Fighting for Safe Jobs, Part Three: Back to the Beginning

In part two, Factor offered the history of Terminal Island in Los Angeles and recalled an explosion at the Hugo Neu–owned processing plant that galvanized her to create change for the safety of the plant’s workers.

I had wanted this job and was proud when I accepted my position in 1982. I had my first interaction with Cal/OSHA while employed as a Pasadena school bus driver, a job I held a decade earlier while finishing my undergraduate degree.

My idea to file a complaint was sparked after discovering Franklin Wallick’s book The American Worker: An Endangered Species. I was researching a topic for a health course and came upon this slim volume in the library. The subtitle says it all. Wallick was from the old guard at the United Auto Workers union, working in their Washington, D.C., office, and had been one of the leading advocates for enacting the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act.

For my coworkers and me, it was the right book at the right time. It motivated our group of disgruntled drivers to submit the complaint, just four years after passage of the act, to the new Cal/OSHA agency.

Our unofficial committee of concerned drivers exercised our right to file an anonymous complaint, which triggered a surprise inspection by a qualified safety investigator, who assessed the hazards that we alleged, including poor bus maintenance, unlit parking lots, and no bathroom facilities for women. We demanded that the company improve conditions.

Was I shocked when I found a termination notice awaiting me on my driver’s seat before my afternoon shift? The Cal/OSHA investigator, a prickly older safety engineer, had showed up that morning and appeared annoyed by my insistence that he come back at night to stumble around in the pitch-black parking lot, check the brake pads, measure the tire tread on the older buses, and question the absence of sanitary facilities for women drivers. As the shop steward, I thought the OSHA act and the Teamsters Union would protect me if I spoke up. I believed I had a right to represent my fellow drivers’ concerns.

What transpired would be a rite of passage through the reality of how legal protections work—or sometimes don’t.

With persistence, and with the assistance of a lefty pro bono lawyer with a tie pin in the shape of a clenched fist, we waged a small campaign over 10 weeks. The first remedy proved to be a joke: filing a claim with the administrative law judge at the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement. The judge had no interest in or patience with my attitude or my lawyer’s accusations. The union grievance procedure was our only hope. My lawyer had to threaten the Teamsters’ attorney to argue for my reinstatement. Surprisingly, the company relented. We felt victorious; the Teamsters’ attorney seemed baffled.

I returned to work, and while I wasn’t exactly hailed as a hero, the admiration I felt from the other drivers was palpable. I was invited to join the club of mostly Black workers and Vietnam vets as if I were one of their own.

In this group, I experienced solidarity based on being a sister driver. I had proved myself by not crossing their picket line protesting the firing of two shop stewards shortly after I was hired and by accepting the nomination to serve as a replacement steward. I had spoken up in front of management on their behalf during the Cal/OSHA investigation—and paid the price.

Were they using me as a 21-year-old loudmouth upstart? Perhaps, but I was now included in their domino games and lunch escapes to the Green Buck soul food cafeteria, and I was soon invited to after-work parties.

As we bonded, our school bus drivers’ cadre began attending local school board meetings. We were initiated into the pro-integration busing campaign, along with the Pasadena Community Information Center, run by the local Black Panthers, and the American Friends Service Committee. I had crossed over.

My four grandparents had immigrated to St. Louis and Winnipeg, Canada, making their way out of antisemitic Poland and Russia, eventually settling in L.A. by the 1920s. My mother, Betty, met the dashing Monte, in his navy whites, during the war. They married on December 23, 1945. In 1947, they opened a small men’s clothing store in Beverly Hills. Over the next 47 years, Monte Factor Ltd. was a fine label for a tailored suit paired with ties, handkerchiefs, belts, socks, and shoes.

Upstairs, in the barbershop, the barbers told dirty jokes, and the blond Russian manicurist with long legs and Lucite heels gave clean shaves. The bookie in the back placed the bets. Customers flocked in for this one-stop shop. Even the Three Stooges were regulars.

My ’50s California childhood was charmed. I could roller-skate to the Santa Monica boardwalk, ride my bike to the canyons, and saddle up our two sweet horses, Stormy Weather and Big Red, and ride all day in the Santa Monica Mountains.

I ran with a tight clique of mostly Jewish friends: intellectual, political, arty. We liked blues and jazz, and none of us played football or surfed. Several of us went on to attend UC Santa Cruz, an experimental public university that attracted talented professors and students.

I lasted only three years, dropping out to travel, moving to New York for a season, and ending up in a group house of young artists in Pasadena, one of whom became my husband. Three years into my marriage, I returned to school and realized that I preferred the community forums and bus driver house parties to the pretentious art world.

Soon my marriage ended. My maternal grandmother, Rose Berch, helped me celebrate this milestone with a vodka tonic and a toast to my freedom. I was now a divorced, financially independent woman. Rose applauded my decision. She’d abandoned a traditional Jewish lifestyle after my grandfather died, just before I was born. She drove a ’59 silver Cadillac with a red leather interior, smoked three packs a day, and traveled the world. She became a sculptor, still prepared gefilte fish and borscht from scratch, and nurtured me with her forthright opinions.

