(To the right is Victor Bussie at his Baton Rouge home in 2006)
Victor Bussie, longtime Louisiana labor leader and a legendary figure in the Southern labor movement, died at 92 a year ago this month in Baton Rouge, La. I interviewed Bussie at his home in Baton Rouge back in February 2006. Here's a column I wrote from that interview. I thought now might be a nice time to remember a special friend of working folks.
BATON ROUGE, La. – Labor patriarch Victor Bussie, confidante of presidents, senators and governors, saddens at a half-century-old memory of a politician and friend who gained national notoriety for exploits that included an affair with a French Quarter stripper but who was simply “Uncle Earl” to the working people of Louisiana.
Bussie was with Earl Long in the late 1950s when the
three-time governor’s mental breakdown forced his family and friends to send
him to a mental institution in Galveston, Texas. “He
had been crying all the time for grape juice. He loved grape juice. We’d bring
him some, and he’d pour it all over himself. He looked horrible. … It made me
realize if it could affect a person in the position of governor … it could
affect anybody.”
(To the left, Earl Long giving one of his famous barn-burners)
It was one of a hundred tales the 87-year-old Bussie told
during a recent visit related to a book-in-progress on the Southern labor
movement. As president of the Louisiana AFL-CIO from 1956 to 1997, the trained
firefighter withstood many a firestorm during a tumultuous time in history. A
key player on the political as well as the labor scene, he recalled President
Kennedy once summoning him to the White House to get him to convince U.S. Sen.
Russell Long, D-La., to support the bill to establish Medicare. Bussie’s
lobbying transformed Long from a powerful opponent to a leading champion.
“I said, `Senator, I’ve come to tell you the AFL-CIO is not
going to support you any longer. You’re blocking a program that’s more
important to us than any other thing else you could have voted for or against.
… Russell Long helped pass the bill.”
Bussie offers the perspective of long years in the trenches
when he looks at the working lives of Southerners today and yesterday. Like
Claude Ramsay in Mississippi, he saw his state AFL-CIO suffer major
defections—40 percent of the membership in Louisiana—because of his strong
stand in support of civil rights during the 1960s. His home was once bombed by
Klansmen.
He worked with Earl Long and others in keeping a
full-fledged, anti-union “right to work” law--which critics call a “right to
work for less” law because of its long-term effects of keeping wages and
benefits down— off the books in Louisiana during the civil rights era. This was
a rarity in the South. The state finally passed such a law in 1976.
Still, the movement that Bussie and others fought so hard to
preserve is today at its lowest ebb since the 1920s. Union membership has dropped from a
post-World War II high of roughly one-third of the workforce to approximately
13 percent. Last summer the defection of the Teamsters and other major unions
from the national AFL-CIO split the movement. Meanwhile, the transformation of
the U.S. economy from a manufacturing to a service base continues unabated,
leaving many good-paying union jobs in the dust.
Also continuing unabated is the anti-union assault by
business groups such as the so-called “Center for Union Facts—an organization
led by former tobacco industry lobbyist Richard Berman that has begun running
full-page ads in the New York Times and other leading newspapers vilifying
unions.
Still, the statistics and campaigns don’t deter the optimism
Bussie feels about the movement. The high-priced campaigns can’t kill an
idea—the idea of working people joining together to have a united voice on
issues that affect their working lives.
“People are gradually beginning to realize there is no
strength without an organization,” Bussie said. “They are beginning to realize
what can be done to them if their enemies are given full control.”
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