Well, it sounds like the beginning of a deposition rather than a videotape.
My name is Jim Feathersdener.
I'm an attorney and a lobbyist here in Albany at this time with my own firm.
I first worked for CSCA when right out of law school, I took a job with the firm that
was then their general counsel outside counsel.
They actually didn't have a in-house law department at the time to graph Boy Conway and
Hold Harris.
And I reported to my first office which I shared with two other young lawyers, Jim Romer
and Fred Reister.
We all sat around at table in a little library at 33 Elk Street.
So I was a younger lawyer with CSCA from December 1969 for a couple of years thereafter
through the organizing boards of the, when the Taylor Laws at its inception came in.
I then left CSCA worked at the law firm for a year.
So I then founded a firm of my own which where we practiced and connected it for a few
years.
In 1976, when the union made a change in law firms, they had a dispute with the people
at the graph Boy and they replaced them ultimately with a firm that Jim Romer and I formed sometime
in 1976.
And I stayed with them as they're really the head of their political operation and also
when a litigating general counsel's role along with Jim from 1976 until I must have been
about 86 I think when we, the union made another change went to its in-house program with
the March Crow I think was their first in-house counsel and we left at that point.
Do you know how long the graph Boy had represented CSCA?
I know that they had represented the association for a long time.
The graph when I went there was in his 70s.
He had represented the association for at least a couple of decades at that point and maybe
a little before that 33 Alchstreet actually was built on a lot that was sold.
There had been some old brown stones there that John DeGrabb senior owned and they, he
sold them to the association and they knocked them down and built 33 Alchstreet.
In fact, my first legal job for CSCA was there was a party wall question between 33 Alchstreet
and the adjoining building that was owned by a guy named Art Harvey who was counseled
the police conferences of New York.
My first really the first thing I worked on were the legal problems between the police
conference and CSCA over there the shared wall of their building.
So with you representing the firm you were physically located within the CSCA offices?
Yes Fred Restard, Jim Romer, myself were physically located in the CSCA offices.
Jack Rice who was the lead partner in the firm at that time doing the work for CSCA had
an office in 33 Alchstreet and Alchstowe had one down at the firm at 90 State Street but
he spent 90% of his time also physically located up at CSCA.
Those must have been Joe Feeley was the president when we came in.
Okay.
I was going to say those must have been very interesting times in that you had the
Taylor Law recently passed your fresh out of law school.
I would imagine that a lot of what you were doing was kind of making some law for the
first time.
Well we were but the great thing was we were at no disadvantage that we were no experienced
practitioners under the Taylor Law because it had just come into being and we also played
not only a legal role but to some degree the organizing fights that were going on then
required an enormous particularly CSCA had never been in them before.
They were changing and evolving very very rapidly in order to compete for the units after
the uniting determinations were made.
So we also got to go out and do a lot of public speaking and help the organizers in the organizing
effort which was certainly something most young lawyers didn't get to do was a lot of fun.
Explain a little bit about what you mean when you talk about the organizing obviously CSCA
had been around for a long time but when the Taylor Law came into being they still actually
had to go out and sign up the members of the union I take it.
Yes that ultimately turned out to be a not a failure but that was an objective that they
had tried to avoid as you might expect but failed to avoid.
They had hoped to simply be certified as the collective bargaining representative for
all state employees.
The after the Taylor Law was enacted and the first per board was appointed by Helmsley
as I recall.
Uniting decisions were made very much like the units that the state has today.
There have been some additional uniting decisions made subsequently but the big ones the
occupational services unit, institutional services unit, the PS and T unit which is no
longer represented by CSCA and the administrative services unit.
When those units were created CSCA had to compete and had to win an election to represent
them.
They eventually won all four of the statewide units although they didn't win them all they
lost the police and they lost corrections.
At the same time that was happening they were having organizing battles in all the local
governments across the state.
CSCA which prior to that had been to some extent even after that but prior to that was really
an association.
They had no collective bargaining rights.
President Philly and John DeGraf senior, a few of the members of the board would go up
sit down with the administration and just work out whatever they could but they had no
leverage at all.
