Greetings:
My name is Howard Doughty. I’ve been hanging around Seneca since I was hired as a full-time “Teaching Master” (as faculty were called then) on August 1, 1969. As such, I was a “founding member” of Branch 560 in what was then called the Civil Service Association of Ontario, Inc.
Ever since, I’ve been in and out of Union “office” – formerly President of OPSEU’s Toronto Area Council, Region 5’s representative on the CAAT(A) Divisional Executive, etc., but (mostly) Steward for King Campus.
None of that, however, justifies a claim to your time and attention. Longevity guarantees nothing but imminent irrelevance in the great composter of history.
I have, however, been given this space to offer opinions, some useful information (I hope) about Local 560, OPSEU/SEFPO, and trade unionism in general. You’ll be the judge of my success.
I’ll start with a nod to two friends who unwittingly helped put me in this place. One was Henry S. Kariel (1924-2004), who was a 15-year-old Jew when he and his parents sensibly fled Dresden, Germany in 1938. Another was Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), who was a 22-year-old American “free-thinker” and infantryman from Indianapolis when he was transported as a prisoner-of-war to Dresden, Germany in February, 1945.
I became aware of Henry one chilly, rainy afternoon in November, 1966. I was a student soon to graduate with a BA in Political Science at York University’s Glendon College. I was killing time in the campus bookstore when the bright yellow spine of a “new acquisition” caught my eye. I bought it, read it that night, decided to apply to the University of Hawai’i where Henry was located, and to study under his supervision. And so I did.
My most important task in 1967 was to assist Henry with a series of lectures he’d be giving at Chicago’s Loyola University in 1968. The first began:
I should like to begin in the first-person singular, shamelessly revealing my own concerns. Perhaps this will help others to do the same. A conspicuous example of egocentricity may induce others to realize not only that it is all right to begin with one’s very self—that it is possible to get away with it—but also that one can thereby be led to concerns that are anything but selfish.
Being a Union member, or better, being a trade unionist, is to be part of a community wherein mere selfishness has no place. Few of us come to union membership and unionism naturally. We need to learn and to grow.
My hope is that, by “personalizing” my own journey, I will avoid the self-righteous and ultimately patronizing pedantry that too often corrodes well-intentioned efforts to “educate” and “mobilize” working people—and we are all working people—in organizations like this.
We differ in backgrounds, personalities, aspirations, and ideals. Bear with me and I hope to show how we can unite for our own and everybody else’s good.
Kurt? I’ll get to him (and others) later.
In solidarity…
Howard