LONGSHORE INDUSTRY COAST ARBITRATOR SAM KAGEL, 1909-2007

By Harvey Schwartz

Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

[Note: This memorial essay appeared in the July-August 2007 edition of The Dispatcher, the official newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). It is reproduced here courtesy of The Dispatcher. ]

The ILWU lost one of its most esteemed friends when former coast arbitrator for the longshore industry Sam Kagel died on May 21. He was 98. As coast arbitrator, Kagel was a major figure on the waterfront for 54 years between his appointment in 1948 and his retirement in 2002. As a person who served as a union advocate in the 1930s, he was also one of the last living links to the 1934 strike and to the founding of the ILWU.

Among the many remarkable things about Kagel was that he was completely trusted by both the ILWU and the employer bargaining group, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). Everyone knew he was close to Harry Bridges from 1934 on and that his background included union advocacy. But everyone in the ILWU and the PMA also knew that he was thoroughly honest and scrupulously fair in everything he did.

Those qualities held Kagel in good stead as he presided over hearings, interpreted the longshore contract as well as agreements in the warehouse industry, and handed down arbitration decisions over so many decades. That he was also direct and down-to-earth, humane and progressive in his personal values, and in possession of a great sense of humor seemed only to increase his attractiveness.

Kagel emerged from humble beginnings in an immigrant family to become one of America's leading figures in the field of labor mediation and arbitration. Born in 1909 to Jewish parents who fled persecution in the Russian Empire for asylum and work in the United States, Kagel grew up in Jack London's old working-class neighborhood near the Oakland, California waterfront.

As a young produce employee he slipped watermelons to itinerant Wobblies, as the rebels of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were known, and read deeply in the writings of London, Frank Norris, Emile Zola, Anatole France and Upton Sinclair. "Those guys were basically sociologists who turned out to be great writers," he said in his oral history recorded in 1999.

In the mid-1920s, Kagel attended the University of California, Berkeley. He worked his way through school handing out towels in the campus gymnasium and laboring in the produce industry until he was invited to read examination papers in economics during his senior year.

Kagel graduated from Cal in 1929 and then became an economics graduate student and a teaching fellow there. When the eminent labor economist Paul S. Taylor got him a temporary job advocating for unions with the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau (PCLB), a private consulting firm, the direction of Kagel's life was set for what would become an extraordinarily long and brilliant career.

The San Francisco office of the PCLB had been recently established under the direction of Henry Melnikow when Kagel went to work there in 1932. The bureau represented unions in negotiation, mediation and arbitration proceedings. Melnikow proved a great mentor to Kagel, who stayed with the PCLB for ten years. He arrived, it turned out, just in time to participate in the labor upsurge of the mid-1930s, which started regionally with the West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes of 1934.

Kagel got acquainted with Bridges during 1932-1933. He helped with the organizing campaign on the San Francisco waterfront in 1933 that replaced the existing company-dominated "Blue Book" union with the worker-controlled, autonomous Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA).

The employers had used the Blue Book in the 1920s to control longshore laborers and deny them true union benefits. One aspect of control was through daily hiring from the notorious waterfront "shape-up," in which workers begged or paid for jobs. In other ports there were employer-controlled hiring halls, called "fink halls" by the workers, that served the same purpose. This was why the longshore unionists demanded worker-controlled hiring halls in 1934.

Once the 1934 strike began, Kagel met with Bridges on a daily basis as his close advisor. He remembered strategizing for hours on end with the longshore leader in the small PCLB office on the mezzanine in the Ferry Building on the San Francisco waterfront.

There were times during the May through July strike when Kagel slept on his office desk instead of going home because the hours were so long and the demands on him so unrelenting. "But I never felt put upon," he said. "This was part of the job. I was representing unions. I wasn't there for the fun of it."

As the PCLB's waterfront advisor, Kagel also worked closely with Randolph Meriwether of the Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association (MEBA), which was on strike with all of the other maritime unions. Appointed an honorary MEBA member in June 1934, the 25 year old Kagel represented that organization on the important Joint Marine Strike Committee (JMSC), which Bridges chaired. Kagel remained justifiably proud of that service for the rest of his life. Before he passed away he was the last living JMSC member.