Now they had to convert, it was really their first baby steps towards becoming a union
where the organizing struggles of the early 70s.
So were you involved with the negotiation of the first state contracts?
Yes.
First state contracts which were negotiated between after the organizing was done.
The negotiating they worked out how they were going to negotiate those contracts.
I think Abe Levine was the chief negotiator for the state although there was another guy
who wasn't actually a state employee who the Rockefeller people relied on.
His name escapes me at the moment.
But yes, we each got assigned to be the lawyer to one of the units and to assist the collective
bargaining specialist in the unit negotiations.
Then there was above the four units who would negotiate about whatever it was that was unique
to their job titles that they wanted to.
There was an umbrella negotiation that took place over financial issues, retirement issues,
things like that went across the four units.
So that first contract for the institutional services unit, the collective bargaining
specialist was Bob Gild and I was assigned to sit and provide the legal support for him
at those negotiations.
Was there a large number of staff at that time?
There was pretty good number of staff.
There were, I don't know, something more than 100 and probably less than 200 initially.
They had organizers.
They had the newly created collective bargaining specialist, some of whom had sort of morphed
into that having been organizers.
But some of the organizers themselves were the most colorful guys that, as you can well
matter, the nature of that job that the union had and they were just organized.
They get sent off someplace to get the union recognized for the people who got the people
to want to have the union.
At that time it was a little less structured than it had become when I left and I would
hazard a guess that it's even a lot more structured now.
I mean, they would, the organizers and the CBS's when they had a convention and stuff,
they would sit up in Jack Rice's office and they would just hand them handfuls of cash
to be used to entertain the people they were trying to organize and actually at the
delegate conventions in those early ones just to keep the delegates happy.
The real assignment would be to go out and socialize and pick up the check at every
gathering they went to and there was really no accountability for the way they did it
in those days.
But it was a little bit of a frontier atmosphere and it worked well.
It was a very exciting place to work at that time.
What was the dynamic internally?
Tell me a little bit about the dynamic internally because you're talking about a circumstance
where you have a new law, there's a lot of change.
Suddenly you're representing people in a different way.
I would imagine that there would have had to be a lot of change internally in terms of
the structure and dynamics of the leadership of the organization to deal with these new
challenges.
Well there was.
There was concomitant with all that.
It changed what's taking place.
Ted Wenzel had been elected president Joe Feeley had.
That election had taken place just as I came.
I don't think they ran against one another.
I think Feeley just stepped aside.
But I'm not sure that someone else would know.
In any event Wenzel was the new president.
The executive director of the union was a guy named Joe Lachner.
He had spent his professional life at that time.
Joe was with the union for a long time.
So he'd already been with it for, this would be a guess.
But I would hazard a guess that he had been with the union for somewhere between 10 and
20 years before the Taylor Law changes came along.
So he did have a structure and a way of doing things.
And the union, even when it was an association, was quite large.
So the administrative side of the operation was already pretty complex.
But in addition to the other changes that were taking place, they now had to go and
deal with things like the dues check off and how to account for it.
So they were putting, if you think back in the 70s, they were also just beginning to
work through the data processing issues, which now you would look back at and
think, well, those are pretty simple, but they weren't at all simple at that time.
And on at least two occasions, the data processing issues almost put the union out of business.
I mean, took them right to the edge of going out of business because they couldn't
post to accounts.
They had hired an outside firm to shut in a company that was headquartered, I think, out
of Canada.
Or at least the founders came from there.
And the data processing got so filed up that they couldn't pay their bills for
while.
Anyway, they worked through that.
But Joe, he was the executive director, and normally you would have looked to him,
I think, to set up the structure that would have dealt with the collective bargaining
and such.
Instead, actually, in an informal way, a lot of those structural issues were addressed
by a very informal partnership between Jack Rice and Joe Lachner.
The two men got along extremely well, trusted one another, had very different personalities,
but a lot of respect for one another.
And they set up the system with the collective bargaining specialists.
Those first negotiations were not for the CBS, but Jack Rice, who served as the chief
negotiator for the union.
