Dicker's Last Stand

There was a rhythm to it at times, slapping labels on boxes and heaving them down the line. Some nights I would zone out in a throwing frenzy, look down to check my watch and find I had missed break. But more often I would discover that the 44 boxes of Hefty Cinch Sacks I had just put on the belt were supposed to be 44 boxes of Tide.

Huggies diapers, halogen floor lamps, Depend undergarments, I launched their journeys to the Kmart store near you. Some nights I moved so much Quilted Northern that I felt personally responsible for the collective ass wiping of the Mountain time zone. To Kmart, I was Associate No. 22699 at its Denver distribution center, the guy from Boulder who didn't smoke or eat meat. To the AFL-CIO, I was a "salt" or a "colonizer," a spy in the service of the American labor movement.

"This is not 'Norma Rae,'" Mark, the organizing director, told me. "You're not there to rile people up. Stay quiet, blend in as best you can and keep your ears open. If someone mentions anything about a union, don't say anything. If the campaign is a go, we might put you on management's anti-union committee. Anything can happen. Be prepared to be bored; pretty soon you'll forget that you're anything but a Kmart worker."

The consensus among seasoned union organizers is that the best of them are born out of the shop floor struggle for union representation. Those who have lived through management's often dirty and always divisive anti-union campaigns are best suited to lead workers through them. I had come through the AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute, which trains both rank-and-file union members and young, socially conscious college graduates in the fundamentals of organizing. I was a hybrid of the two, having been a member of a craft union in the film industry, but still young and naive enough to delight in an undercover assignment of non-union shitwork.

I harbored doubts about my capacity to be an organizer. I'm soft-spoken, frequently mistaken for gay and, according to my cousin, dress like a librarian -- in other words, not a likely stand-in for the macho, chain-smoking, coffee-swilling, fast food-inhaling stereotype of the male union organizer (a generalization, incidentally, that I found to be quite accurate). Salting was my personal litmus test for my future as an organizer. Coming through alive would bestow me with the labor-movement street credibility I so needed, along with an intimate understanding of what the struggle looks like from the inside. It would, I hoped, light the fire necessary to fuel an often-thankless itinerant lifestyle of economy motels, strained personal relationships and hard work.

I was ready for the challenge of organizing Kmart; what I didn't know is that I'd end up fighting a very different battle than the one I'd chosen.

My last name is Dicker. With the possible exception of films featuring men disguised as nuns, it is, quite simply, the funniest thing in the world. "Dickhead," "Dickchip" and "John Dicker the pricker licker" are only a few of the amusing nicknames I enjoyed in my youth. But in my 26 years, I had never encountered anyone so thoroughly enchanted by it as Jim, the college football player, summertime Kmart casepack associate and, as luck would have it, the architect of my mission's demise.

The second shift casepack department comprised 20 associates. Rob was a "reach truck" driver who had worked at the Kmart distribution center for four years. When our shift let out at 12:30 a.m., he left to deliver papers for the Denver Post. He then rose at 6 to start his other job at the carpet upholstery business he hoped would become his mainstay. He saw his two kids for a few hours on the weekends and rarely got five hours of sleep.

Amanda was 19 and perpetually indignant. She lived with her parents and 4-year-old son. The start of each shift found her sprinting through the plant to punch in on time. John was a retired college recruiter whose dreams of raising cattle were dashed when a hailstorm decimated his hay crop and forced him to sell most of his herd. He worked part time for the health benefits. We talked about baseball and the merits of beer vs. whiskey, the latter of which he was a great proponent of. Two weeks into the job, he confided to me: "This place sucks."