Longtime Labor Stalwart Doris Poland to Receive “Working Class Hero Award”

At our COPE Convention on June 23, Doris Poland of Windham will receive the Maine AFL-CIO’s “Working Class Hero Award” for championing the cause of labor, showing up for everyone’s fights and for always volunteering when something needs to be done. Doris currently serves on the Maine AFL-CIO Executive Board, the Southern Maine Labor Council and the American Postal Union’s Auxiliary. She is also involved in the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Maine Chapter to support workers of color.

She is proud to say that on October 16, she will have been a member of a union for 55 years. Since Doris was a child, unions have been an important part of her life and one could say the passion for labor is in her blood.

“My dad worked at the South Portland shipyard and was a member of the union there, so I knew about unions,” she says. “And I knew I better join or else!”

While Doris’ father never had the time to get too involved in his union because he worked at the shipyard at night and ran a dairy farm during the day, he always paid his dues and believed strongly in unions and the labor movement. Doris herself later joined the Machinists Union when she got a job at the Prosperity Company at the shipyard back in 1962. 

Originally known as the Portland Machine Tool Works, the company was sold to Ward Industries in 1955 and became a division of Ward’s subsidiary, The Prosperity Company, which manufactured commercial laundry and dry-cleaning equipment for the Navy. It was there where she met her future husband Wayne Poland, who would later become a dedicated leader in Maine’s labor movement.

The Wildcat Postal Strike of 1970

For the first few years of their marriage, Doris focused on raising their three children and in 1967, Wayne got a job as a part-time flexible clerk for the US Postal Service and joined the American Association of Post Office Clerks. At the time, the union was prohibited from getting involved in political advocacy, so Doris joined the union’s auxiliary to advocate on behalf of the union. Two years later, in 1969, she went to work as a bus driver for the Windham School Department. Doris was not impressed with the way school staff was treated in those days.

“We struggled with low wages, no benefits and lack of respect,” she recalled. “There were also some safety concerns with custodians and bus drivers.”

Although the the teachers had their own union, the rest of the staff was unorganized, which Doris thought was “just crazy.” So she started talking to her coworkers about their issues, found out what they had to do to form a union, got the support of the president of the teachers’ union and formed the first wall-to-wall school support staff union in the state.

“When we did the ratification vote for the membership it was almost 100 percent, which was wonderful. They were ready,” she recalled. “It took a year to negotiate our first contract but my team was wonderful. Both unions supported each other. If the teachers were negotiating I sat in on their negotiations and when the support staff was negotiating their president sat in our negotiations, so the administration couldn’t play us off each other.”

She later became an assistant librarian in the school library where she would work until her retirement 30 years later.

Meanwhile, Doris continued to serve in a number of roles for postal workers’ auxiliary, including local president, state president, national secretary and national president. In his first few years, Wayne was shop steward and craft director before later becoming Local President of the Portland Maine Area Local #458 and Maine State APWU President. But in the early years of his career, postal unions had very little power. They didn’t even have collective bargaining rights. 

Wage increases weren't negotiated and were based on the whims of Congress. In 1970, full-time postal employees earned about $6,200 on average to start and $8,440 after 21 years of service, which was barely enough to survive on and many postal workers qualified for food stamps. In his first two years working for the USPS, Wayne’s wages didn't increase at all even as Congress gave itself a nice 41 percent raise.

In 1968, a special commission of the Johnson administration concluded that postal workers deserved the same collective bargaining rights as private sector employees under the National Labor Relations Act, but Congress failed to act on the recommendation. Frustrated with Congress’ inaction, on March 18, 1970, thousands of postal workers in New York City walked off the job in an illegal wild cat strike. Within days, 200,000 postal workers in 30 cities across the country joined them and mail service ground to a halt. One day, Doris got a call from Wayne telling her that the postal workers in his union were going to join the wild cat action in a sit down strike at The Portland facility.