That was his first negotiation.
So he started out by negotiating a contract for essentially all of the employees in New
York State.
And they did have to deal with a lot of those kinds of issues as they converted.
Did they have a representative negotiating team with members sitting there at the table
and at the table?
They did?
They had negotiating teams.
The negotiating teams sat at the unit negotiations where I was.
When they went to the umbrella negotiations, there would be a representative from each
of the teams, but all of the members who are on the team didn't go so that there might
have been two, there probably were two from each of the units that went up to the umbrella
negotiation.
Tell me a little bit about how your law firm became associated with the CSEA.
And obviously you had a longstanding relationship with their previous firm.
How did that change and how do you convince CSEA to take you guys on as a relatively young
firm?
Well, I had left the other firm and was in a practice on my own chiefly illiteration
practice over in Schenectady, New York.
I was aware of what was going on in CSEA.
I had made a lot of friends and continued to talk to people here.
But there was a, and there frequently is, at that point, the graphfoid represented them
for a long time.
There began to be, as the union grew and aged, its internal structure and the degree of participation
of the members grew.
When I was an association, it was a very leadership-driven group.
When you had those first negotiations and people could begin to bargain collectively, the
members themselves became more active.
And in the first negotiations, they were able to negotiate time off from members so they
now had the time to become active, which they had not done other than for their statewide
officer before that.
So you began to get a lot more member involvement.
It's time when I met that led to some tensions between the law firm and the union.
And they, Jim Romer, who was still with the law firm and was still working up here, had
managed, although the law firm was in a dispute with the union, had managed to stay in very
good terms with a number of the statewide officer, particularly Bob Latimer, who was from
the Western region at that time.
Bill McGowan, who was the, I think it was the executive vice president at that time, and
a couple of the others.
And at that point, Jim was doing, was really the lead lawyer doing most of the day-to-day
legal work of the union, Rice and DeGraffoy.
Was doing the public policy and governmental relations for the union primarily, and not
doing as much of the legal work at that point.
In any event when they, and there was a split between the officers and the board as to whether
they wanted to fire DeGraffoy or not.
Eventually, they made a decision to do it.
In order, and Jim had the idea that he would like to continue with the union, to form a firm,
to continue with it.
One of the things he had to convince them of was that his new firm would be able to handle
the political role.
And Jim had no background and actually no interest in that.
So he had to look outside for it.
When I had been here in my first incarnation, I had worked in the legislature on behalf of
the union with Jack.
And when I had gone down to the firm for a year or two, I had continued to be active in
the legislative end of the practice.
So we conceived the idea that together, if we formed a firm, we could reasonably represent
to the union that we could continue to provide the services, all of the entire menu of services
that they had had with their prior firm.
And for reasons that have never been quite clear to me, they decided to take a chance on
us and let us try that.
So we did.
Now, when you came on, did you pretty much carry forward the same kind of relationship
that they had with the previous firm, or did you kind of take a new role in terms of
the way you interacted with the union?
I think the way we, if you're talking about the way the firm interacted with the, interacted
with the union, it was similar structurally.
We simply had a retainer for which we agreed to provide certain stated services.
We had offices, you know, separate and apart from the union, but Jim and I also had places
to work at 33 Alk Street when we were there.
And we had offices for some of the other lawyers there at 33 Alk Street, people we put together
to represent them.
So in a structural sense, it was the same.
However, in a practical sense, it did continue the evolution in that the old firm and the criticism
of the old firm had been that the lawyers were running the union.
That eventually got to be the criticism of our firm as it went on.
But when it started, we did interact differently with the leadership and much more broadly with
the leadership than the graph firm had.
But that was really evolutionary.
It wouldn't sudden change the most.
Probably the most observable dramatic change when we came was the change on the political
side and how we handled the government affairs for the union.
Okay.
Talk a little bit about that.
How did you interact on that basis?
Well the one and this was both practical and structural.
One agreement we made when we came in, one of the difficulties that the union had been
experiencing was the graph void.
