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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

And I was delighted that I was able to do that. But it didn't hurt me either because, you know, people knew that I was doing that, so that Victor Navasky and Ham Fish, all of them, they would say, “Whatever we can do for you.” And so Ham would open up his contacts to me, so that it was not harmful to me, but I felt good about that. I'm jumping around.

Q:

It's okay.

Foner:

The Nation is the thread. I'll go home and read it now. Did you see that full-page ad today on the 007, next to the Washington page of the Times?

Q:

No.

Foner:

Full-page ad.

Q:

This is kind of out of chronological order. I was bound to ask you a question about this sooner or later anyway, and since you've sort of gotten into it, it's somewhat related in terms of when you developed an approach. It seems like you have a certain style of work that has to do with really the most remarkable networks and set of contacts of anybody I've ever seen. Personally, I mean, I haven't seen that many people, but from what I've seen. When you started organizing, did you have a conscious thing like that, or was it something that you just fell into over time? At some point it becomes conscious, no doubt.

Foner:

I'll tell you what happened. It's a story and a history to it. See, when we got into the decision to organize hospital workers, we were a small union. You know that. You've read this stuff. And what happened was, getting to know hospital workers and the problems that they face had a tremendous impact on us, on all of us. It was like suddenly we found out that there were these workers in New York City who were being mistreated, who were making twenty-six and twenty-eight bucks a week, and they were all black and Hispanic workers, most of them were women, they had families, and they had nothing. Nobody had paid any attention to them. And as a result, those of us who were involved, there were very few of us at that time, very few, all the drug staff were assigned to do different things, so Elliot Godoff was the organizer of it, Davis was master minding it, and I was with them, you know, I was there. I wasn't an organizer on it, but I was there because I was doing the paper, and I was going to write about what we were doing, do leaflets, and that kind of thing. The more I became familiar with the problem, the more I came to the conclusion that we could not win this thing this way. So you begin to find out about the voluntary hospitals, what are they? Who are they? And you found out that the





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