Kagel witnessed the violence of Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, when San Francisco police killed two workers and wounded scores of others. "I didn't see the guys getting shot in the back," he said. But he did see "guys getting clubbed." He walked in the great protest funeral parade up Market Street four days later. "Nobody said anything while we marched," he remembered. "Except for the low music and the shuffling of shoes there wasn't a single sound."

A week later Kagel saw the famous San Francisco general strike of July 16-19, when all of the region's union members stopped work in a show of sympathy and solidarity. "I looked up Market Street and there was nothing moving," he recalled of that historic event. "It was like in the movies where something happens and all of a sudden the film shows blank."

When the San Francisco general and the coastwise maritime strikes ended, Kagel counseled Bridges while the latter prepared to testify before the National Longshoremen's Board, which arbitrated the dispute and handed down a landmark decision in favor of the workers. Bridges was articulate and was "the name" in the strike, Kagel explained. Besides, he said, Bridges "had worked all types of cargo. So what better witness do you want to describe the conditions on the waterfront? Harry was made to order."

Kagel picked the right star witness. Bridges proved spectacular in describing the degrading longshore employment conditions that brought on the strike, including extortion and favoritism in hiring, brutally long work shifts, and unsafe "speed ups" on the job.

In the aftermath of the what has been known ever since as the Big Strike, Kagel become widely prominent in Northern California as the representative of a broad variety of unions. Most notably, from 1934 through 1937, he helped plan organizing drives and negotiate contracts for the ILA during its dramatic "march inland" into the San Francisco Bay Area warehouse, distribution, and production industries.

Working with Eugene Paton and other organizers, the initially small waterfront warehouse bastion emerged as one of Northern California's most important unions. In 1937 it became Local 6, ILWU, when the Pacific Coast District ILA turned itself into the ILWU.

San Francisco's employers locked out all of their newly-unionized warehouse workers the following year. As usual, Kagel played a central role. Throughout that summer-long crisis he consulted daily with Paton, who was by then Local 6's president. Ultimately the lockout was settled on terms satisfactory to both sides. One result was the creation of the Local 6 master contract system that is still in place today.

Paton died young a few years after World War II. But Kagel never forgot his good friend. In later years, he always credited Paton, along with some other ILWU pioneer organizers like Oakland's Paul Heide, with the success of the march inland in Northern California.

After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Kagel joined the federal government's War Manpower Commission (WMC). He decided this made more sense than staying with the PCLB at a time when most unions, including the ILWU, were committing to a "no strike pledge" for the duration of the conflict.

Kagel also believed the WMC would make a real contribution to fighting fascism. He felt it promised more vibrancy as a potential employer than the new War Labor Board, which he assumed would merely police employers who were chiseling around the edges of war-time regulations. "I had just come off the battlefield as a union advocate and I wasn't prepared to go into a convent," he explained.

The WMC recruited labor for ship yards, war plants, and other production facilities essential to the military effort. As assistant director and then director of the WMC for Northern California, Kagel remained a high profile public official throughout the war years.

In 1945, when the war ended, Kagel decided to attend law school. Bridges supported Kagel's decision with the comment, "We'll be working together again soon." While he was in law school, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and San Francisco's clothing employers invited him to act as "Mr. Impartial Chairman," the name adopted for the apparel industry's neutral arbitrator.

Kagel's appointment as Mr. Impartial Chairman was another pivotal development in his life. He was now a labor arbitrator. By 1948, when he finished law school at the University of California's Boalt Hall, he was taking arbitration cases on a regular basis.

That same year there was another major coastwise longshore strike. Kagel said of that dispute, "The longshoremen had gotten the union-controlled hiring hall the hard way in 1934. The employers tried to get rid of it in '48. It took a strike to say, 'You can't do that.'" In adjusting to their strike loss, the ship owners engaged a new bargaining agency, the PMA.

The new PMA and the ILWU asked Kagel to become their coast arbitrator for the longshore industry. In this post, Kagel would judge appeals of decisions made by four major port area arbitrators. The employers "knew about my activities with the WMC, when I used to appear publicly before big war shows in San Francisco," Kagel said. "This sort of dried the red out of me for them. They now thought I'd been cleansed."

