Background
Autobiography, by Gene Bruskin
Gene Bruskin
I was born into a Jewish working class family in South Philadelphia in 1946. My father had just come back from several years in the infantry in Europe during WWII. He had been active as a high school Communist Party cell leader in the 1930s in Philadelphia but later grew disillusioned with the Party. He became a TV repairman in the late 1940s when televisions were novelties and remained one, working constantly, until he died at the early age of 61 in 1977. I have an older sister-Francine, now deceased, and a younger sister Denise. My mom raised and loved the children, gave me unconditional love and made our home work.
My mother's family had emigrated from antisemitic conditions in Rumania to Philadelphia by way of Montreal around 1925. My father's parents fled a pogrom in Vitebsk, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement near Minsk, Byelorussia, around 1906, and somehow reached Philadelphia. Story has it that my great grandparents -- hat makers for the Cossacks -- were thrown down a well by the Cossacks in a pogrom. My grandparents opened a small store, Bruskin's Hardware, on the corner of Fifth and Porter Streets in South Philadelphia, and the family lived above the store. The store closed in 2021, more than 100 years since it opened, when my cousin Irv, who lived above the store and operated it, died. My mother's family ran a small upholstery store in Philadelphia until the Second World War.
Growing up, my family lived a few blocks away from the hardware store in South Philadelphia on a street that was Jewish on one half and Catholic on the other. We all got along. My family was loving, but in its own way dysfunctional; my mother suffered from serious mental illness at a time when there were few good treatment options. My dad didn’t know how to help, and my strategy was to get out of the house every second that I could.
In 1954, hoping for better schools, we moved to Upper Darby, in an almost entirely white Christian neighborhood, where we stayed until I graduated high school. While I got good grades, my obsession was basketball. In my junior year in high school, our team lost in final rounds for the state championship, and with good fortune I received scholarship offers to several colleges, ending up at Princeton in 1964, which was at its height as a national basketball power led by Bill Bradley.
By my junior year of college, I stopped playing basketball due largely to injuries and became engulfed in the cultural and radical political and antiwar movements sweeping college campuses. Upon graduation in 1968 I was able to get a teaching job at a South Bronx elementary school which, ironically, gave me a draft deferment, presumably under the logic that it was riskier to teach there than to go to war. In 1969 I was married to Meredith Means from Vermont, and we lived in Washington Heights in Manhattan.
After College
My first day teaching in September 1968 was the opening day of the citywide strike by the teachers union (AFT/UFT) against the community forces exercising local control, led by community leaders in Ocean Hill Brownsville, Brooklyn. This was the first of three strikes, and I wholeheartedly supported the first two. By the third and longest strike, I became convinced that the largely Jewish teachers’ union was working against the interests of the mostly Black and Latino communities. While the city and the school system where in chaos, I joined a small effort at my school, by a group of experienced teachers who led about 100 children from the community across the picket lines and opened the school. For several weeks, I taught under these conditions. Ironically crossing a picket line was part of my first union experience. The conflict seriously injured the historic Jewish-Black coalition that for decades had played an important role in New York City and that represented the Jewish tradition with which I most closely identified.
Teaching in the South Bronx was a radicalizing experience for me. For the first time I witnessed the impact of a school system in crisis and deep institutionalized poverty on poor Black and brown children. After eighteen months, with the encouragement of my good friend, since deceased, Jeff Perry, I left, feeling that the systemic discrimination was so deep that I, as a young untrained teacher, could not help the kids in that context and in fact was becoming part of the oppressive system. In one instance, for example, I took a small, exasperated, and regrettable, swat at one of my favorite fourth graders who would not stop disrupting the class, only to find out from another student that his father had killed his mother that morning, and that they sent him to school, not knowing what else to do with him. I had to get out.
Again, with Perry's encouragement, my wife, Meredith, and I took part in the second Venceremos Brigade to Cuba in February 1970, along with 800 other mostly young Americans. We were breaking the U.S. blockade of Cuba and spent six weeks cutting sugar cane (incredibly difficult) and two weeks crisscrossing the country in an enormous effort by Cuba called The Year of the Ten Million tons. We met and cut cane with Fidel Castro and also with revolutionary delegations from all over the world: the Tupamaros from Uruguay, the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola, the National Liberation Front from South Vietnam and others. It was a profound lesson on international solidarity and a transformative experience for me.
