Second Class by Batya Ungar-Sargon

Author:Batya Ungar-Sargon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books

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Eric grew up extremely poor in Pittsburgh. His father was a career job-loser; he was an extremely hard worker when he wasn’t drunk. He worked in manufacturing when he could get out of bed, and it was tough making ends meet. They lived in a house Eric’s parents got from HUD that was in bad shape. Still, his mother always found ways to make sure he felt like he had something, even though they didn’t have anything. Eric never felt poor, probably because there was no one around him growing up any other way. No one ever took vacations, they didn’t go to the suburbs, they didn’t even really leave the neighborhood. Everyone around me was poor so you didn’t know no better.

Kids in the neighborhood did a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking. By eighth grade, Eric was high at school more often than he wasn’t. By the time he was twenty-one, he’d lost five friends to drunk-driving accidents or drug overdoses. He realized he had a decision to make: He could become his father, or he could choose something else. He chose something else. Every day I woke up and said, “That is not the guy I want to be.” I hated him as a teenager, because he wasn’t there to guide me. I made the decision to stop everything, and I had friends who were willing to accept that. They didn’t exclude me or shun me. They didn’t make fun of me. But I stopped everything in ninth grade and said, “I am not ruining my life.”

It’s not exactly true that Eric’s father taught him nothing; he taught Eric what not to be. As far as what to be was concerned, Eric looked to his friends’ fathers. And his friends’ fathers had union jobs. Anyone in Pittsburgh whose family life was stable had a father in a trade union. So Eric grew up thinking that unions were the way out of poverty—period. And he still believes that.

Back then, about twenty-five years ago, Eric’s high school was very oriented toward the trades. He went to a Pittsburgh public school where they had carpentry classes, basic electrical classes, and power-energy classes. In his senior year, the carpentry teacher took the students to take the union test for carpenters. She rented a van and took the whole class.

But Eric didn’t want to be a carpenter. He wanted to be an electrician. There had been an elevator company across the street from where his mother worked when he was little, and the idea stuck with him: an elevator electrician—a union elevator electrician. That’s the thing to be. But getting into the electricians’ union was harder than he expected. He applied to the electricians’ union, the millwrights’ union, and the tin knockers’ union right out of high school, but he was turned away three years in a row. Back then, there was a lot of nepotism, and he didn’t have enough connections to land a spot. But every

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