Caroline Lund-Sheppard
September 24, 1944-October 14, 2006
Many of you know the newsletter "Barking Dog" and know that
Caroline Lund was a NUMMI worker in Fremont, California, a joint
venture between GM and Toyota and a big supporter of SOS. Caroline
died an untimely death on October 14, 2006 from Amyotrophic Lateral
Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
In her UAW local at NUMMI, she maintained for eight years her
independent newsletter, "The Barking Dog," which not only expressed her views but got others to contribute to it - an enormously difficult
task. She focused on shop floor issues like speed-up, outsourcing,
concessions and union democracy. But the "The Barking Dog" spoke to
other struggles in the labor movement as well. She also was able to
emphasize and win support for the building of an international labor
movement.
The Troublemaker's Handbook 2, a Labor Notes book, chose "The Barking
Dog" as an example of a shop floor newsletter that others could learn
from and interviewed Caroline about its politics and practice.
Autoworkers around the country appreciated reading "The Barking Dog"
online and admired Caroline as its editor.
Caroline had been a part of the New Directions Movement and played an
important role in helping maintain that movement through its later
years. She continued participation in national rank-and-file activity
after NDM, usually attending national autoworker meetings that were
organized once a year by the UAW Solidarity Coalition.
She, of course, immediately embraced Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS). The
Barking Dog carried statements by SOS and reprinted news and comments from rank and file newsletters by SOS members - like Live Bait and Ammo, the newsletter published by SOS spokesperson and Delphi worker Greg Shotwell.
Caroline also participated in a local caucus at the NUMMI plant and was
successful in moving it in a progressive direction without getting
caught up in its conservative tendencies. Once the President and the
Chairman of the Bargaining Committee of her union local threatened her
with a lawsuit for a criticism she made of them in the Barking Dog.
Caroline quickly hired a lawyer to defend her free speech rights then
exposed the President and the Chairman in the Barking Dog. Workers were outraged that top union officials would seek to silence a rank and file worker.
She then ran for office as an independent and was elected Trustee when
the previous leadership was swept out of office. On the Executive
Board, she worked with the new leadership, playing a key role in
keeping them from going astray and working on the Local's newspaper.
Caroline grew up in Minneapolis and was of Swedish-Norwegian heritage.
She loved to read and developed a passion against injustice at an early
age after reading "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Les Miserables." Becoming
an idealist by the age of 15, she knew she wanted to dedicate her life
to helping end suffering in the world. Caroline spent a few years at
Carlton College, a small liberal arts college just south of
Minneapolis, where Caroline encountered socialist ideas. For Caroline,
socialism opened up a whole new way of looking at the world and
understanding it.
Drawn more to political activism than academics, Caroline quit school,
worked as a waitress at a diner in Minneapolis. In spite of the fact
that Caroline grew up and went to public schools in Minneapolis, she
learned nothing about the great Teamster strikes of 1934 until Carlton.
The 1934 strikes made Minneapolis a union town and the Teamsters one of the most powerful unions in the country. She eventually met several
leaders of this strike Ray Dunne and Farrell Dobbs who recounted the
days of the strike to young activists, when there was virtually a civil war between workers and bosses. Farrell Dobbs - probably the best-known leader of the '34 Teamster strike wrote four books on the subject.
Later Caroline was a student at Columbia University in New York City
where she helped found the Columbia Committee Against the War in
Vietnam. On several occasions Caroline had the privilege of hearing
Malcolm X speak in person. She remembered him to be very humble and
humorous, and said he spoke as if he were one with the audience. "The
thing about Malcolm X was you could tell he was seeking the truth," she
said. "He didn't presume to know everything. He was not afraid to seek
the truth, wherever it might lead him."
In 1968, Caroline lived for a while in Brussels, Belgium. It was an
exciting time to be in Europe, where the May-June student-worker
general strike in France had a profound impact on the continent.
In 1970, Caroline returned to the U.S. where she participated in the
student strike against the war that swept the country. Caroline was
active in movements for women's liberation, labor politics, and third
world struggles for independence. She wrote about these movements and traveled in Spain to report on the explosive mass movements that
developed in the wake of the death of the fascist dictator, Francisco
Franco in 1975.
In 1978 she followed the miners' strike, the formation of Miners for
Democracy, and the Steelworkers Fight Back Campaign, hoping this
signaled a new militancy in the American working class. Never one to
sit on the sidelines, Caroline wanted to work from the inside to help
the labor movement. Though she had mainly done office work, she took
her first real industrial job at a GM plant in North Tarrytown, New York in 1980. She lost 10 pounds in two weeks she said, "sweating
buckets, coming home completely exhausted."
Caroline immersed herself in all the key struggles and strikes American
workers were involved in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She did
solidarity work for PATCO, Greyhound, Eastern, and Hormel workers.
In 1988, Caroline moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she found
a job at the NUMMI automobile plant in 1992. She was a production
worker until early 2006, when she went on disability due to her
illness. It's tragic that at the very time she became ill, her
influence in the local was at its greatest point. There is no question
she would have continued to advance the local in critical ways if she
had not gotten ill.
Caroline understood clearly that the rank-and-file was key to changing
the labor movement. She worked hard to win her fellow workers to the
concept of self-activity and democracy. This was central in her mind
to the socialist ideals she felt so strongly about.
"The rank and file are very ignorant about what real unionism is
because they've never seen it in action, like the old-timers in the
1930s and 40s." she said. Caroline also believed solidarity among
workers would eventually win over self-interest, and this would revive
the labor movement.
She made a real difference in her local and in the rank-and-file
movement. We were so glad to see her at the last Labor Notes
Conference and sad to learn shortly thereafter that she was diagnosed
with ALS. Caroline will be sorely missed.
[Caroline Lund, a long time union activist and socialist died on
October 14, 2006 from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's
Disease at the age of 62. If you would like to read back issues of the
Barking Dog as well as other obituaries, go to Caroline's website at
www.geocities.com/abarkingdog/.
Wendy Thompson, former President, Local 235 UAW, American Axle, Detroit
Gear & Axle
