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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

Foner:

-- and called me and wanted to know my opinion. She said, “I just read about this strike. It was fantastic.” She told me yesterday when she called me that the union was assigning Kenny Sunshine, Greg Tarpinian, and their staffs.

Q:

Kenny Sunshine runs a public relations agency.

Foner:

A big public -- he represents Barbra Streisand. He always says I taught him what he knows.

Q:

And Greg Tarpinian is a --

Foner:

Runs Labor Research Association. They have big staffs. They're working on this campaign. I began to think of when we did Bronxville and we got this tremendous PR, just tremendous. I have the whole file on it. Editorials. It was a strike that lasted a long time, ended up settled, really, because of a photograph that appeared on the front page of the Times on Sunday of the pickets rushing the hospital, John Black, and the --

Q:

1199 organizers.

Foner:

-- and some of the strikers, and you see the police with their clubs beating them. Now, it was an incident that we had staged. We knew what was going to happen. What I did is, the reporter for the Times, John Stevens, I said to him that afternoon, “John, tell your cameramen to be available, and I'll give you the sign to send them shooting in to shoot it.” And he did, and the picture ended up on the front page of the Times, and that's how the strike got settled.

We had demonstrations there every Saturday of members bused up from New York as well as from the Westchester, the NAACP, King's statements, and we had Ossie with us every -- Ossie Davis. Ossie went to jail for the first time on that strike, and Ossie is speaking Thursday at a rally in front of the hospital where two of the workers who were on strike are still working in the hospital. It was done, you know, with just me.

Q:

So the additional point about PR is that you have to be willing to work around the clock and have one person, in your case, do the work that in some instances is done by entire corporate [cross talk].

Foner:

Yes. Let me just add to it. When we were doing the PR for the legislation in Albany that the governor passed as a result of the Beth El / Brookdale strike, it was agreed that the tactic was -- and it's in the oral history earlier -- that the way the governor would get involved is I would get every newspaper to editorialize on the issue, it was a long





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