Ken Previti. My Grandfather, the Great Depression, and today’s teacher wage theft.

– Ken Previti is  a retired Illinois teacher living in Florida, activist and pension blogger at Reclaim Reform. 

My grandfather, Joe Tagler, was victimized with wage theft during the Great Depression. He was a motorman (driver) of streetcars for the Chicago Surface Lines, later to be taken over by the CTA, the Chicago Transit Authority. He was hired on an hourly basis when needed; that is how it was done for all of their motormen and conductors. Few people had or could afford phones. Motormen worked whatever times they were present in the car-barns, depots; they sat on benches awaiting orders for work. Three hours of work here, four hours there (split shifts), day after day and night after night sitting and waiting for his name to be called.

He learned to sleep sitting up on the benches waiting for work. He took sponge baths, changed shirts and used the restrooms in the depot along with all the other men awaiting a call to work. The motorman’s streetcar windshield was generally open to all the elements no matter how hot or cold, yet he was expected to wear only the uniform he purchased from the company. If he looked too shabby, he was sent home to change. He went home every few days to sleep a bit longer and clean himself and his uniform a little better. He slept.

On paydays he stood in line at a counter with the other motormen and was handed a paycheck with only the backside showing and told to sign and endorse it for cash. He was then handed cash. The records were kept to be handed over to the city authorities to show that the contract given by the city was being lawfully carried out. (The IRS did not collect taxes on such low wage jobs at that time.)

One day he turned the check over to see the amount is was made out for. It was for more cash than he had ever received. After he endorsed the check and handed it back to the man, the clerk at the counter handed him cash – a smaller amount than he had seen printed on his check. My grandfather complained; the clerk told him he had not seen the correct amount and could not return the endorsed check to him.

As he left the line, one of the foremen told him that he may as well go home for a few days. He had broken an unwritten rule. Many people, from the clerk at the window to the foreman to all the “higher-ups,” were entitled to their share of my grandfather’s paycheck. He was not called to work for a week in spite of spending hours and days waiting at the 69th and Ashland car-barn he was assigned to.

At that time in his life, he was the sole support for his wife and four children, his mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, and his two sisters-in-laws along with their husbands and two children. Hard times had gradually forced them all to live together in a very small six room house in Chicago. Fourteen people counted on my grandfather’s income to survive. It was a very tough week that he and they remembered all of their lives.
I am incapable of telling that story in the manner that my grandmother told it to me.

Personally knowing all of those relatives in later years, at their own various stages of life, made me realize why they too loved my grandfather each in his or her own way. I loved and respected him for entirely different reasons. He was a great man.

Read the entire post here.