“He called and said ‘We’re going on strike at midnight. Take the kids and go to your mother’s house. I don’t know what’s going to happen,’” she recalled. “I had three babies under three at the time, so I called my mother and said ‘hi! I’m coming to visit!’”

The strikers couldn’t leave the plant because they wouldn’t be let back in unless they crossed the picket line, so food had to be delivered to them. The National Guard was then called in to sort the mail.

“That was kind of a stupid thing to do because they didn’t have a clue of how to sort mail,” Doris recalls. “They kept saying that they were going to do it, but New York had shut down, Boston had shut down so there was no mail even coming in. That's why the strike didn’t last very long.”

After eight days, the largest wildcat strike in US history ended with Congress approving a 6 percent wage increase. It also finally passed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which granted unions the right to negotiate with management over their wages, benefits and working conditions. Although the postal workers didn’t get the right to strike, the new law established a binding arbitration process to resolve contract disputes. They were also granted an additional 8 percent raise and allowed workers to more quickly advance to higher paying positions. The results were transformative. The starting postal worker’s salary was now more than what a 21-year USPS veteran would have received three years earlier.

“When the strike happened Wayne was making $2.38 an hour and after the strike and the reorganization he was making over $12 an hour,” said Doris. "Until reorganization they said we had collective bargaining but we really had collective begging.”

The Postal Reorganization Act also created a much better standard for hours and wages. Before that, when Wayne was a sub, the post office would call him into work at 8am, but often he and the other subs would end up sitting in the swing room until they were needed. However, they were only paid for the hours they worked so they would frequently be there for 12 to 14 hours to get in a full eight-hour day.

“The biggest thing [in the new contract] was that you had normal days, regular hours and the whole scheme of when you went to work,” Doris explained. “You knew when you were going to work and how many hours you were going to work unless you got overtime. It stabilized the work and gave us rights.”

A year later on July 1, 1971, five of the postal unions, including Wayne’s union, merged into the American Postal Workers Union. Sadly, Wayne passed away in August, 2020, which was a tremendous loss not only for his family, but also for the labor movement and all working people in Maine.

Teaching the Next Generation 

Unlike a lot of active union members who leave the labor movement when they retire, Doris has remained very active in the auxiliary and the labor movement since retiring in 2002.

“I believe in what I’m doing,” she says. “When you’ve been in the labor movement as long as I have, it’s part of life and part of your family. It’s a belief in what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s worth fighting for.”

She is particularly passionate about teaching young people about the value of unions. When she was an assistant librarian, she recalls having to fight to get labor history books into the library. She likes to hold games for children at APWU conventions to teach them about what being part of a union means and why they are important.

“I say this all the time and people laugh at me, but we don’t teach kids what the union movement is,” she says. “They know that we go to meetings and we argue a lot, but they don’t understand why we’re doing it.”

These are lessons that many children like Doris learned from growing up at a time when unions were strong and union culture was more widespread in the working class. She still has a letter that her daughter Lori wrote when she was 12 years old after a labor magazine reached out to her, unbeknownst to her mother, to write about what being part of a union family meant to her. At the end of it, she wrote, “I never realized how many miles I walked for the rights of others.”

“My kids always knew,” says Doris. “When we went to picket lines, they came with us. They knew why we did it. They understood some things aren’t fair and they knew we had to fight for those rights. Unfortunately, too many union members don’t teach their kids anymore about the labor movement.”

Doris says she is thrilled that a new generation of working people have a passion for unions, particularly having live through a time when they were constantly demonized.

“You used to tell people you were a member of a union and they’d just look at you like it was a dirty word,” she said. “They thought unions were about big union bosses with cigars and machine guns riding around in limos. Nobody truly understood what a union represented and now it’s beginning to come back to people saying, ‘oh, well you’re only fighting for workers.’ Yeah!”

Her advice to young people: “Join the labor movement! Become an active member. And fight for the rights of others, not just yourself.”