The graph void at that time was the largest lobbying firm in the state in terms of number
of clients they represented Billings, so on.
And many of their clients were, they represented that time, the medical society, a whole panel
plea of clients, many of whom would have at least in general terms of when so much
that they were specifically adversarial to the union.
But they had a great many other interests that were kind of generally, if not adversarial,
at least not arm and arm with the union.
So one of the things we did do when we came in was we agreed that for purposes of government
relations, the union would be our only client.
Well actually we agreed they would be our only client unless the union gave us specific
permission to represent somebody else.
And in the 10 years we were there we asked them to do that a couple of times and they did.
But for the most part, for that entire period we represented only them in terms of lobbying,
public policy and government relations.
So that was the first change.
Now the union could actually, could assert without concern of it being filtered its positions
on a whole host of public policy issues.
Second change when he made is up until that time the public policy and the lobbying of
the union was strictly a conversation between Jack and the president and or the executive
director.
When I came is coterminous with when the political action committee began to have an actual
role as opposed to a cameo role.
At that time and that worked out again partly because of personalities that the committee
at that time was headed by a guy from Rockland County named Marty Langer.
And Marty and I set about trying to create a statewide political program that would then
support a strong lobbying position by the union.
You have to remember between 79 and 76 when I began to assume the role we're talking about
now.
You had that all of those early tension that people expected and that now if you look back
you say what was the tension about the Taylor law whether you were going to achieve your
aim strictly through collective bargaining in the classic trade union model that had been
built in a private sector all over the country or whether you were going to do it in some
combination of collective bargaining and political persuasion.
Well I felt I think much more than some of the I believe than my predecessor that in
fact it was going to have to be a combination and I believe then and I think I've really
been proven right in some respects that the political arm of that of that equation would
all of them be at least as important if not more important than the collective bargaining
arm and that's because of the prohibition on strikes obviously.
What was the what was it like for you lobbying on behalf of the CSEA in those in those
years particularly did the fact that you were representing CSEA get you on trade and
what was the perception of CSEA in terms of its political clout.
Well in the in the first six months what it did was make all of this hair that's fall
out fall out actually when I came on the union was at the absolute rock bottom of its political
influence.
He even below what it had as an association and that was a result of a combination of unfortunate
events.
They hadn't gotten organized politically so they had no grassroots operation whatsoever.
They had no political action committee they had no funds whatsoever.
That might have been all right if it had stopped there but then they had gotten into
a horrendous fight with the state legislature.
Horizon out of a number of things but the cramming blow was when they joined with then assemblyman
Andy Stein who was interestingly enough the son of the publisher of there it was an
outside newspaper called the civil service leader and they had sent him on a statewide
tour and done a conjunction with him where he was attacking the legislative system of
Lulu's.
And if you look back in the newspaper archives you'll see high-rosing cartoons of Ted
Wenzel looking under a rug for Lulu who is depicted as a girl with curly hair and they
had just I mean it was just awful.
There was a new governor in town at that point a new head of the office of employee relations
and Stanley Stein got and Warren Anderson were the two leaders.
So when I came on and by the way the president at that time Ted Wenzel had opposed the firing
of the old law firm and the hiring of the new one.
So my first couple of days were pretty easy nobody bothered me I was able to sit through
and think how we might proceed because the only person that would talk to me either from
the legislature or anybody important inside the union Marty and I could talk throughout
we might do.
I set up a series of meetings because we obviously the first thing we had to do was have a
dialogue with somebody and we started with the legislative leaders.
We went to see Stanley Stein got first I set up the meetings and I knew both he and
Senator Anderson and told him we'd like to come over and Marty and I went Dr. Wenzel
with us at the meeting and I think we met we had scheduled to meet with a couple of
committee chairman also.
At the first meeting when we walked in Stanley started running around his office when Ted
came in saying is there a little here Ted I don't see any little.
The meeting ended disastrously Dr. Wenzel unwilling to be humiliated again left and refused
to go meet with Senator Anderson.
We went out and concluded the meeting explained to Senator Anderson Senator Anderson was and
is a gracious gentleman didn't have quite the physical sense of humor that Stanley did
so that meeting went a little better anyway.
