In My Third Act: Karen Szczepanski on Legacies of Leadership

In this edition of In My Third Act, Karen Szczepanski speaks with Jennifer Nielsen about how her family's history of organizing has influenced the path she has taken to Third Act. Now co-leading the New Jersey Working Group, she’s carrying those legacies of leadership into the fight for climate justice and democracy.

Union organizing is in Karen Szczepanski’s genes – or at least in her heritage. Both her maternal grandmother and her father were union leaders in their day, and both shaped her profoundly. Seared in her memory is the strike her dad led as a telephone lineman for seven and a half months to gain health insurance when she was 14. She had just landed a summer job in a department store, “And my little paycheck went to help pay for groceries.”  But what stuck with her the most was the community support and spirit of the union members, sticking together and helping each other out financially and emotionally as they stood together for their rights. It is a lesson especially relevant today.

By the way, the name is pronounced Skepanskee, and Karen is also the proud product of a mixed marriage:  her father’s family was all Polish immigrants, while her mom’s was all Italian. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens, she was raised in a working-class community in Long Island and attended a Catholic High School on a reduced tuition. She learned empathy for the underdog early.

Her grandmother also had a powerful influence on her; despite her diminutive size, she had enormous strength and courage. She lost both parents to the Spanish influenza and was married off by her grandparents at age 14, bearing her first child, Karen’s mother, at age 15. She was divorced by age 20 and went to work as a cook in the Grumman factory to support the military mobilization for World War II, where she cooked for 500 at a time. Then after the war worked in a garment factory and helped organize her fellow workers into a union. She used her fluent Italian to persuade fellow Italians to join up and wasn’t shy about trying to communicate in Spanish with the Puerto Rican workers and to overcome the ethnic segregation created by the company. “The Italian ladies were the sewers; the Puerto Rican ladies packed the garments into big boxes; and the African American did the ironing. They really were distinct groups! And my grandmother was one of the few who went between all the groups. She had friends in all the groups.”

 

It is clear working with Karen on the recently launched New Jersey Working Group, where she serves as one of the Co-Leads, that she also inherited her grandmother’s gregariousness and her fearlessness.

I try to be more patient with people, but I am less patient now with injustice.” In fact, she loves people and loves collecting the stories of their lives and the glimpses they give of just how much diversity there is in the world.

It wasn’t long after finishing college that Karen realized that union organizing was also her calling. (Eventually, it also became her husband’s.) She pursued a master’s degree in social work and chose to focus on community organizing and policy work. Her first job after graduating was in a factory that produced smoked fish (“Talk about stinky places to work!”) and she found that it was also segregated: Haitian immigrants did the gutting, arduous work knee-deep in water; Polish workers prepared the fish; and Puerto Ricans worked in the smokehouse, where the work was hazardous to the lungs. Like her grandma, she talked to everyone, teaching them their rights and organizing them to improve health protections. She then moved to the meat packing industry (“It made me realize work can really kill you!”) where the fumes from sealing the meat in plastic caused serious respiratory problems. But perhaps most importantly, she declares with her infectious laugh, “You can’t be bored in a labor union!” There is also the triumph of winning a union vote. “These achievements, making the world a little bit better and doing it in community…well there’s nothing like it.” She has endowed her two children with the same drive to help others:  her daughter works in hospice care and her son is a nurse.

Karen started at Third Act with the Union and New York City groups working on Summer of Heat, then jumped at the chance to launch the New Jersey Working Group. “All my Second Act jobs involved working with established organizations,” she observes. “Starting the New Jersey Working Group gives me the opportunity to build something from the ground up…what’s exciting is that we are building the path together, and it’s not completely clear where we are going… it’s wide open! We get to define the priorities.”

Reflecting on how she has been shaped by her first and second acts Karen says, “I try to be more patient with people, but I am less patient now with injustice.” In fact, she loves people and loves collecting the stories of their lives and the glimpses they give of just how much diversity there is in the world.”