Kagel, a good story teller, remembered the meeting he had with PMA and ILWU representatives to discuss the terms of his new employment. "Across from me sat Harry, Lou Goldblatt and Howard Bodine of the ILWU plus all of the employers. For the first time in their history Harry and his group and the ship owners were on the same side of the table. I was sitting over here by myself."

Coast arbitrator for the longshore industry provided Kagel with an outstanding home the base for the rest of his long career. He was already well-known in labor circles by 1948. But in his new position he would become a living legend along the waterfronts of the Pacific Coast.

Kagel heavily influenced the development of the coastwise longshore arbitration system, which has successfully stood the test of time. In 1948, he suggested appointing two area arbitrators from the union and two from the employer side. He argued that this would provide balance while putting people in office who understood the industry. It was one of Kagel's hallmark ideas that such jobs should be filled by industry practitioners, not outside academics or non-waterfront professionals.

Bill Ward, a 20 year longshore coast committee member, and the late Phil Lelli, a long-serving president of Tacoma's longshore Local 23, both emphasized Kagel's importance as a friend of the industry. "You'll never find a better arbitrator," Ward said recently. In his 2002 oral history interview, Lelli declared, "Kagel is the glue that held this whole thing together. His attitude is, 'I'm going to preserve this industry.' He wouldn't allow it to be torn apart because of stupidity. I have nothing but admiration for the guy."

While becoming a major historic figure in the longshore industry and ultimately in the annals of American labor mediation and arbitration, Kagel also adjudicated numerous ILWU warehouse division disputes. These were mostly Local 6 cases, which fell outside of the boundaries of the PMA-ILWU coast longshore agreement.

Toward the end of the 134 day 1971-1972 West Coast longshore strike, Kagel was called in to mediate. Because a strike was on, he had no authority as coast arbitrator. His solution was to preside over marathon negotiation sessions that went on around the clock for a week. Kagel, always a man of boundless energy, often employed such tactics to get tough mediation jobs done.

In the end, Kagel brokered a contract that dealt with most of the strike questions. There did remain several problems involving "steady men," or workers employed directly by stevedore companies. These issues were ultimately settled on a port by port basis.

Longshore Local 13 needed an experienced hand to present its steady worker cases in post-strike arbitration proceedings before Kagel. Rudy Rubio, who had served as the local's secretary-treasurer until his two year term limit expired during the strike, was the logical choice. He said recently that as the Local 13 representative, he found watching Kagel in action to be an education. "What especially impressed me," Rubio noted, "was that Kagel instilled a real code of ethics into the arbitration system."

In 1977 Rubio became International Vice-President. During a heated exchange during one arbitration, he called a PMA representative a liar. Kagel stopped the discussion and privately said, "Don't call someone a liar during arbitration proceedings. You'll do better staying cool and respecting the other side." Rubio went on to serve successfully as Vice President for eleven years. He now views Kagel's advice as "one of Sam's great lessons. He helped me develop a perspective that worked."

Kagel's ability to keep an arbitration proceeding focused on the important issues impressed Rubio as well. When discussions began to stray, Rubio pointed out, Kagel would always bring people back to the main points with his patented quip, "As they say in Montana, let's get down to the nut cutting."

During the five decades after his appointment as arbitrator for the Pacific Coast longshore industry, Kagel's mediation and arbitration practice outside of the waterfront expanded exponentially. He eventually handled thousands of labor cases in dozens of diverse fields such as nursing, the soft drinks industry, pulp and paper manufacturing and the airline business. He arbitrated an important early agricultural case involving the United Farm Workers (UFW) and, in 1968, mediated the settlement of a major San Francisco newspaper strike.

For many years Kagel also taught law classes at the University of California. He wrote books and papers about mediation and arbitration, including Anatomy of a Labor Arbitration (1961) and The Anatomy of Mediation: What makes it Work (1990, co-authored with Kathy Kelly). Early on, he developed an innovative dispute resolution technique called "med-arb," in which the parties select a "med-arbitrator" who first acts as a mediator but in the end hands down decisions on unresolved issues. In 1961, he used this technique in Hawaii to resolve an impasse between the ILWU and the Islands ship owners.