Inspired by our Cuba experienced, following the Brigade in June 1970, my wife and I moved to Springfield, Mass., with a group of Brigadistas and joined with local activists to attempt to create a community-based revolutionary movement. We reached out to local working-class youth, created a women's center that helped women get what were then illegal abortions, supported the Black Panther Party, marched against the war, provided draft counselling for local youth and started a food coop. The group dispersed a year later in internal confusion over the challenges posed by the emerging women's and gay liberation movements.
Boston
After a year in Oakland, California struggling around the personal and social issues raised in Springfield, my wife and I moved to Boston in1972 where I lived for eighteen years. We ended our marriage there but remain friends. During those years I held a series of part-time jobs, including as a day care worker at a year-round after school center for poor white kids north of Boston. There we organized a union (short-lived) and I met Evie Frankl, who eventually became my wife and life partner.
I remained politically active. Around 1973, I helped found the Red Basement Singers, a song group that performed at left/progressive events, on picket lines, at rallies and even on the Boston T.(subway). We sang a range of pro-union, antiwar, labor, and international songs. This was the first initiative for me in countering the lack of a political culture in many of the eras U.S. left and progressive movements, particularly in the labor movement, with the civil rights and the women's movements being notable exceptions.
In 1975, my friend Ira Wood and I wrote and produced a musical, The Stolen Bicycle Blues. Both Ira and I grew up in families that loved musicals, but we had no real musical or theatrical experience. We gathered friends and the talent to create the show and performed at community events and at youth centers. The play was eventually turned into a radio show with the help of host Danny Schechter, and it aired on WBAI and other radio stations. The play was based on a true story of a bike being stolen from a friend in downtown Boston and our chase and capture of a young white working-class kid from Southie that followed. The theme of the play was about theft and class in the United States. I was thrilled.
On 1974 a Federal judge ordered the desegregation of Boston's highly segregated school system, a ruling that came after decades of attempts by the African American community to get the School Committee to develop an effective desegregation plan. This set off a fierce and violent reaction from the white communities where African American children were being bussed into, while many white students were bussed to African American neighborhoods. These developments profoundly shaped my experience during the 70s.
One result was that African American families who dared to move out of their confined geographies and into mostly white neighborhoods often faced intense violence. I became active in creating a group called the Hyde Park Defense Committee. This group kept a 24 hour a day vigil for a year at the home of Susan Page and her family in the Hyde Park neighborhood, to prevent harassment by the white neighborhood youth and their parents. Eventually those in the neighborhood who most violently objected moved and Susan and her family stayed.
In 1977, Ira Wood and I spent a summer interning with the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe, formed in the early “60s. Ira Wood and I wrote a play called It's Not the Bus which was based on a fictitious story of a black family facing violence when they moved into a white neighborhood. We created an integrated collective to workshop and develop the play. Unfortunately, the play had a very short run, in part because of the difficulty of Black and white folks working together during so much tension around racism in Boston, and in part due to other tensions within the collective.
In January 1977, both Evie and I took jobs as Boston school bus drivers, jobs created due to desegregation bussing, in a move that was to change my life. My motivation in choosing the job was that the hours included long morning breaks while the kids were in school, during which I thought I could do writing and other theater work. That next September, however, the two privately contracted bussing companies cut the drivers' pay by 88 cents per hour, down to $5.89 an hour, without benefits or guaranteed hours. I became intimately involved in an organizing drive for the 200 plus drivers, and in December, we held one of a series of strikes to have an election, bring the union in and get a contract. I was one of two people arrested for striking against an injunction. We won the election, and I became president of one of the two locals formed with the United Steelworkers of America. During my ten years there, we built a powerful multi-racial union that included strong women's leadership, including gay women. We won several strikes, many people went to jail, and the local became a model for militant, democratic, anti-racist, community-oriented trade unionism in the city. The strong ties between Black and white workers we built during the stark divisions within the city created a model for me that inspired my union work for the next forty years. Years after my leaving, by 2020, hundreds of Boston school bus drivers, many of them Haitian , made well over $25 an hour with benefits.
