Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Showdown Time at City Light" in Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 183-186). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Freedom Socialist: September 1986
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
WAY, WAY BACK IN OLDEN TIMES, when I was young and twenty, I scoffed at the notion that women were maltreated.
After all, I had never experienced prejudice.
This sublime narcissism and arrogance of an achiever deprived me of grasping the social reality.
I wonder if I was ever so far gone that I finked on a woman who needed help. I hope not, but I probably did. God knows — and she will undoubtedly punish me for transgressions against my sisters, myself.
But ignorance is one thing. Life takes care of that. Coldblooded sellouts are something else.
And the new generation of yuppies and upwardly bound women in the trades is so replete with scabs and rank opportunists that one almost marvels at newly arrived equality advocates who actually rally ’round afflicted women.
WHY SO MANY RENEGADES? Because of economics.
Of course, "Economics" is an abstraction. But the people who exemplify and serve the economic system — managers, union officials, and assorted employees who join to squelch those workers who demand sexual or racial justice or their right to speak their political mind — are very concrete.
Management "teams" and labor-corporate networks coalesce these days with a common objective: to isolate the outspoken and entrench the powers-that-be. They use workers to condemn workers, women to trash women, minorities to denounce minorities. The goody-goodies who play the game are handsomely rewarded; the rebels are hounded, crucified, fired. The economic death-penalty is the deterrent to trouble-making.
SEATTLE CITY LIGHT, as always, hunts for witches. Sherrie Holmes, a female lineworker apprentice, was murderously attacked recently by journeyman Art Meyer on a utility pole 30 feet in the air. She survived by grabbing a crossarm, and because a second journeyman yelled Meyer off. The bruised and battered Holmes complained to management and a weeks-long investigation ensued. Meyer meanwhile stayed on the job.
Sherrie, distraught by lack of support from the union and management, turned for advice to Teri Bach, the only journey levellinewoman ever produced out of 21 hires in nine years. Bach received union permission to personally represent Holmes at the hearing on her charges.
Later, a leaflet was issued by the two main civil rights groups at City Light, the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL) and the City Light Black Employees Association (CLBEA), demanding quicker action and placing responsibility for the assault on a 12-year management record of social irresponsibility.
NOW, TERI BACH IS AN UPFRONT REBEL, feminist, veteran of City Light’s civil rights wars, and a leader in the struggle for job safety. She is affiliated with CERCL, Radical Women, and the Freedom Socialist Party. Right on cue, therefore, the management-labor collusion team roared into action.
SHERRIE HOLMES WAS WARNED by male and female coworkers to break relations with gadfly Bach.
She was told by crew chiefs, supervisors, and female apprenticeship program officials not to associate with CERCL and RW members if she wanted a City Light career.
The union placed on the agenda of a meeting with management the issue of Bach’s "unauthorized" presence at the hearing on Holmes’s charges.
On September 1, the Seattle Post Intelligencer featured a large photo and story on the only other female lineworker who currently is hospitalized from a 20-foot fall. "Woman worker backs City Light ... sees no ... discrimination," announces the headline. Said Vicki Peterson, "Most of the women who have sued City Light have not been able to get along with the men. . . I never had any trouble working with men. I can’t understand how some of these women do ... management is not hiring the right people."
Peterson called some of the former apprentices who filed lawsuits "radical women" who only took the job in the first place because City Light "would not dare fire them."
Peterson, who faces almost four years of apprenticeship, nevertheless has "already been told she can become a crew chief after she becomes a journeyman." Remarkable!
On September 2, a female line crew helper and vociferous defender of management distributed copies of a statement she wrote which attributed the current problem to "the Freedom Socialist Gay Radical Women’s movement" who are "leeches ... ladies in drag ... female warriors on a testicle hunt." Art Meyer is a Vietnam veteran, she boasts, and an "All-American, Heterosexual ... [who] cannot relate to Sherry Holmes breed ... [She is] an incompetant, beligerant [sic], flipped nose, slug ... "
The September 2 Seattle Times editorialized that if the charges against Meyer are valid, he should be turned over to the police. But the editorial quotes City Light Superintendent Randy Hardy as saying that "there are legitimate questions of physical strength as well as attitudes involved." There are, he said, "only three or four female journeymen lineworkers in the nation." So women are too flaccid and insubordinate to make the grade?
THE SHABBY SCENARIO never seems to end. The victim will be endlessly criticized, the aggressor hotly defended, Sherrie Holmes’s supporters castigated, and the entire mess blamed on the bolsheviks. And turncoat women will have played a leading role in the stale melodrama.
This political trickery — so horribly evocative of Hitlerian scapegoating tactics — is an essentially fascist mechanism for self-preservation, no matter who employs it to secure their jobs and ingratiate themselves with the power structure. When economics talks, Radical Bashing goes High Tech, and finkery obliterates worker unity against the bigots.
I WON A CASE AGAINST CITY LIGHT because of its sex and political ideology discrimination. These issues are, as ever, intertwined. Employees will learn, and management will re-learn, that differential treatment on account of political philosophy is as much a crime as any other form of discrimination. Nobody is young and innocent anymore. Not even women. It’s too late in history. It’s too late to be in the middle, to be "moderate," to see conflicts as different "perceptions" and hence unreal, to whitewash the guilty by not taking sides. When showdown time comes, our peers — and posterity — will record indelibly what stand we took.
And the hell with vulgar economic determinism. Human beings are capable of rising above and beyond that. Principles can still overcome, even in the ’80s, even in America.
POSTSCRIPT: On September 3, two City Light electricians were in the lobby of KING-TV, just prior to being interviewed, along with Holmes and Bach, by reporter Mike Oling. A bible-spouting maniac who had been driving by repeatedly to case the building, came crashing through the glass doors in his Porsche, seriously injuring Oling and two other station employees and narrowly missing the City Light supporters of Sherrie Holmes. Coincidence? ’Tis the season for neo-Nazi holy missions in the Pacific Northwest.