Kagel even judged grievances involving famous professional athletes who played for high-profile sports organizations like the Oakland A's baseball team. He became the chief arbitrator for the National Football League (NFL) after successfully acting as mediator during the 1982 NFL players strike. Probably the most well-known NFL controversy he arbitrated was the 2000 compensation case of Barry Sanders, the Detroit Lions star running back.

In the late 1990s, Kagel donated his papers to the Labor Archives and Research Center (LARC) at San Francisco State University. Made up of thousands of cases in dozens of archival boxes, LARC's Sam Kagel Collection is an important resource on labor history and industrial relations during the second half of the 20th century.

Subsequent to Kagel's donation, LARC won a major grant from the federal National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to access the papers for the use of scholars, teachers, students, workers and other interested parties. The processing was completed in 2005.

In 2004, two years after Kagel retired as coast arbitrator for the longshore industry, ILWU Longshore Local 10 made him an honorary member at its yearly July 5 memorial in San Francisco in remembrance of the martyrs of Bloody Thursday. It seemed a fitting tribute to a man who had spent 54 years on the job and seven decades in all working for justice in the turbulent world of labor relations.

Sam Kagel is survived by his second wife, Jeanne Ames. His first wife, Sophia, who he separated from in 1971, preceded him in death. He is also survived by his and Sophia's children, John Kagel, who is now the arbitrator for the Pacific Coast longshore industry, Peter Kagel, of San Francisco, Katharine Kagel, of Sante Fe, New Mexico, three step children, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Donations in Kagel's memory can be sent to the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University, 480 Winston Drive, San Francisco, CA 94132; the Sam Kagel documentary program, care of the Harry Bridges Project, P. O. Box 662018, Los Angeles, CA 90066; or Kids' Turn, 1242 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94102.

LABOR JOURNALIST AND HISTORIAN DAVID SELVIN, 1913-2007

By Harvey Schwartz

Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

[Note: A shorter version of this memorial essay appeared in the July-August 2007 edition of The Dispatcher, the official newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The use of the longer version reproduced here is courtesy of The Dispatcher.]

David F. Selvin, the esteemed labor journalist and people's historian, civil rights advocate, and patron of the Labor Archives at San Francisco State University, passed away March 6. He was 93. In the introduction to his acclaimed 1996 book, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco, Selvin wrote, "I was there, that angry, discordant summer of 1934, not as a participant, but as a young, deeply engaged observer."

Selvin may have started out as an observer, but before the summer of 1934 was over he was employed first by the National Longshoremen's Board that arbitrated the strike and then with the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau (PCLB), which represented the waterfront unions. In the latter post, Selvin worked closed with Harry Bridges and Sam Kagel, the PCLB's advisor to Bridges in 1934 who later became a legend as coast arbitrator for the longshore industry.

It took Selvin many years of toil to complete his 1996 book on the big strike. That singular achievement, though, was hardly all that he accomplished over his long lifetime, for the breadth and depth of his interests and his far-reaching commitment to labor and progressive causes was extraordinary.

Examples from Selvin's stalwart writing career clearly suggest his range. Selvin was well-known throughout the Bay Area during 1951-1979 as editor of the San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC) newspaper, Northern California Labor. Yet in those same years he wrote a series of books about labor leaders for young readers, the histories of two union locals, a classic brief history of the California labor movement, articles and reviews for American and British scholarly journals, and newletters for commercial and non-profit organizations.

Selvin was born in Tooele, Utah, about 30 miles Southwest of Salt Lake City, in 1913. He came to California to pursue his education and attended Menlo Junior College in 1929. A year later he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.S. in Commerce in 1933 and an M.A. in Labor Economics in 1935. As a student, Selvin wrote an M.A. thesis on the San Francisco Typographical Union. This was obviously a portend of good things to come.

After the 1934 strike Selvin went to Seattle for the PCLB. While there he helped organize the Newspaper Guild in the Pacific Northwest and was employed under the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a statistician. In 1937 he returned to Northern California to work for San Francisco-based mainstream newspapers.

During the late 1930s Selvin joined the staff of the Survey Committee, a joint project of Jewish organizations interested in human rights. In 1942 he was instrumental in connecting the Survey with Black civil rights groups to form the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination (BACAD). The Council is generally credited with being the first interracial civil rights coalition in Northern California.

