MENANDS, N.Y. -- On Mother's Day this year, 33-year-old Jared Boehlke died in an accident at his Selkirk railroad job. The following month, his daughter Coral turned 3 on Father's Day.
And Heather Boehlke, now a widowed mother, says it didn't have to happen. The details of the incident are sparse, but according to accounts of organized labor supporters the worker was performing a task alone that should have been performed along with another employee.
"What he was doing he shouldn't have been doing, and they shouldn't have made him do it," said his wife, of Hannacroix in Greene County. "It needs to be changed."
Her cause was just one of many on display at an organized labor-themed picnic held at Ganser Smith Park in Menands Monday. It is put on each year by the Solidarity Committee of the Capital District, and the sense of pride among union members was clear.
"I think without labor, well, it's like that lady's T-shirt says," Greene County schoolteacher Mary Finneran said as she pointed. "'Labor: The folks who brought you weekends.'"
"We're all workers," she said.
In addition to her membership with the Coxsackie-Athens Teachers Association, Finneran is her county's interim representative for Single Payer New York, an organization advocating for "true universal health care," she said, not the public option potentially on the chopping block of a plan favored by President Barack Obama. She manned a table next to Boehlke advocated her cause Monday.
The organization supports H.R. 676, which would essentially expand Medicare to cover all Americans through closing loopholes and hiking taxes.
While Finneran is opposed to a "public option" she said would only pick up about 10 million of the uninsured in America, she's torn over whether she wants the president's more mainstream option to pass.
"I don't know if it's better to stay with the status quo than what they're talking about now," she said.
One huge labor issue not visible on any tables was that of unemployment. Troy resident Jon Flanders, a member of the Machinist Union, said he thinks that issue and health care are the most pressing labor issues of the day.
Huge advances in technology have increased productivity exponentially, Flanders said, creating benefits he believes are seen only by corporations, not workers. A shorter work week at a full week's pay would "spread work around to all the people who aren't working," he said.
"If the system can't create jobs, we need to create a mechanism so more people can get jobs," Flanders said.
But while unyielding activism was visible in the impassioned talk of advocates -- not to mention a wealth of bumper stickers for sale and visible on vehicles, promoting an end to war, tax hikes for the rich and so on -- many workers seemed happy Monday to simply don their respective union shirts and eat burgers grilled by state Sen. Neil Breslin as they drank wine, beer and soda and mingled with one another.
But the one booth that displayed tragedy aside activism drew many of the curious. T-shirts were sold depicting Jared Boehlke and naming his union, United Transportation Workers Union Local 212, with proceeds benefiting a trust fund in the name of his daughter.
Heather Boehlke said she has spoken with her husband's co-workers, and many are in agreement that safety measures need to be improved in an industry that killed almost two dozen workers in 2008, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
"Everyone is very angered -- very, very angered," she said of those in her late husband's trade.
(The preceding article by Dave Canfield was published September 8, 2009, by The Troy Record News.)
