Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
At the bottom of Peoria's War Memorial Drive is a secondhand store run by Goodwill Industries. The store looks out over the riverfront, and its parking lot faces wooded bluffs to the north. Jake and Betty Leunz, a couple in their late 50s, hold hands as they walk toward their dented blue Ford. Jake is tall and gregarious; he sports sunglasses and a bushy black mustache. Betty is milder. She laughs easily as she brushes her shoulder-length white hair away from her eyes.
"I met Betty while hot-rodding down Main Street," Jake says. "That's what everyone did in the early '70s. We were the 'American Graffiti' couple. It was love at first sight."
Betty smiles and rolls her eyes. "He's a very sweet man," she says.
"Things were so much easier back then," Jake says. "After we got married, I worked at jobs where I made $5 to $7 an hour, but our rent on a nice little place was $65 a month. Now the kids today -- how much are they getting paid? $5 to $7 an hour."
"I don't see how young people can make it," Betty says.
The couple had two kids, and Jake started a business. For 11 years he owned an auto body shop. Six years ago, after Betty had a brush with cancer, they decided to cash in their chips. Jake sold his business and they paid off their house. It was all part of a larger plan to live cheaper and more fully.
"The first thing we did was get rid of our $35,000 cars," Jake says. "We had two of them. We sold our Isuzu with the leather interior and got this here 1990 van. We hear the economy's bad, but it no longer makes a difference to us."
Now Jake sells his abstract paintings on eBay. Since he's a self-taught painter, he markets them as "outsider art." "People around here don't want to buy a painting unless it shows a barn," he explains.
It may sound as though Jake and Betty have been truly liberated, but they have one problem: They don't have health insurance. If Betty has any beef with the federal government, it's that the healthcare system is so reliant on insurance: "My sister had lupus, and she spent eight days in the hospital. The bill was $66,000! Jake just got two pairs of glasses at Sam's Club for $90. I asked why it was so cheap, and they told me, 'We don't take insurance.'"
But don't expect the Leunzes to pick up the cause of national healthcare, much less write a letter to their congressman -- they've dropped out. "What can you do about it?" Betty asks. "We just have to rely on more powerful men to make the right decisions."
"You know who I liked?" Jake chimes in. "Jesse Jackson -- I listened to him for two hours and I thought, if someone ever did this, it would be great! But it could never happen."
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Two blocks north of Caterpillar's headquarters is a five-story painted brick building constructed in 1925. It's just across the highway, but it might as well be in another world.
The white paint flakes off the outside of the Peoria Labor Temple, which houses various union locals belonging to the AFL-CIO. Steve Capitelli sits behind a desk in Room 12. Of all the union locals in the building, his is the only one that's growing.
The Service Employees International Union Local 880 represents 14,000 home healthcare employees. In the past two years, its ranks have swelled by more than 4,000 workers, all of them making little more than minimum wage. Many could be counted among the working poor.
"The folks we represent are employed through the state agencies," Capitelli says. "Even though they're providing healthcare to others, they don't have health insurance themselves. They also get paid between $5.50 and $7 an hour."
The 49-year-old organizer first joined a union when he was on the assembly line at Fleming-Potter, a Peoria printer of labels and packaging. When he got caught in a company downsizing -- "me and a lot of other people" -- he decided to pursue labor organizing full time.
SEIU Local 880 has been in Peoria since 1995. When Capitelli took his job with the union, he looked at the local's members and felt as though he was starting from scratch. But now he thinks their struggle represents the future for labor unions. "Working with this type of socioeconomic workforce is what labor is all about -- we're fighting for basic human-dignity issues," Capitelli says. "It comes down to the workers recognizing they have strength in numbers."
Just this year, Illinois' new governor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, handed the union a major victory, granting collective-bargaining rights to its members. "That's the first time this has ever happened," says Capitelli. "We've won raises along the way, but now we're in a position to sit down together at the table."
While Peoria has always been a strong labor town, it has also favored Republicans. Capitelli attributes that to a "heavy rural influence," but now he's noticed a larger shift taking place. "Peoria County and the city have been going heavily Democratic -- the majority of officeholders are Democrats."
SEIU has already come out in favor of Blagojevich's bid to raise the state's minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $6.50. The median age of a minimum-wage earner in Illinois is 31, and 41 percent have two or more children.
The union also opposed the war in Iraq. "And most of the labor folks I've talked to have some very serious questions about the wisdom of it," Capitelli says. "Personally I think it's a huge waste of our resources. And for the first time in our history, we're an aggressor nation. Yes, Saddam is a bad guy, but who appointed us God to go after the bad guys? When does that end? The administration has never answered the most basic question: Why now? After keeping Saddam in a box for 12 years, why now? We couldn't get Osama bin Laden, so we're going after Saddam?
"Now that we're doing it, I want it to be successful, but I think it was a mistake. Bush will spend $75 billion as a first installment, and he still wants to give his friends tax breaks."
Capitelli believes Bush's tax cut will aggravate the federal budget crisis, making it clear the cost of the Iraq war will ultimately be borne by the little guy. In a sea of red ink, social welfare programs will have to be reduced or eliminated. "The irony," he says, "is the veterans will return home to find their benefits cut back.
"I'm just very suspicious of the administration's motives. There's another agenda Bush and his friends have got, and it's not a good one."
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Ida Crall's husband, Willard, is a survivor. For 36 years, he's worked at Caterpillar and remained a member of the UAW through every boom, every bust, every strike, and all the backstabbing and bitterness in between. His union local once had 23,000 members but now has 5,000, and he's left wondering what good has been accomplished.
Willard Crall moved to Peoria from Missouri in 1967, when he was 17 years old and fresh out of high school. He took a job at Cat's East Peoria plant, cleaning oil drums. He was quickly promoted to a forklift operator in tools and supplies, then truck repair. With each new position came a pay increase. Finally he was picked for the boiler room, and that brought not only a raise but also all the overtime he could handle -- two out of three weekends and every holiday.
When the UAW's last strike ended in 1995, Caterpillar closed plants, and boiler rooms were updated to natural gas. There were once 160 boiler-room operators in Crall's UAW local; now there are only three union guys left: Crall and his buddies Buck and Len. "We watched our kids grow up," Crall says, "and now we have grandkids."
Every week in recent years, he's watched semi trucks filled with parts coming up from Mexico. Two years ago Caterpillar hired an outside contractor to take over the boiler room. Since then, Crall has been training its nonunion workers to take over his job. At the age of 54, he'll be officially retired this summer, and though he'd guessed this day was coming, that hasn't made it any easier.
"I'll have to find something to do," he says. "All I've ever done is work."
He's worried, too, about the future for his two sons. At one time he advised them to get into the apprentice program at Caterpillar. "They both said, 'No way in hell. Why would I want to save for three years to survive for six or seven months while I'm out of work?' The point of the union was, you sacrificed for the good of the next guy. Today people don't really care about the next guy."
His son Michael has become a vocal political conservative. "I call him 'Little Rush Limbaugh,'" Crall says with a chuckle. "I really don't think that Michael is mine." Michael recently quit his job as a car salesman to return to school to become a history teacher. He's moved back into his parents' house.
"Somewhere something went wrong," Crall says. "People are working two jobs, and their wives also have to work just to make ends meet."
In Iraq, Crall believes, "Bush is now finishing what his daddy started. I have no problem with that, but I'm not impressed. Sooner or later somebody's going to have to put a foot down to keep jobs in this country. Our government needs to help families and create jobs at decent pay."
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