And then we set up a meeting with the governor and took President Wenzel to see him over
time his relationship with me got to be as we did these things somewhat more trusting
and you could get him to do things we began to work together better.
But we read basically we just went out and reopened a dialogue with the legislature.
Now we were doing that Marty and I became convinced or perhaps Marty would tell you I convinced
him I'm not sure he was a full-scale partner in this he was and he's very good at explaining
it to the members and doing all those things you have to do to actually change things.
We conceived the idea that we were going to have a political action committee and that
we were going to have a grassroots tree if you will we call them pals political action
liaisons.
Our initial scheme if you will was to get somebody in the district of every one of the legislators
assembly and senate who's assignments so there were whatever there were in those days
210 of was to become close to his or her legislature we'd given the money to attend local political
events we'd brief them on issues and so on the thought being that we could then and remember
there was nothing in place absolutely nothing in place at this time we'd then begin to have
some in district contact with them.
Then we went to have a political action committee because it was perfectly clear that that was
one of the things given the whole we were in that would make it attractive to politicians
to at least begin to talk to CSCA again which at that time we're just seen as an agitator.
Unfortunately CSCA was a corporation and consequently initially when you looked at it appeared to be limited
spending $5,000 a year for all purposes politically.
We conceived the notion that of course you could have passed the hat but that was a difficult way to raise money.
We conceived the notion of a negative contribution to the political action committee that as far as I know
and we did a lot of research at time had never been tested in New York as to whether you could go about it that way.
There were some cases around the country more often from internal union disputes about how do's money was spent
from an outside thing.
We simply went ahead and did it and I've forgotten what the initial we had, we're at a convention, Marty made the proposal,
might have been as little as a $10, $20 a member.
Basically this was to set up a separate political action fund where a portion of the dues were allotted to that fund.
That's right and then it was our legal position that those weren't corporate monies and that even though the corporation had collected them and put them over there
that was an administrative service.
To the best of my knowledge that has never been officially tested but our feeling was that if it didn't get tested for the first couple of years
it was going to be an acknowledgement that it was all right.
I mean it had gone, now we've been doing it or CSEA has been doing it for 30 years now.
There's probably nobody in the state that hadn't received contributions from it.
But there was, as you can imagine, there were a lot of nervous people when we decided to do it.
I took the position and Marty was good enough to back me up that if you didn't do that it was going to have a dramatically negative effect on your ability to negotiate a contract.
Let alone your ability to shape any legislation in a way that would be favorable to the union as it went forward.
But probably the real driving force behind it was at that point the issue of the institutionalization and the Willowbrook consent decree had become just a brush fire in the institutional services unit.
And it was very clear that there would be no way to make meaningful progress there unless you were able to develop real political clout.
And that's what we set out to do.
Probably a little tight on time and can't cut to all of these things.
But I wonder if you talk a little bit about the 1978 Coventatorio race between New Carrier and Perry-Gurier and what role CSEA played in that?
Well, I think CSEA played a pivotal role in it. It was a very difficult thing internally.
What was going on was you had a, at that time you had, now you had the Political Action Committee which I've honestly forgotten whether they had the formal authority to endorse or they simply had the authority to recommend it and do it.
But in either event, Hugh Kerry was so low in the polls that you couldn't find him.
He was trailing Jury A by probably 40 points.
CSEA had had a very rocky relationship with Hugh Kerry starting with his days of one and roses speech and going on.
On the other hand, Kerry's people had negotiated the first contract with the union.
And more importantly, they were at the epicenter of the institutionalization issue.
Now, Hugh Kerry and his head of OMRDD, Tom Coglin at that time, before he came out of corrections, Tom had a retarded son of his own.
He was very deeply personally committed to the deinstitutionalization.
Within the institutional services unit, the Willa Brook Developmental Local was enormously active because they were all going to lose their jobs.
It became apparent that that was going to spill over throughout not only the retardation community but mental health,
that there was going to be this real push to get people out of there.
