Custodian

Custodian came about when public radio producer JoAnn Mar of KALW in San Francisco, who won a national George Polk Award her radio documentary Crime Pays: A Look At Who’s Getting Rich From the Prison Boom, challenged me just before her show “Folk Music and Beyond: to write a song about privatization. As JoAnn was playing the opening songs, I remembered a true story told to me by Grant Walter, at the time President of SEIU Local 140 in Portland, Oregon, to whom this song is dedicated. Grant called in while Don McIntosh, Associate Editor of Northwest Labor Press, was interviewing me on the KBOO labor show about the book Elizabeth Minnich and I wrote together, The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. I wrote most of the song during the breaks in JoAnn’s show, finished it up that evening, and played it over the air the next day.

The story ends happily: The Oregon Supreme Court ruled in the union members’ favor, and all of them were offered their jobs back.