketing, no sympathy strikes, none of the militant actions
that had marked labor's rise to economic, political and social prominence.

There was only grumbling, among most of the city's other labor leaders,
that O'Sullivan was "grandstanding" in trying to get them to rely on more
than just largely unpublicized courtroom arguments.

But the arguments won the unions very little. About all they got was a
narrow court ruling that, although indeed overturning the decision which
had ordered the strike leaders to jail, did so on purely technical grounds.
The ruling did not upset the previous finding that city employees could not
legally strike.

Union strategists argue to this day whether activist tactics would have
countered that anti-unionism of the 1970s, as they argue whether such
tactics would be the best way to counter the anti-unionism of today.

Such questions rarely even occurred to O'Sullivan. Activism was virtually
the only tactic he knew. He learned it very early in life, as an 11-year-old
telegraph messenger working with the Irish Republican Army in 1913, against
the British forces occupying his native village of Tralle, County Kerry.

Young O'Sullivan, entrusted by the British authorities to deliver messages
to the occupying British troops, showed the messages first to local IRA
leaders -- despite the leaders' warnings "that if I was caught, it would be
the finish for me."

So why did he do it? "The messages were very important, they wanted them,
and I felt that whatever I could do for Ireland ... well, I would do it."

O'Sullivan left the messenger's job to work with his father, a master
carpenter and secretary of the carpenters union in Tralle, but continued
his IRA activities.

"Whenever they were going to ambush a British lorry," he recalled, "the IRA
had to know when it was leaving to come out in the country. So I would put
out a gas lamp, then another boy a mile away would see that and he would put
out another one.

"That would be the signal. The IRA would dig a trench in the road and the
lorry would fall into it. Our guys would call on them to surrender. We'd
take the rifles and ammunition, and their shoes, and then make them walk
back into town ....

"We never went to kill them -- though people were killed, that was for sure
.... But there was more caskets going back to England than were being
lowered in the ground in Ireland."

O'Sullivan's IRA activities ended abruptly one night when two British
soldiers burst into the cottage where he lived and dragged him away at gun
point after O'Sullivan's mother, certain he was to be killed, "started
throwing holy water on me."

Once outside the cottage, O'Sullivan knocked away the rifle of one of the
soldiers and ran. Although wounded by the other soldier, he escaped,
eventually making his way to the United States.

O'Sullivan arrived in San Francisco in 1925, seeking work through the
carpenters union local he eventually would head. At the time, the local was
leading a major strike aimed at forcing contractors to bargain with
construction unions on pay and working conditions.

Contractors had brought in more than 1,000 non-union strikebreakers from
Southern California to replace the strikers, and they became the striking
union's main targets.

"We formed 'wrecking crews' -- 'thugs,' they used to call us in the
newspapers -- and got $1.50 a day from the union to get into a job, roust
the scabs, break their tools," O'Sullivan remembered.

"When we shut a job down, nobody worked -- they got out fast. We just used
our hands, but we worked the scabs over good .... Maybe it was the right
thing to do, maybe it was wrong -- but that's the way it got done."

At one point, O'Sullivan and the six other members of his "wrecking crew"
were arrested for the murder of a strikebreaker. They were held three weeks,
until two other men confessed to the killing.

The construction unions lost the strike after a year of fierce struggle and
O'Sullivan, blacklisted by employers, had to move to the nearby city of
Vallejo to find work. But he later returned to San Francisco and, in 1935,
was elected to head Carpenters Local No. 22.

O'Sullivan held that job until 1977, helping lead carpenters and other
building tradesmen in the struggles that finally won them the right to
effective union representation.

The relatively high pay and benefits and decent working conditions of the
tradesmen today are taken for granted. But the workers wouldn't have them
if it wasn't for their unions, which had to fight hard to get employers to
grant even the simplest amenities.

O'Sullivan's nephew James vividly recalled his uncle's great pride in
getting "fresh water and toilets on the job for the carpenters and a pension
plan to take care of them when they grew old."

O'Sullivan was stubborn to the end. He left union office only because of the
adoption, over the strong objections of O'Sullivan and many of his local's
members, of an amendment to the carpenters' national constitution that
prohibited anyone over 70 -- O'Sullivan included -- from seeking union
office.

But he was no grim advocate, despite his stubbornness, dedication and
determination. I recall watching him turn on his considerable Gaelic charm
in Israel, where he had gone with a delegation of touring labor leaders in
1973.

The most important day of the tour was March 17, when the leaders were to
confer with David Ben-Gurion. As the senior member of the delegation,
O'Sullivan greeted the legendary former prime minister, who stood before
the visitors with an air of immense and almost forbidding dignity.

Joseph Michael O'Sullivan, looking and sounding only as someone who had
been baptized in Ireland with such a name could look and sound, quickly
broke the ice.

"Mr. Ben-Gurion," he said, "let me be the first to wish you a happy St.
Patrick's Day."

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	1831
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Local Legend
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	1976
Person:	Joe O'Sullivan