Labor Leader : Refusing a Honda Made Auto Worker Pam Richards a Union Hero
It’s been a month since Pam Richards turned down a Japanese car on an Ohio lottery TV show because the car wasn’t union-made, and still the adulation continues. Talk about twin peaks. She’s not only the heroine of American organized labor, she’s the darling of the American auto industry.
She’s been given two new cars and a third is on the way. She’s done more than 100 radio, television and newspaper interviews. Her phone answering machine and mailbox have been jammed with hundreds of chunks of poignancy. People send her union caps, lapel pins, pictures of their unionized factories, $5 bills with notes urging her to have lunch on their tab. All that’s left is for Johnny Paycheck to write and record “Take This Car and Shove It.”
Not bad for a $13.86-an-hour Chrysler steering column assemblywoman from Risingsun, Ohio, a tiny working-class community 30 miles south of Toledo.
“I’ve made out like a bandit,” Richards said with a laugh.
All because on Aug. 3, when the master of ceremonies for “Cash Explosion Double Play” informed her that she’d landed on the “bonus square,” entitling her to a $17,600 Honda Accord, Richards said:
“I don’t want that Honda. I’m union.”
In the withering ranks of organized labor, so often on the defensive and so desperate for heroes, what Pam Richards did is being compared to Rosa Parks’ refusal to take a back seat on a segregated bus or Ed Murrow’s courage in standing up to Sen. Joe McCarthy.
She put herself on the line, her compatriots say admiringly. Symbolically, she stood up to the Japanese auto makers, who have eaten away at domestic car manufacturers’ dominance and have kept prices low in part by fighting off unionization. The car Richards turned down was built at Honda’s Marysville, Ohio, plant, where organizing drives by her union, the United Auto Workers, have failed.
Unwittingly, the producers of the television show gave even greater voice to Richards’ message.
They censored it.
Explaining that they did not wish to offend Honda, the producers edited out her reason for declining the car. On the tape, aired the next night, Richards’ mouth moved but there was no sound. Then the announcer informed the audience she would take a $1,000 cash prize instead.
A Toledo newspaper broke the story two days later, and a few days after that, the whole world seemed to land at Richards’ doorstep.
“I thought that it would last, you know, maybe a couple of days,” she said. “It hasn’t. It’s been going like crazy.”
Richards has become so celebrated that last week she effortlessly bridged the chasm between her union and the Big Three auto makers--General Motors, Ford and Chrysler--which are in the midst of tense negotiations on a new three-year contract covering 450,000 auto workers.
On Tuesday, less than three weeks before the current contract was due to expire, UAW leaders announced they were designating GM as their first target in contract negotiations. The UAW said it would demand unprecedented “job security” guarantees from GM, which has closed five plants in the last three years, laying off tens of thousands of workers. Industry analysts warned that GM, having lost much of its market share to the Japanese, was in no position to be generous.
That morning, union leaders from Toledo brought Richards to Detroit, where presidents of scores of UAW locals were being briefed on negotiating strategy. The presidents gave her a standing ovation.
Later that day, she was taken to Chrysler headquarters in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, where executives presented her with a new Plymouth.
Heck, this was becoming old hat.
It all began the day after the lottery program aired throughout Ohio.
Richards went to work at Toledo Precision Machining, a Chrysler subsidiary, where she has worked for more than half of her 39 years. She was working a Sunday overtime shift. Everybody wanted to know why she’d been edited. When she told her co-workers, they were outraged. The workers told supervisors. The supervisors put congratulations on the factory marquee the next morning.
A few days later in Washington, Tom Donahue, the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer and one of the most fiery speech writers in the ranks of labor, read a newspaper article about Richards.
Suddenly, “this building just went ga-ga,” said AFL-CIO spokesman Rex Hardesty. The AFL-CIO, a federation of 90 unions with 14 million members, decided it would give Richards a car of her choice. Representatives called her. She didn’t think they were serious. They called back. OK, she said, I’ll take a red Dodge Dakota truck to replace the old truck her husband, a Chrysler supervisor, drives. Fine, they said, we’ll fly you to Washington this week.
