From Newsletter Volume 5, Number 2
By Kevin Lynch
Editor’s note: We hope that this
article by Kevin Lynch about his parents and his son will inaugurate a series of
articles about “family labor traditions.” Please either send your stories in by
mail or email, or contact us and we’ll talk with you and write them from the
information that you provide.
In May 1998, Austin B. Lynch
graduated from Yale University and continued a long family tradition of union
involvement.
Austin’s grandparents, Charles and
Catherine Lynch, were Irish immigrants. Charles, even in the face of thundering
pulpit admonishments not to, became a founding member of “Red Mike” Quill’s
Transport Workers Union. In September, 1949, while inspecting elevated track,
Charles fell, breaking his back and all four limbs; he remained in hospitals
and rest homes for over six years. To support herself and her three children,
Catherine went to work as a seamstress and joined the International Ladies
Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), where she stayed until 1964. So thirty-four
years later, given this family tradition, Austin surprised no one when upon his
Yale graduation he became an organizer for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees
Union (HERE). But in the interim, the ILGWU had transformed and renamed itself
as UNITE, and then combined with HERE to form UNITE-HERE. At that point,
Austin, after two generations and one Yale education, was back in the same
union of which his grandmother had been a member.
Austin’s older brother, Brendan P.
Lynch, went to Harvard Law, graduating the same year as Austin (1998), and has
for the past six years been the treasurer of his amalgamated union local of
public interest lawyers in Philadelphia.
Their father, Kevin Lynch, learning
union activism from his sons, was the founding President of the Connecticut
Alliance for Retired Americans (Ct. ARA), a chapter of the AFL-CIO sponsored
ARA. During his working life he, like his wife Denise Lynch, was an active
member of the faculty union of the Ct. State University System, AAUP.