In any event, Kerry's troops had made up their minds that they were going to try and get the union's endorsement.
Which initially seemed impossible because the rank and file of the union at that point just hated the government and didn't want to have anything to do with them.
The union, though, was willing to deal on this question of how important this question of the institutionalization was.
Also, I should point out that Bill McGowan came from the institutional services.
He actually came from the operational services unit, but he came out of an institution. That's where his job had been.
He had an enormous empathy for the people that were down there.
In any event, we had pretty much, Dury, it was very popular with our long island members in the local government side.
It was certainly much more popular than Kerry throughout the state side.
He met with a committee, he was a charming guy. I had known him for all of my professional life and liked him.
His counsel, Charlie Webb, had worked with us, indicated they would work with us on various things.
But at the end of the day, Hugh Kerry had more to offer us right then and there with the problem we needed to deal with than Perry Dury.
It was a very cold bloodedly, non-emotional, objective, what's in the best interest of the members' decision that was made that we were going to endorse Kerry.
Dury had been all but assured the endorsement by all kinds of people.
In fact, they pulled off the through way that were going somewhere in Charlie Webb called me right after we made the decision to endorse Kerry.
He was just livid and he was dissembling. He was so angry about it. He was hardly able to talk.
It was just a litany of threats that came out as a result of it for which I don't blame him incidentally. I like Charlie.
I saw him about a year ago. It was a dramatic moment. It really was the first blow to the Dury campaign which then over the series in the next months or so just collapsed and Hugh Kerry was reelected.
Now, ultimately it was that decision that led to the issuance of the Morgato memorandum which has even to this day shaped the way the institutionalization went forward and provided protections to the employees in terms of job continuity.
It was clear you couldn't stop and probably rightfully shouldn't stop real institutionalization.
Now, the dumping should have been stopped and the union did the best it could.
That's all it did was the best it could when they able to stop it.
However, we did preserve thousands of jobs as a result of that. It led to one of the wildest confrontations at a delicate meeting that was called where Marty was up there explaining our as was I explaining the endorsement and people from the NASA local were actually rushing the stage to try and
try and tear away the microphone. So we had about it. So it was just a conscious decision to do what the leadership perceived to be in the best interest to the members really whether the members liked it or not.
It's what it was driven by the institutionalization.
Do you know was that the first time CSEA had ever endorsed for governor?
Yes. They had never done it before.
Obviously that sets the stage for a whole bunch of other questions which I know that we're going to have enough time for.
Let me kind of close in this way. I wonder if you would just give me a very short description about several of the CSEA leaders who you worked with over the years and you talked a little bit about Joe Philly.
Can you tell me what you remember about him?
Yeah, I didn't feel as I said was on his way out when when I came in but he was around. He was an educated cheerful man who has truly been in the association bowl.
There was still an association really when he left. So I he saw himself as a really just elected leader of professional colleagues.
I don't think in his wildest imagination he would have thought himself as a union leader.
But I think he you know he took his responsibilities seriously. He had figured out how to lead effectively in the structure of the legal structure that was there at that time which was you know he was willing to go beg for his members which is really what you were doing because you know no one had to give you anything or do anything for you.
So he was willing to go up and make the case and I think in that structure he was a good leader whether he could have made the conversion and I have my doubts about that but he was never confronted with it so it didn't matter.
Talk about colorful figures that tell me a little bit about Ted Wenzel.
Ted was very colorful. He was you know in addition to as you got the note Ted in addition to being I forgotten what his doctorate was in but he invented a game that he patented in soul and had copies of it.
He was a master chess player of you know national ranking.
He he was the man who had was in the uncomfortable position of being there when the Taylor law changed.
He was from the PSNT unit and as you know he had a PhD and again I don't recall what it was but and he was probably not as good at at articulating his views to the rank and file members as you might have liked.
He was used to being with the PSNT group by the same token. He was you know he was he was a man who had grit in the first the kind of infamous statewide was really a weekend strike that first strike that took place.
We were all we pretty much locked ourselves in the 33 out street because the attorney general's office had all these guides and over coats out there was penis looking for everybody looking for all the leaders the officer and the lawyers and everybody else.
