In the mid-70s, David Ranney quit his position at the University of Iowa, where he was a tenured professor of urban planning, and moved to Chicago for a job at the Workers’ Rights Center, a free legal clinic for industrial workers run out of a southeast Chicago storefront. When money got tight, Ranney decided to look for work at one of the many factories in the neighborhood. Armed with a made-up work history and a couple of friends willing to act as fake references, he landed a position at a shop that built centrifuges. Over the next seven years, he’d bounce from factory to factory, working at a box maker, a freight car manufacturer, a steel fabricator, and the Solo Cup Company. Burned out and nearly broke, Ranney eventually made his way back to academia after a chance encounter at a cocktail party led to a position at a community research center affiliated with UIC, where he’s now a professor emeritus.

You know, he’s a person who had some rough edges, you might say. But during the strike, he sobered up. I never saw him high during the strike. And it meant a lot to him, to stand up to these fuckers.

It’s not just that we probably will never have manufacturing at the level that we have—there were a million-and-a-half manufacturing workers in the area. It’s also that I don’t want people to have to work at jobs like that. There’s nothing “middle” about it. A lot of it’s really awful.

At the end, all these differences really do come out. This Marxist-Leninist group wrote a critique of how we behaved in the Chicago Shortening strike. It was quite fascinating, really. They were totally critical because, you know, we didn’t see ourselves as a vanguard party and we didn’t take [the plant] over and organize it better. They thought that we had made this huge mistake.

I went back to the office of Save Our Jobs Committee, and told Frank and the guys that are sitting around what had happened. And Frank says, “Shit, we got to tell Harold about this.” And he picks up the phone and dials and says, “Harold, this is Frank Lumpkin.” He says, “Can we come down? See you in about half an hour? OK, we’ll see ya.” And this says a lot about who Harold was, too, because he was close to these people. I don’t think it was a [Communist Party] thing. I think this Black steelworker was a community leader and Harold respected it.

By David Ranney (PM Press)