Before she could get there, a man called from Huntington, West Virginia.
“He says, ‘Hi, don’t hang up,’ ” Richards recalled, laughing. “He says, ‘This isn’t a prank. This is Frank Horney. Now, don’t hang up.’ I said, ‘Surrrre.’ He says he owns a Chrysler dealership and wants to give me an Acclaim to drive for a year. I told my husband. He said, ‘Hang up.’ But he kept calling back. Finally, he says, ‘I’ve decided not to give you Acclaim.’ I thought it was a joke. He says, ‘I’m going to give you a Chrysler Imperial (a $28,000 car) for your loyalty.”
It was no joke. Frank Horney does exist. He flew Richards and a daughter to West Virginia. They stayed at the home of Horney’s vice president and drove back to Ohio in the dusty-rose Imperial, stopping at pay phones along the way to check messages and call back the various radio stations begging for interviews.
As soon as they returned to Ohio, Richards flew to Washington to receive the Dodge Dakota--technically, to pose with a model of a truck that is still on order. Richards held a press conference with AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland. She had so many TV interview requests that labor leaders asked her to stay a second day. She said she couldn’t; she hadn’t brought any clothes. The labor federation took her out to buy a dress stitched in a union shop.
“I didn’t intend to insult Honda,” she told one television interviewer. “I’m union. I buy what I build.”
Didn’t she think her union was using her? one TV reporter asked.
“I am the union,” she said.
Richards is pure rank-and-file. She’s never been an officer of her UAW local. She’s known her husband, Mike Richards, from childhood, but they went on to marry other people. Both subsequently had two children, both got divorced and six years ago they got married to each other.
She has a good-natured appreciation of her sudden role.
“I’m glad for it. I’m really proud of it. People need to know. I like to buy union, or buy American. This is how I feel about it. I feel that the union has given me a lot through the years. I was laid off five years, and my union got four years and some odd months of that credited to me for seniority. Without the union, I wouldn’t have the wages I do, or the health benefits.”
Ask her about the nerves she has touched--why the television producers felt compelled to bleep out her declaration of union solidarity, why her union brothers and sisters regard her with such admiration--and she’s pressed to put it into words.
“I keep wondering about that,” she said. “They (the producers) stepped on a lot of people’s toes.”
The unspoken explanation is that Pam Richards fell into a clash of two cultures, the culture of unionism and the culture that regards unions as passe. Neither side talks much to each other anymore.
The proportion of Americans who are union members has shrunk so drastically--now about 16% of the work force--that the word union is often viewed with the disdain reserved for a cult.
Many Americans regard organized labor as a campaign of greed, an entrenched special interest trying to get more. Many union members, meanwhile, have come to view themselves as defenders of a diminishing breed, the non-college-educated American middle class, the people who have managed to work their way up to a $13.86-an-hour job with only a high school diploma. Japanese competition--leaner, more efficient--has encouraged American employers to hold hourly wages below the pace of inflation, to cut the size of their staffs and contract work to cheaper non-union or part-time workers. Unions, their power eroding, have been so busy backpedaling that the notion of fighting these trends has almost been lost.
Into this breach walked Richards.
“She stole our hearts,” said Lloyd Mahaffey, assistant director of a UAW regional office in northwest Ohio, who jokes that he wants to become Richards’ agent. “What she did had so much impact because it came from an ordinary union member, not a labor leader. The feeling has been that somebody had to speak up.”
On Friday, Richards was a guest in Chicago’s Labor Day parade. Today, she’ll be the toast of Toledo’s parade. When the phone rings, she and her husband joke that it’s Johnny Carson. She has yet to go back to work. She’s been on unpaid leave since the uproar began. The day she held a press conference in Washington with AFL-CIO president Kirkland, somebody asked her just when she planned on getting back to the plant.
Kirkland, a smooth, avuncular man whose polish defies the public stereotype of a labor leader, leaned forward.
“Her job will be there for her,” he said.