In Boston during the 1970s there was great ferment among many on the left who had emerged from the civil rights, antiwar, and women's movements. Many leftists went to work in the industrial and medical workplaces in the city and either organized unions or became active in reforming them. In many cases, they took over union locals, activating what had been a cautious and conservative labor movement in the area. There were intense debates and study circles among leftists attempting to build Marxist Leninist organizations that had a broad revolutionary vision, linked to the revolutionary upsurge that was happening around the world, particularly in third world countries. Eventually most of these groups folded as people matured and cultivated deeper roots in the working class, even while maintaining a strong anti-capitalist perspective.
I became active in City Life/Vita Urbana, a socialist-oriented organization based in Jamaica Plain that focused on housing, and I helped create a workplace committee with City Life labor activists. We produced a city-wide paper for unions called The Labor Page. City Life still exists in Boston and is more vibrant and relevant than ever.
In the late seventies, at the urging of my partner Evie Frankl, I became involved in Re-evaluation Counseling, also known as Co-Counseling. The organization was founded on peer-based methods of mutual support to help people deal with the many emotional effects that come from various forms of hurts and oppressions we all experience (as a child, woman, African American, etc.) in Capitalist society. Co-counselling has been a tremendous aid for me throughout my life in dealing with the many discouragements and difficult moments that come with organizing and life in general, including helping me to understand those of people I was working with or trying to organize.
With an increasingly activated Boston labor movement in the 1980s, we developed a multi union labor community organization called the Massachusetts Labor Support Project (MLSP). The MLSP created militant picket lines for strikes and organizing efforts, held cultural events and hosted visits from international trade unionists. In many ways, this was the precursor of the national organization Jobs With Justice that developed later in the decade.
In 1986 I left the bus driver's union, partly because of back trouble aggravated by the driving and because both Evie and I were ready for a change after ten years as bus drivers. In 1987, I was hired by the small Laundry and Dry Cleaners International Union (AFL-CIO) Local 66 as their only organizer in the Massachusetts region. I organized a small chemical company in Chelsea as well as the biggest industrial laundry in Boston, Hospitals Laundry, which was owned by a consortium of Harvard hospitals. The diverse immigrant and Black workforce there, including a large Cape Verdean group, made the organizing a major challenge and learning experience for me.
My experience in the Boston left labor movement was tied to solidarity with international labor movements including visits to the Philippines under the Marcos dictatorship, Poland during the Solidarnosc period, Mexico, and solidarity in the anti-apartheid movement, Salvadoran, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan struggles. International solidarity work, with a labor focus, continued to be integrated with my work for the rest of my life, including visits to the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, and building US labor opposition to the Gulf war among DC based local unions, DC Labor for Peace.
Washington DC and the National Stage
Evie and I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1990 along with my friend Bill Fletcher and his wife Candace, to work for a newly elected African American leadership in the National Postal Mailhandlers Union, a division of the Laborers International Union of America (LIUNA). During this one-year stint, I served as the National Field Director for their postal contract campaign and Bill was assistant to the President. This was my first experience with a national union and the culture of international labor unions based in Washington. Evie and I decided to stay in DC. Both my sisters and their families lived in the area and my mother was in a nursing home nearby in Baltimore. Evie became a teacher in the D.C. public schools. I was hired as a community outreach coordinator for an eighteen-month stint with the D.C.-based initiative of the national Justice for Janitors Campaign, SEIU Local 500. At this point Justice for Janitors was developing as a national militant organizing model for labor to fight back against the anti-union restructuring of many formerly unionized industries.
In June 1992, with support from SEIU, I was hired by Reverend Jesse Jackson to assist in mobilizing African American and labor voters for the national and state elections that year. I remained as Jackson's labor deputy after the elections until 1994, charged with building labor support for the National Rainbow Coalition, at that point based in Washington, DC. Working closely with Reverend Jackson and the Rainbow was an eye-opening and challenging role and gave me an opportunity to develop a national network of progressive trade union connections. I left the Rainbow after adopting four year old Nadja (Anastasia) from a Russian orphanage in January 1994: truly a transformational moment for me and Evie, and one of the great continuing joys of my life.
