Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1983. július-december (37. évfolyam, 27-49. szám)
1983-10-27 / 40. szám
Thursday, Oct. 27. 1983. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZO 11. A GIANT OF AMERICAN LABOR Emil Mazey, American-Hungarian (Reprinted from the Detroit Press) Retired UAW Secretary-Treasurer Emil Mazey, a union firebrand from the time the UAW was a lusty infant until he stepped down in 1980 after 33 years as the union’s No. 2 officer, died Sunday in Metropolitan Hospital. The flinty Mr. Mazey, who was 70, challenged presidents, congressmen, employers, hired goons, union dissidents, mobsters and even the U.S. Army. He won many battles, but lost a long bout with cancer. The son of pacifists, a fearless man of principle and compassion, a stutterer who conquered the affliction not through therapy but by sheer force of will, Mr. Mazey was a giant of the labor movement. There will be no memorial service. His widow, Charlotte, told the UAW he preferred no service because there had been many tributes^ him throughout his life. His body was cremated Sunday, . / THE UAW*S«op officer^ President Owen Bieber and Secretary-Treasurer Ray Majerus, eulogized Mr. Mazey as “a giant among American labor activists a fighter for the underprivileged and downtrodden; a leader who tenaciously pursued the very highest ideals of service to his fellow union brothers and sisters, a human being of immense integrity.” Like many who grew up in bleak Detroit during the Depression and had nothing to lose, Mr. Mazey was outspoken and rabidly pro- union. Trouble followed him because of those traits. In his old Solidarity House office, a framed drawing of a turtle on the wall looked down on a flotilla of tiny china turtles on his desk. A motto under the drawing reád, "Consider the turtle. He makes no progress until he sticks his neck out.” “That was what Emil did all of his life,” his widow said. HIS FIRST JOB in a plant was with Gulf Refining Co. He once told a reporter, “I urged the fellows to form a union ... and they said they would stand behind me if I got fired. I got fired for union activity early in 1935 and they were so far behind me I couldn’t find them.” The results were the same when he touted unionization at the Rotary Steel Electric Co. because he was earning only 43 cents an hour. Between firings, Mr. Mazey kept the wolf from the door by playing violin, saxophone and clarinet in small combos and even was a Hoover vacuum salesman for six weeks. It was at the Briggs Manufacturing Co. stamping plant on Mack Ave. that he gained prominence and first caught the attention of the late UAW president, Walter Reuther, and other leaders of the fledgling union. THE BRIGGS PLANT, with rows of power presses that had no safeguards, was known as an unsafe place to work. “If I shook hands with a worker missing a couple of fingers, I’d know he worked for Briggs,” he said. Mr. Mazey went tó work for Briggs in 1936 and immediately joined the UAW. “You could count the number of UAW members on the hands of your two fingers,” he once said. In November 1936 he led several departmental work stoppages that gained immediate wage increases of 10 to 25 cents a hour. A month later, he was told he was being fired because he was a troublemaker. Four burly plant guards strong-armed Mr. Mazey from the plant and shoved him onto Mack Avenue. He shook his fist at them and shouted, “You sons of bitches, I’ll come back here and organize this place.” And he did. HIS FIRING became a family matter. His father, Lawrence, a skilled experimental body builder, and his brother, Bill, now a Detroit attorney, both were discharged by Briggs — not because they made waves, but because they had the same name. Even Robert Mazey, no relation, was let go. All were reinstated after Briggs was organized. Mr. Mazey was elected president of Briggs Local 212 in 1937, lost the post in a bitter campaign four years later, and regained it in 1943. Meanwhile, he and his supporters were trouble-shooting all over southeastern Michigan. “The guy had guts, and it made up for what he lacked in other areas," said his late brother, Ernest, with whom Mr. Mazey had a falling out during the 1947 UAW convention. “Emil led more departmental strikes than anybody in the union ... He was authorizing strikes all over the place. He put together a ‘flying squadron’ of about 500 guys that he could call out of the Briggs plant anytime he wanted to, and he would not ask his guys to do anything he wouldn’t do.” SAID RETIRED UAW President Douglas Fraser in a 1979 tribute: “Emil rushed in where angels feared to tread. He was a pioneer. He did more to organize unions than any single individual. It’s a simple fact.” Mr. Mazey helped organize Ford Motor Co. employes in 1941 while assistant director of the union’s Ford department. “I was arrested so often that I still have top seniority in the Dearborn jails,” he once said. Few people realized that he had bargaining responsibilities. Called “Cash-box Mazey” by his UAW associates, he was better known for his zealous guardianship of the union’s treasury, once disallowing a $1.50 valet charge on Walter Reuther’s expense account. Whdn Reuther was wounded in an assassination attempt in 1948, Mr. Mazey'took Reuther’s place at the General Motors Corp. bargaining table. That was the year GM proposed that wage increases be based on productivity and protected against inflation by the cost-of- living allowance, a concept that is still a part of auto Big Three contracts. , MR. MAZEY negotiated the first uniform wage agreement for assembly plants and parts depots in the far-flung Ford system, and later helped break Ford’s ban against hiring women. He made labor history when he led a strike against the Kohler Co. in Wisconsin that lasted nearly 12 years. The $4.5 million back pay settlement negotiated by Mr. Jdazey in 1965 was a record at the time. Emil Mazey was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1913, but had lived in the Detroit area since the age of two. He was a graduate of Detroit’s Cass Technical High School. His father and two uncles fled Hungary for Canada to escape military training. “They were all anti-war. I’ve been opposed to war since I was a child. During the Depression, I read many articles about World War I profiteering .'I. and became convinced that workers were fighting rich men’s wars for rich men’s profits,” he said in a 1971 interview. AT THE 1943 UAW convention, Mr. Mazey opposed the wartime no-strike pledge and fought the endorsement of President Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term. Later, he would claim that his draft deferment was rejected because of this. Mr. Mazey was inducted in March 1944 and later sent to the Philippines. There, the man who had been the scourge of Detroit employers became the bane of the U.S. Army. First, he accused the Army of destroying surplus supplies. When the war ended, he wrote articles for the base newspaper complaining about the slowdown in demobilization and agitating for a speedup. In the best union tradition, Sgt. Mazey fired up 4,000 GIs and officers at a meeting. At a hearing in Manila, the legendary Mazey got into a shouting match with a U.S. senator, who asked the commanding general why he ’couldn’t control the sergeant. Eventually Sgt. Mazey was “exiled" to the island of Ie Shima, a dot in the South China Sea garrisoned by 50 soldiers. “I thought I was to appear before a Senate committee when I was ordered to Manila. But they shipped me the wrong way. I was the only passenger on the plane,” he once recalled. BACK IN the States, Walter Reuther was cranking up the campaign that would lead to his ouster of R.J. Thomas as UAW president. Reuther endorsed Mr. Mazey — who by now had become a folk hero to homesick soldiers and their parents back home — for a regional directorship. He won in absentia. Mr. Mazey returned to the States in 1946, only to get embroiled in another fight, this time with Detroit mobsters angry about Mazey’s campaign to rid the plants of gambling. When his life was threatened, he began carrying a gun and policemen were stationed around his house. There was a public outcry, not because the public liked mobsters, he always said, but because people resented spending taxpayer money to protect a trade unionist. IN 1947, Mr. Mazey was elected secretary- treasurer of the UAW. “The election of the Reuther slate ended the factionalism and was the greatest single factor leading to the union’s subsequent successes,” he later said. It was at that same convention that he broke with his late brother, Ernest, who later served 13 years as director of the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The differences would never really heal. MR. MAZEY bucked the tide of support among trade unionists for the Vietnam war, even defying Reuther. “We had an officers’ meeting in 1965 and they asked me to stop talking about it. I refused. But by 1966, a majority of the executive board had swung around to my position.” In later years, he would show up at Farah pants and other product boycott demonstrations, leaning on a four-pronged cane because of a game leg, wistfully talking about the old day;. He railed at adherents of the New Lelj, calling them “credit-card Communists, guys in suits who don’t know the difference between capitalism, socialism and rheumatism.” 7 Asked by a TV reporter at the 1972 UAW convention to soften remarks he had made during discussion of a resolution to impeach President Richard Nixon, Mr. Mazey replied, “Is the camera rolling? OK. I didn’t mean to call the son of a bitch a bastard.” Besides his widow, he is survived by a son, Larry, of Farmington Hills; two grandsons; his mother, Wilma; a sister, and a brother. &/oktdcu3&ia€lc Miami Women's Club 454 NE 58 St. egy utca^ a Biscayne( Blvd-tól nyugatra, a 60-as és 54-es autóbusszal a Biscayne Blvci.-on.-Indul a S.E. 1 St.-től. Elegendő parkoló. 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