From The Soldiers Of Solidarity Web Site
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