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Whether or not that was true, an hour or so later a patrol car coasted down the street in front of the shipyard. The cop looked long at us as he passed then stuck his arm out of the car window, his hand in a fist. “Fuck ’em!” he yelled and we applauded, shouting the same back to him, to the sky, to…

[...] I brought a handful of fat-tipped, black markers and I saw some cardboard in the dumpster in the workers’ parking lot. We took the cardboard and wrote messages like “Our contract sucks!” (and on the back, “So does Zuckerman,” the president of our local), “Drink Milk,” “Fuck this Union,” and s…

Then we looked at the contract. It was a stapled collection of pages whose cover read, “Last, Best and Final Offer.” “Final Offer” is a legal term used by negotiators to signal that, should the offer – the contract – be rejected, that rejection would qualify as an automatic strike vote. But this fi…

Paul came to my aid at the end of the winter, when the company decided to institute a new drug-testing program. Instead of a foreman hauling us off to be drug-tested, we were to do this to ourselves. If we suspected that our fellow worker was under the influence of some safety-compromising substanc…

“I live right over there. There’s a guy works at the carpentry shop at the shipyard. My nextdoor neighbor. Hung himself last month. Whatever was eating him, they wouldn’t even shove a handful of antidepressants down his throat to give him a break.”

“Damn,” I said, “that’s hideous.”

“Yeah, his…