In the early 1940s, after the United States entered World War II, Selvin worked for the War Manpower Commission, then under the direction of his old friend, Sam Kagel. He was drafted into the Army in 1944 and served until 1946 as education aide, newspaper editor, public information specialist, and even drill instructor.

Upon leaving the Army, Selvin resumed his civil rights advocacy. He campaigned for a California Fair Employment Practices Act and, through the BACAD, helped Japanese-Americans get settled following their release from confinement in wartime "relocation" camps. One such Japanese-American he met at an anti-discrimination meeting in 1946 was Noriko ("Nikki") Sawada, who became Harry Bridges' wife twelve years later. Because of their common interest in civil rights and, eventually, the preservation of labor history records, Selvin and Sawada-Bridges became long-term friends and colleagues.

During the early post-war years, Selvin was a consultant to several Northern California unions, including the retail clerks, that were engaged in organizing drives. He wrote organizing circulars and employed some imaginative innovations, like setting up membership question and answer surveys well before most unions began doing this.

Between 1951 and 1955, Selvin edited a Bay Area entertainment magazine, TV This Week. Carol Cuenod, the former ILWU International librarian who recently processed Selvin's papers for the Labor Archives and Research Center (LARC) at San Francisco State University, noted that although this was a commercial publication sold at supermarkets, Selvin worked his labor-friendly views into his column. Selvin's personal run of TV This Week, which was bought out and discontinued by TV Guide, is now at the Special Collections Department at State, which houses a major archive on California TV history.

For years Selvin also edited Free, the newsletter of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Free was always produced by a union printer. Subsequently, Selvin steadfastly refused to edit the newsletters of other organizations that would not honor his request that they patronize union printing houses only.

As mentioned, in 1951 Selvin began his long career with the SFLC as editor of Northern California Labor, which was initially called San Francisco Labor. In this capacity he worked with notable SFLC leaders, including John Crowley and Walter Johnson. Over the years Selvin won a remarkable 21 awards for his reporting from the International Labor Press Association. He served several terms as vice-president of that group. Selvin also became the founding president of the California Labor Press Association.

During the late 1950s, in addition to editing the SFLC newspaper, Selvin conducted oral history interviews for the Institute of Industrial Relations (IIR) at UC Berkeley. In l961-62 he received a visiting appointment as a Senior Fulbright Scholar with the School of Economics at the University of London.

Between 1964 and 1969 Selvin published four books for youthful readers that featured the careers of famous labor leaders, including AFL pioneer Samuel Gompers, the socialist Eugene Debs, CIO founder John L. Lewis and others. He decided to pen these works when his ten year old son, while preparing a school report, could not find any sources on Gompers written for young people. At the end of the 1960s Selvin also released The Other San Francisco, a book for youths about the city's working poor and its minority populations.

In 1966 Selvin produced his classic Sky Full of Storm: A Brief History of California Labor. It was written for a general audience and is still in wide use today. Between the early 1960s and early 1970s, Selvin labored on numerous other volumes, including histories of the grocery clerks' and typographical workers' unions in San Francisco. He published another book on California labor in 1981, A Place in the Sun, which was written for college classroom use.

By the early 1970s Selvin had developed an abiding interest in labor education. He helped the IIR at UC Berkeley, which won a Ford Foundation grant, in setting up labor studies courses for workers and potential labor leaders. That program, offered at Merritt College in Oakland, California, ultimately led to the establishment of the B.A. major in Labor Studies at San Francisco State University.

This endeavor, however laudable, was merely a preliminary to one of the great crusades of Selvin's life. At the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, he championed the creation of a comprehensive labor archives in Northern California. Selvin faced serious obstacles in this effort. It was difficult finding an institution that would commit to such a major undertaking. Selvin, though, never gave up. In 1984 he and some colleagues persuaded the SFLC to approach the California legislature to ask for state-budgeted money for an archive. They got support from the State Federation of Labor, which lobbied hard for the project. The funds were allotted and the now-celebrated LARC opened at San Francisco State University in 1986.