In the 1970s, L.A. was still a city of workers—the largest manufacturing center in the United States. The city was full of good jobs supported by strong and political union leaders. Aircraft, automobiles, tires, ships, steel, and petroleum were all produced in unionized shops in L.A.

I liked being a blue-collar woman and being part of a labor movement that was grounded in people and their bread-and-butter needs. Solidarity was far more than a slogan. Holding a union job, even driving a school bus, meant I could afford my own apartment and a car and not be beholden to anyone.

This was the decade before the cataclysmic disappearance of blue-collar jobs during the ’80s, when globalization incentivized companies to move manufacturing to other countries. Los Angeles, as a border town on the Pacific, would be hit particularly hard, losing hundreds of thousands of good union jobs to workers who would be put in the position of accepting cheaper wages and fewer protections across the border or overseas. The era of postwar prosperity, when L.A. supported over a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs, diminished rapidly, decimating working-class communities. This happened in tandem with a backlash against civil rights laws enacted during the ’60s and early ’70s.

By 1973, the opposition to integrating public schools was gaining momentum, and antibusing politicians took over the Pasadena school board. I can recall protesters in white pointy hats and swastika armbands were now present outside the board meetings. (Southern California was the western stronghold of the John Birch Society and the KKK.) Despite our community efforts, the busing experiment was collapsing.

School bus drivers were collateral damage in this fight, and within months the Pasadena bus yard shut down, everyone laid off.

The bus-company management probably suspected they were going to lose the lucrative Pasadena contract at the time of my reinstatement. Our cadre of drivers dissolved, but at 23 years old, I had found my calling.

The Teamsters Local 572 decided I might be useful to them after all and recruited me to “salt” as an organizer in a nonunion school bus yard in Vernon, a no-man’s-land south of downtown L.A.

I was hired by the Associated Charter Bus Company, then serving the Los Angeles Unified School District, which, unlike the Pasadena school district, was still dedicated to integration busing. I acquired a reliable VW Rabbit and moved into a cottage in Echo Park overlooking the downtown skyline. It was the beginning of my career as a union crusader.

Alone in the predawn hours, I drove south on Alameda Street, a tiny pebble in a river of cargo trucks, between railroad tracks on one bank and manufacturing plants on the other. No convenience stores or coffee shops, just the odor of the Farmer John meatpacking plant. In the bus yard, I would conduct a walk-around check of my assigned school bus, then lock myself in as the diesel engine warmed up for the day’s run.

Soon I would pick up students in South and East L.A. and transport them across the network of freeways to the San Fernando Valley, where they could attend whiter schools in wealthier neighborhoods. As an alum of lily-white LAUSD public schools, I marveled at the audacity of trying to integrate one of the largest school districts in the country.

On my route, I navigated neighborhoods that I had glimpsed as a child from the freeway on our way to family vacations in Lake Arrowhead. I recalled my father pointing to the burning Watts skyline during the 1965 rebellion, the community a war zone compared with our untouched Westside neighborhood.

The middle school students on my bus were curious and cautious about their journey across the city. They never failed to cheer me up with their shy early-morning smiles and sleepy eyes. On several occasions, waiting students at the San Fernando Valley schools stoned the bus as we pulled into the entrance. I told the students to duck as we ran the gauntlet in the big yellow bus. We were not afraid, and no one was hurt. They were tough kids, and their courage made me tougher, too.

I wore two hats: school bus driver and organizer. And true to form, Local 572 did not back me up when the unionization campaign got going. They wanted to wait and see what I could do. Our cadre of drivers began meeting regularly during the downtime between routes. We would gather in the back of our buses and compile our grievances, from poor salary to the lack of health insurance. We conducted surveys and held large gatherings in nearby parks. Slowly and methodically, we organized the majority of drivers who were willing to fight for union representation, threaten to strike, and, in the end, win the union election.

Local 572 was not expecting the packed union hall in September 1977, the set of clear demands, or those of us who stood up and agitated the crowd. We wanted the union leadership to fight for a decent contract that included raises and health benefits. We insisted on participating in the negotiations with Associated Charter, which were being held in the evenings at a local hotel.

The conference room where the union and the company reps met had a wet bar. The driver representatives had to wait in the lobby for periodic updates from two union sidekicks who were babysitting us. This went on for a few weeks. Finally, around 2 a.m. one night, after the other drivers gave up and went home, I decided to wait it out. I was pissed off. We were getting pressure to accept a contract proposal with either a pay raise or health benefits. The drivers wanted and deserved both. The union bosses were clever. They knew that the women drivers preferred the benefits and the men preferred more money. They hoped to divide the drivers so that we would not have the power to reject their “sweetheart” deal. After all our achievements, this did not sit well with me. As the negotiators emerged from the conference room, I decided to give them a piece of my mind. The union bosses were not pleased.

I didn’t care. I turned and confronted the union goons, telling them I wasn’t going to endorse the weak proposal that I knew the drivers would not ratify.

Amazingly, we ended up with a decent contract—health benefits and a fair raise.

With this success, I felt myself become a part of the generation of young radicals building a stronger labor movement in Los Angeles. We would show up at picket lines, immigration raids, rallies, and protest marches. We stood together; we stood strong, to improve the lives of workers.•

Next week: Becoming a COSHista