After leaving the Rainbow I was hired by the Food and Allied Service Trades (FAST), a trades department of the AFL-CIO. I worked for Jeff Fiedler at FAST, a major influence on my development as an organizer and campaigner. FAST and Jeff were significant leaders in the development of Comprehensive/Strategic Campaigns in the 1980s, when some unions began using points of leverage in addition to strikes against major corporations in contracts and organizing fights, to combat the aggressive corporate anti-unionism that was flourishing under Reagan. My initial campaign was a coordinated effort between SEIU and UFCW to organize the massive national nursing home chain, Beverly Enterprises. I subsequently became the Secretary Treasurer of FAST, participated in AFL-CIO Executive Board meetings, and organized hotel workers in Hilton Head, S.C., nurses for the AFT in various locations, laundry workers, and more.
During the early years of the 21st century I participated in several gatherings of left trade unionists from across the country to consider strategies to move the labor movement to the left, an effort that was ongoing since the 80s and continues today.
While at FAST, labor veteran Bob Muehlenkamp and I initiated U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) to oppose the anticipated invasion of Iraq. The USLAW coalition was formed in a Chicago Teamster union hall in January 2003. It became a bottom-up national organization that created an unprecedented movement of unions against a major military invasion by our country, and it eventually persuaded the AFL-CIO to pass an anti-Iraq war resolution drafted by USLAW. USLAW developed close ties of solidarity with Iraqi unions that lasted for the 15 years of USLAW’s existence, including bringing Iraqi trade unionists to the US and sending US trade unionists to Iraq.
In January 2006 I went on loan from FAST to UFCW to lead a campaign to organize the massive slaughterhouse owned by Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, N.C., where workers kill 32,000 hogs a day, which had been an organizing target since it was opened in 1991. The three years I worked on that campaign, resulting in a successful December 2008 election for 5000 workers, were in many ways a high point of my work in the labor movement. FAST and Jeff Fiedler played a major role in that struggle, at that point the biggest labor election victory in the 21st Century. A powerful film, Union Time, was made about the campaign.
Following the Smithfield Campaign, I was by hired the American Federation of Teachers to create and direct a new Strategic Campaigns Department. The new department, which including some FAST researchers I brought with me, was charged with analyzing and developing strategies to combat the massive influx of private money and ideology into public education, particularly with Charter schools and vouchers. It included organizing the non-union charter industry and working with AFT Healthcare struggles.
Retirement
Life since my 2012 retirement (I called it Redeployment) as head of the AFT International Strategic Campaigns department has been unexpectedly rich. Although I left intentionally with no plans many adventures have since come to pass.
Initially I continued working as a consultant with AFT on an extensive organizing effort in the expanding Los Angeles charter school market. As such I was able to build connections with the incoming new progressive leadership of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). UTLA, along with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), who have made a substantial mark on the development of the progressive teachers’ unions across the country, including expanding the concept of Bargaining for the Common Good, membership mobilization and the power of a strong majority strike. I have had the good fortune to be connected to the evolution of both of those unions.
Starting in 2014, Peter Olney and I were hired by the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way (BMWE/IBT) as consultants to create a national member-to-member internal organizing and communications network, a significant challenge due to the uniqueness and complexity of the railroad industry, the Railroad Labor Act that governs labor, and the divisions among RR unions. BMWE workers maintain the track all over the country and are frequently on the road in the equivalent of work gangs. We worked in that capacity until 2018 along with Carey Dall, who we brought in to run the program. This campaign was an effort to create a transformation of member involvement within BMWE as an integral part of their national railroad contract fight in 2017-2018, and beyond. The program was better received by the members than by many of the local leaders but showed the potential to build member led movements even in industries where the members have been long neglected.
Around the same time, I was hired by the visionary Larry Hanley, the since deceased president of the Amalgamated Transport Workers Union (ATU). Larry asked me to work with the DC area ATU Local 698 to design a strategy and program to involve members in building a community/labor coalition to fight the growing privatization of transit in the area. This included work with Jobs with Justice (JWJ), the Metro DC Labor Council and the area IAF group. I learned a lot about the world of public transit but for a variety of reasons the program wasn’t successful.
