Bill Usery was appointed by President Nixon as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Labor Management Relations in March 1970.
A week before the start of fall classes in 1972, the Philadelphia teachers union called a strike following failed negotiations. Since the strike was illegal, a local judge placed the top three union officials in jail when they refused to stop the strike. Several days into the strike, Assistant Secretary of Labor Bill Usery was asked to help.
At the time, I headed an office under Bill Usery, which provided information about state and local government labor relations. Usery called me to his office in early afternoon saying that the following morning he was going to Philadelphia to mediation a teacher strike. He asked me to provide him with as much information as I could find that might be helpful. Before he left the office at 6PM, I provide him with three pages of information my staff and I had gathered.
Four days later, Usery called me asked me to assemble my staff so he could thank all of us. His over the top thanks and was followed by his description of what he had done to settle the strike. These are the high lights of what he said:
He called the hotel where the mediation would be held and reserved four staterooms. Next, he called the wives of the three union officials and asked them to come to the hotel where a stateroom was available for each of them. Then he went to the judge who had put the union leaders in jail, and asked the judge to release the three to his custody because he could not mediate with them not present. The judge agreed. When Usery arrived at the hotel with the union officials, who had spent five days in jail, he gave each a key to a stateroom and told them to enjoy their evening and come to the mediation conference room at 10:AM ready to settle the dispute.
The photo above is from the cover of Usery’s 2014 book.