And that was he was taking you know it hadn't happened before he was taking an enormous risk and he was willing to do it because he thought it had to be done.
He was could be very musing up in front of a crowd sometimes because he did speak and communicated in a very different place than most of our delegate meetings.
He had a real contrast then when you got to the next president Bill McGowan.
That's true. It was a real contrast. Bill McGowan to my mind of the leaders of the union that I knew was the one had a special place in the building of the union.
And he certainly had a special place in my affection for him. I became so I should as a disclaimer I became very close to Bill personally but I had a great admiration for him.
He really was as people would say at these dems and those sort of speaker but he had a fundamental understanding of trade unionism and leadership that none of his predecessors had had.
He took the union places it never could have gone without him. He was comfortable going there because of course he had been a union member in the private sector before he came to work for the state.
When you talk about a man of courage he was willing to do all kinds of things. When you get back to that institutionalization Bill was just adamant and he held his ground there.
At one point we met with Tom Caglin at a restaurant when the union our convention was going on so it was somewhere near the concrete or grosseners but one of those places in my cell.
And a discussion took place between Bill and Tom and which Tom misunderstood thought Bill had said something derogatory about his child Bill would never do that and didn't even in fact even know that Tom had children.
But a scuffle broke out between the two of them. That then grew into a full fledged fist fight between Caglin and I. Now Caglin who had been an ex-state trooper his reaction would just to start firing his fist at all directions I had pushed him off of Bill.
He came back so now I've gone over and rescued Bill sort of I'm now engaged in this desperate struggle with Caglin. The people from the governor's office came and broke up the fight I look over. Bill is sitting like I am now puffing his cigar and talking with one of my partners Pauline Consella who let her run on the head as if nothing is happening in the room and chairs are flying.
And this is why it builds just waiting to get back to the negotiation.
But he was great. Hugh Kerry loved him. Bill and I would go down as he should have after the endorsement. But we made an awful lot of progress for people in the second.
So I love Bill.
Tell me a little bit about Joe McDermott.
Joe was again from the PS and T unit.
Very smart, very orderly, very administratively savvy, understood how to make things run correctly and efficiently.
I mean, Bill was truly passionate about these issues of his members. I thought Joe was an extremely effective leader but I think he really lacked some of that inner passion that Bill had.
On the other side, Joe was a much better leader in an administrative sense. I mean, his communication was better, it was more organized, it was more directed.
I never certain that he, Bill really loved the job. I think Joe felt the job was a responsibility and liked it. I never had the feeling that he really loved it, loved the Hurley Burley, the elbow throwing the way Bill did and how it could get into it.
Particularly after the merger with AFSCME, I think Joe was exactly the right guy to be the transitional president there and make that merger fully work.
Tell me a little bit about Irene Carr, who you may know just passed about a month ago.
Well, Irene was the secretary to the union for all of the time I was there. Could not have been a lovely or more gracious lady, could not have been more of a team player throughout the time that I knew her.
She always was there for the union, was willing to stick her neck out for him, played a very supportive Bill when he was president and a Joe.
Although there were some times when you had the Bill Joe sort of split when that transition was going on.
I don't think she was ever comfortable with that. She saw the union holistically as a whole place where it really was one for all and all for one.
I think she saw it as a family and her duty to her family and was a great lady.
Did you have it assumed played a pretty pivotal role at a time when women were taking a more prominent place in the union?
She did play, she certainly, the women who now have leadership roles in the union should, if they look back and remember, realize that they're standing on Irene's shoulders.
She did it at a time really before, well she started at a time, before the feminist movement had gotten much traction.
She stayed with it as the feminist movement, both inside and outside the union, began to get real traction.
She accommodated to that change, wonderfully led that change and led it in a way that was effective at her time and place.
I think in 1971, say, 72 in that area, era, they would have been hard to have a Bella Abzug type feminist inside this particular union.
Irene was able to stand for all the same things, support all the same things and just do it in a way that was compatible with the culture that existed at that time.
