Lucille Dickess, 1934-2013

There's a great tribute to Lucille Dickess, the first president of HERE Local 34, Yale's Clerical and Technical worker union, up at the New Haven Independent today. Dickess died last week. After voting no on two earlier organizing campaigns (by the OPEIU and District 65), and scabbing during local 35's long strikes in the 1970s, Dickess, a registrar in Yale's department of Geology and Geophysics, became a rank and file leader of an organizing drive which emphasized constant, one on one, grassroots organizing and worker participation, leadership, and power. As an undergraduate during the long 2001-2003 contract fight, I met Dickess several times and saw her talk about her experiences at panels and at strategy meetings. She was always profoundly supportive of us undergraduate radicals, even half a decade after her retirement from the university. In late August 2003, Dickess and seven members of the Yale Union Retirees Association occupied the offices of the university's million-dollar-a-year investment guru, David Swensen, to demand information about the university's pension fund and why Yale hadn't contributed to it in two years. On the first afternoon of what became an overnight occupation, kickstarting the second of two strikes that year, several of us entered the building with a bag full of sandwiches and pepsis for the occupiers. They were confiscated at Swenson's office by rentacops who, comically, accused us of smuggling contraband, and demanded to inspect the sandwiches, which probably never made it to their intended recipients. But in addition to the sandwich inspectors, we also found Lucille, who had left the occupation to use the bathroom and was brilliantly and adeptly working the rentacops to gain re-entry back into the room where the other retirees had hunkered down. I was impressed with Lucille's bravery - there were, and are, a lot of very brave people in the federation of hospital and university employees - but also with the nonchalance with which Lucille dealt with the intimidating and obnoxious presence of the university's security, and her unshakeable commitment to continuing the occupation of Swensen's office until he agreed to a meeting.

Lucille helped to build and spent decades fighting for a union that has played a pretty formative role in my political and intellectual life, and in that of this blog. Her dedication and ability as an organizer have served as a model for me for almost a decade, and I've always been in awe of the work that she and her co-workers did to create what Jay Driskell (on Facebook) termed, appropriately and powerfully, "the union that created me." So, thank you, Lucille Dickess. You won't be forgotten.

Excerpt of transcript of the episode of Phil Donahue's daytime talk show filmed at  Yale during the 1984 Clerical and Technical workers' strike.  Lucille Dickess faced off against University President A. Bartlett Giamatti.