Selvin had additional help from people like Sandy Cate and the ILWU's Dave Jenkins in setting up LARC. But Lynn A. Bonfield, LARC's retired first director who engineered LARC's spectacular immediate success, flatly declared Selvin to be "the single most important figure in the founding of the labor archives." Selvin "did his homework," she said. "He found out who to go to to make the archives a reality."

Bonfield also recalled that Joanne Euster, who presided over all of the university's libraries, including LARC, when the archives opened, initially felt quite cool toward Selvin's project. "You have to give Dave Selvin credit," Euster said later. "He took me from an extremely stubborn, obdurate position to being enthusiastic and a strong supporter of the labor archives."

In the late 1980s, shortly after LARC opened, Selvin began working closely with Nikki Bridges again. This happened when Bonfield, concerned that LARC's advisory board had only one women member, suggested the appointment of Bridges to that body. Thereafter, Bridges and Selvin, who was the advisory board's perennial chair, worked together diligently for years on behalf of LARC.

Late in his career Selvin also published a biography of the famous labor leader Mother Jones. Ultimately, to honor his long service to the labor movement and to LARC, in 1999 San Francisco State History Professors Robert W. Cherny and William Issel and LARC current Acting Director Susan P. Sherwood nominated Selvin for an honorary doctorate. The next year the university conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. "Selvin," Sherwood recalled, "was treated to a standing ovation from the students. This he found most gratifying."

Issel recently authored an appreciation of Selvin. "David Selvin's lifetime of service in spreading the gospel of labor unity surely deserves our praise," he wrote, "and we honor his memory. After all, who else do you know who has a book about Eugene Debs on the reading list of the St. Thomas Episcopal Day School in New Haven, Connecticut, and a book about the 1934 general strike on the reading list of the ILWU in San Francisco?"

Selvin was preceded in death by Susan Selvin, his wife of many years. He is survived by his sons Joel, a San Francisco Chronicle music reviewer, Steve and Michael, both residents of Berkeley, and four grandchildren. Contributions in David Selvin's memory can be sent to the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University, 480 Winston Drive, San Francisco, CA 94132.

David Selvin, 1913 – 2007

An appreciation by Bill Issel, March 18, 2007

     The labor history community has lost one of its major figures with David’s passing.  I first met David back in 1981 at the San Francisco Labor Council office on 16th Street when I was a delegate from the CFA to the County Labor Council.  Several of us from different unions and local colleges and universities met to plan a labor history event.  We were all heated up because Ronald Reagan had just fired 11,350 striking PATCO air controllers.  David supplied the voice of reason that put that setback in perspective and focused our attention on the future. The conference was a success, and cooperation between labor and the community grew stronger as a result.   

I am not the only one who was for years impressed by David’s good sense and inspired by his dedication to the cause of working people.  David was a fine labor journalist and historian, but he was not only an all around “great communicator” – he also got things done.  He was instrumental in founding both the Labor Studies Program at San Francisco State and the Northern California Labor Archives.  These qualities led David to be the recipient of the honorary degree doctor of laws (LL.D.) by San Francisco State University in 2000, followed in 2003 by the Southwest Labor Studies Association’s “Distinguished Service to the Labor Movement” award. 

In addition to labor movement work, David also made outstanding contributions to the cause of human rights, particularly to the cause of racial equality in jobs, housing, and education.  When Hitler’s storm troopers invaded Poland in 1939, Selvin was expanding the agenda of a San Francisco Jewish defense organization to include the rights of African Americans.  When Allied forces launched the first commando raids into Nazi occupied France in early 1942, Selvin was organizing the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination to attack racial discrimination in segregated wartime unions.  After his military service, David continued to spread the word that universal human rights is a community responsibility as well as a constitutional right. 

     The Labor Movement may not be a Church, but sometimes we need to “get religion” and renew our gospel of solidarity. You all know the words: “an injury to one is an injury to all.”  David Selvin’s lifetime of service in spreading the gospel of labor unity surely deserves our praise, and we honor his memory.  After all, who else do you know who has a book about Eugene Debs on the reading list of the St. Thomas Episcopal Day School in New Haven Connecticut, and a book about the 1934 general strike on the reading list of the I.L.W.U. in San Francisco?