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3 Enter the Dissidents Keith Thomas is a tall, pale-haired, loud-talking, sturdy dynamo of a man. He is the kind of person who leaps to his feet to be useful before you realize you needed something. In July 1999, we were in his basement workshop getting ready for a picket at the Wichita, Kansas, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union hall, which is right across the street from the Boeing plant. The goals of the picket were twofold: to warn the company that unionists were ready to strike (with the slogan “Get Ready for the Long One”) and to protest the inaction of the union local in preparation for the contract fight. All the while talking to me about the history of the local and its representatives and about the likely terms of the coming contract, Thomas was using templates projected on a wall to paint posters with slogans like “We Are the Union,” “No More Offload,” and “Remember ’95—We Can Do It Again!” Using a circular saw, he cut lengths of lumber into pickets and stapled the signs neatly front and back to the posts with a staple gun. At the picket itself, he (with megaphone) led the small group in chants, spoke earnestly with fellow activists and reporters, and, it looked to me, had the time of his life. He was wholly in his element. But it had not always been so. Surprisingly, when he hired on at Boeing in Wichita in 1978, he actually refused to join the International Association of Machinists. Yet after joining almost ten years later, he would become a strong voice in his union for democracy and militancy. His reasons for not joining the union in the first place were not antiunion. He was reluctant primarily not out of disregard for the workers’ fight against the company, but out of skepticism that the union was the proper vehicle for that struggle. About his distrust of the union, Thomas said: 52 . Chapter 3 Folks need to understand there is no good reason for not joining a labor union, so any reasons that I give, they’re not excuses and they’re not good reasons. I don’t ever want to be on tape somewhere and somebody saying, Keith Thomas gave a real good reason for not getting in, because there isn’t a good reason for not getting in. And I’m gonna say that I said the typical things, made the typical rationalizations that you can’t make a difference, it doesn’t make a difference, the leadership is terrible. I did the same things that people will do with organized religion sometimes. There’ll be some preacher out there who just commits some heinous acts and we will brand an entire religious group according to what this particular individual does. It can happen. And from the union leaders I’d seen, I wasn’t very impressed.1 Eventually, Thomas made a distinction between the institution of unions as the necessary organization of workers in capitalism and the behaviors and ideologies of particular labor leaders. This passage demonstrates his point of view: It is necessary to use the union and to build the union while at the same time questioning its leaders and institutional practices. Fellow activist Sean Mullin—a slight man with brown hair and keen, expressive eyes—also tried to convince people to both use and fight the union: I had a scab tell me the other day, I don’t have any power. I can’t make any changes in this union. I said, you know, the funny thing is the exact complaints that you have with my union are the exact complaints that I have with it. And it’s the exact complaints that every other scab out here has with the union. You know what, my vote they can count on being against them every time. They can count on your vote not counting because you can’t vote. Here’s the deal. If you and every one of the rest of you scabs would get in the union, get together because you all have a common opinion, use your one vote [so you] have way more votes than they have. But you are the silent majority who refuse to get up off your asses and do anything about it.2 Mullin’s argument is that one can join and dissent; a worker can’t control what the union does by refusing...

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