In 2020 I began working with worker leaders of the National Audubon Society. Their several hundred workers across the country were fed up with the management’s hypocrisy, racist practices, lack of respect and incompetence. I worked with them in forming Audubon for All and helped them bring in CWA as their union representative and eventually win a union election. As of 2024 they gained their first contract.
In 2020 I began working as a mentor and advisor for Amazon workers in various parts of the country who were beginning to organize inside Amazon warehouses. This started with helping young workers in Philadelphia who had gone to work at Amazon as salts (inside organizers) and were staying in for the long haul. It spread to providing various types of support to workers in New York, NC, Detroit and the West Coast and helping to develop a national network of organizers and Amazon workers, including staff organizers from the Teamsters. The work included helping the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) in Staten Island win their historic 2022 election and continuing to support their efforts in various capacities, including assisting the successful internal reform movement and the affiliation with the IBT in 2024.
In 2023 the book Labor, Power and Strategy was published by PM press. It included an essay I wrote about my experience in the Justice@Smithfield campaign. I participated in many panels in person and online including one shown in the UK, discussing organizing strategies and choke points, mostly to audiences of eager young organizers.
Cultural Work
A major change for me in retirement was returning to my interest in musical theater, which I originally explored in the late 1970s with two musicals I co-wrote with Ira Wood and produced in Boston for community venues. I spent several years writing the book, lyrics and the music for and producing Pray for the Dead, a Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny, (www.prayforthedeadmusical.com) a musical play intended for non-theater going working class and labor audiences. I received extensive help from Tom Smerling and Glenn Pearson with the music and Mike Thornton as the director. The play was performed in union halls and in community settings as a professionally staged musical reading in the summer of 2016. The catastrophic election of Trump interrupted the momentum of the productions although Pray was distributed nationally in a radio show format in 2016/2017.
After more than two years of writing, workshops and rehearsals my second musical, The Moment Was Now (www.themomentwasnow.com) (with Glenn Pearson again as the musical director and Darryl! Moch as the director) played in Baltimore in 2019 and again in 2020 before being shut down by covid in March 2020, as it was about to go on the road to Boston and to Houston for the Coalition of Black Tade Unionists Convention (CBTU). For many of the show’s, unions bought out the house and we did one well received show for high school students. Moment takes place during Reconstruction in 1869 in Baltimore as a fictional meeting of famous historical characters seeking to build unity between the labor, women’s and freedom movements at the dawn of post-Civil War industrial boom. An excellent quality film was produced of a live performance by Mike Wicklein and continues to be used as an educational tool in unions and community groups. The musical was successful beyond my wildest dreams, particularly with the amazing performances of the since deceased Julia Nixon as Francis Ellen Watkins Harper. I hope some day to revive it.
My third musical, The Return of John Brown (www.thereturnofjohnbrown.com) was performed as a staged musical reading in the spring of 2024 in DC, Baltimore and on the grounds of the Kennedy Farm near Harpers Ferry, WV where John Brown staged his legendary 1859 raid against slavery. The story imagines Brown magically returning to the present, being rearrested and put on trial followed by a dramatic plot twist where Brown builds unity between Black and White farmers fighting for their land against a pipeline company. The musical is currently (2024) searching for a venue for a full production.
Palestinian Solidarity/Gaza
From the outset of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2024, I have been helping to create labor support for the movement for a permanent ceasefire, a halt to US arms shipments to Israel and an end to the occupation. This work has included building an unprecedented network of national unions, the National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC) (www.laborforceasefire.org) and a large network of individual workers and local unions that support the ceasefire petition campaign and have been actively engaged. As a Jew who has visited the occupied territories and Israel and done Palestinian solidarity work earlier in my life, I have been outraged at Israel’s conduct and heartened by the large movement, including many young Jews, that has been built for peace and justice. I have been asked to speak in several venues, including at a press conference sponsored by Congresswoman Corrie Bush, along with Shawn Fain from the UAW. The work is ongoing as is the war.
In the last couple of years I have been asked to speak about my personal history and experience in person and on line, including several podcasts, with lots of interest from young organizers.
Through it all I have been a happy and very lucky father to Nadja and husband to Evie, relationships that ground me and nourish me and make it possible for me to do all the work I have done in the rest of the world while feeling loved.
