RON HENGGELER

October 6, 2015
Posters from a 1984 strike in San Francisco

Yesterday, I was cleaning in a storage closet upstairs and came across a rolled up collection of posters that I had created many years ago. Towards the end of 1984, all of San Francisco's union hotels and restaurants went out on strike together. (I was working in the Franciscan Restaurant at Fisherman's Wharf and had been there for ten years.) As with any time when a union contract ends, the usual issues to be negotiated were on the table. But the city-wide strike in 1984 was very different. A number of restaurant's hired a nationally known union-busting lawyer Montobbio, and those restaurants had no other plan other to get out of the union. Back in 1981, for those of you who remember, August 5 was the day that then-president Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. The air traffic controllers were fired two days after their union, PATCO, declared a strike. They were demanding a pay raise, a shorter workweek, and better working conditions. It was a move that some historians say laid the groundwork for today’s assault on labor. So it was too back in 1984, that Reagan's decision in 1981 helped lay groundwork for the months-long strike in San Francisco in an attempt to bust the Local 2 Union. During the many months of the strike, I was walking other picket lines in San Francisco along with my own. The posters that I created during this period were distributed to various strike lines around San Francisco.The posters were 11 x 17 inches and were pasted to the signs and placards that strikers carried in front of their hotels and restaurants. Later, some of the posters were also used in a strike at SFO. In the end, I was 13 weeks on the Franciscan picket line and never got my job back.

 

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