Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,444

This is the grave of Bill Usery.

Born in 1923 in Hardwick, Georgia, Usery, whose actually birth name was Willie but who went by Bill his whole life, grew up in a pretty regular background of middling working parents. He attended Georgia Military College for a bit, then took a job as an underwater welder for one of the shipbuilding enterprises moving to the South during World War II. He enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and worked on ships as an underwater welder too, since that was a specific skill the military definitely needed. He was based on repair ships for the next three years, leaving the Navy in 1946. He then went to Mercer College for a bit but didn’t graduate.

By 1952, Usery worked as a machinist for a cork company in Georgia that worked primarily on construction materials. Disliking his working conditions, he helped form a union there, which became Local Lodge 8 of the International Association of Machinists. He soon became a pretty important figure in the IAM and served in key national positions in the union, including being its liaison with the Air Force at Cape Canaveral as the space program was beginning. Need to ensure good safe working conditions after all. By 1956, he worked for the union full time. He became one of the union’s most successful negotiators, working mostly on its contracts with the defense and space industries. All of this made him perhaps the labor movement’s most knowledgeable person on the details of these industries at a time when they grew explosively and so did the opportunity for union work on them.

Usery was a lifelong Democrat. But when the Nixon administration wanted to bring in some labor people to ensure labor peace, Usery was one of them. Nixon named him Assistant Secretary of Labor for Labor-Management Relations in the DOL. He proved to be very good at working both sides of labor disputes and became known for his skills as a labor mediator. Representing the government meant representing neither the labor movement or the employer anymore, but this placed him in a very good position. Usery was the kind of guy who was popular for a number of reasons–he dressed like he was too busy to bother with dressing well, he liked a good cigar and martini and liked to share them (he kept both a humidor and a fridge in his office to serve these needs), and he was a good people person. He worked hard to see fair labor relations exist, or as fair as they can under the capitalist system and Usery was not the kind of guy that, to my knowledge anyway, had any real critique of capitalism. He thought workers needed to get a fair shake under the system though.

So as Assistant Secretary of Labor, Usery oversaw the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, which was part of the Landrum-Griffin Act that forced labor to file with the government to make sure they were not corrupt and were holding open elections. He helped write Executive Order 11491, which gave collective bargaining rights to the public sector. He also became the Nixon administration’s mediator. Sometimes, he could work out a deal avoiding a large strike, such as a potential railroad strike in 1969. Sometimes, he couldn’t such as the postal workers strike in 1970, which was technically illegal since federal employees don’t have the right to strike, but the postal workers took the administration to the woodshed on that one and it led to a decade of real public sector militancy that ended when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981. In any case, Usery then played the lead role in ending the postal strike after two weeks. Usery initially failed to convince Nixon not to suspend Davis-Bacon standards for projects related to the Vietnam War, but then Nixon reconsidered and Usery won that fight, which led to higher wages for workers.

Usery was so successful that Nixon named him director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in 1973, making him effectively the nation’s official labor mediator. He was probably Nixon’s most important labor advisor at the end of his presidency, which certainly didn’t make him as influential as Kissinger or Haldeman, but then he wasn’t involved in their evil either. In fact, when John Mitchell threatened him to give over the location of a hiding railway union president who was hiding to avoid arrest due to an illegal strike, Usery told Mitchell off and refused to give him any information. Given that Mitchell was a man who would kidnap and drug his own wife, telling him off did not come without risk. What Usery did was to see good labor relations through. Ford not only kept him but named him Secretary of Labor in 1976. That only lasted a year, as Ford lost that fall. So this was a great honor for him, but he didn’t have a huge impact in that role.

After Usery left government when Carter took over, he became a widely admired mediator who worked on all sorts of labor issues. He started his own firm and got plenty of business because every side respected him, which is what you want from a mediator. One of his biggest projects was working out the deal for the NUMMI auto plant in California, where the UAW, General Motors, and Toyota all came together for Toyota to bring its lean manufacturing model to the U.S. under GM daily control but with the UAW having union representation in the plant, which was foreign to Toyota if not GM. The union agreed to Toyota’s labor practices and Toyota agreed to make the UAW a partner in making production decisions. It was all a very interesting exercise, though in the end, the plant closed. Usery also worked out the issues in the coal industry that led to the Pittston strike and occupation of one of the mines in a classic sit-in. Usery worked up the Coal Commission (real name Advisory Commission on United Mine Workers of America Retiree Health Benefits) that provided leadership on retired miners and benefits.

Usery’s influence continued well into the 90s. Bill Clinton asked him to mediate the baseball strike in 1994, though that one was not successful. The thing about labor mediation is that the parties do have to be willing to settle and if one or both is not, then it’s not going to work. For awhile, Usery also ran his own labor center at Georgia State University in Atlanta, though the bastards who ran the university closed it after his retirement.

Usery died in 2016, at the age of 92.

Bill Usery is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other Secretaries of Labor, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. His predecessor John Dunlop is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and before that it was Peter Brennan, who is in East Farmingdale, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.