by
Terry Tapp
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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 substance (not a safety-compromising influence like work stress, pressure to speed up work, harassment or straightforward safety-compromising situations like faulty equipment or being made to work in unsafe conditions), we were to notify a foreman or security person and that worker would be hauled out for testing. Drug-testing was a form of suspension since you were required to wait until the lab reports returned before you could return to work. If the lab reports showed there was something in your blood the company didn’t approve of (not simply something toxic since the company approved of profitable toxic substances), you would be assigned to drug treatment or rehab before you could return to work. We were outraged at this program which was clearly yet another way to turn us against one another and into snitches.
On the other hand, as I mused at one of our meetings, if the laboratory report came back clean, the company was on the hook to reimburse you for the time you were off which could be a few days or even a week. That reimbursement included any possible overtime you might have been offered. When I mentioned this at the meeting, everyone understood that we were potentially in for some paid vacation. Our alternate vacation program took off and we began to rat out each other every day, clearing this with one another first to make sure that person’s lab work would in fact show no problems.
so good
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 final offer was actually the first offer for us, our first glance at what the company was proposing, and it was terrible. The pay raise was negligible, the insurance costs would eat that increase and more. The contract wasn’t a typical three-year contract but a five-year contract, one extending through the period the company needed to craft that series of very profitable, ocean-going vessels. That extension would give the company a legally-guaranteed stable period with its “workforce.” Item by item the contract was junk but, to add to the insult, there was a clause in the contract granting the union the power to alter the contract in accordance with the company’s wishes without the consent of the union’s members!
yikes
[...] 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 so forth. We didn’t want to simply write that we were on strike since, legally, we weren’t on strike. As we walked back and forth along the stretch of sidewalk in front of gate eight, cars began to honk at us and their drivers raised their fists in support. Dilapidated cars and trucks began to fill the parking lot behind us and to our left, while folks with lunchboxes stood along the entrance watching us, not budging. A heavy-set fellow approached me and asked what the hell these people were doing walking around with signs, people he’d never seen before, people who didn’t work at the yard, outsiders. I told him they were people braver than he was, people doing what he should be doing. He looked around then asked me where I’d gotten the signs and I pointed to the dumpster. He returned with some cardboard and I handed him a fat-tipped marker. Other folks joined him. No one entered the shipyard at gate eight that morning.
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 the company president and any administrators inside. “What the hell?”
A short man I’d never seen before stepped out of the crowd and spoke.
“The police chief said half of their calls come from JeffBoat and the cops’re sick of their bullshit. JeffBoat’s on their own.”
The police in Jeffersonville had been working for two years without a contract and suffered from low wages and long hours much like us. All Tuesday and every day thereafter, patrol cars cruised by slowly, the officers raised their fists, honked and shouted support.
that rare labor story where the police are on the right side
Later Tuesday afternoon three cars and an SUV pulled into the parking lot by the small restaurant across from the shipyard. They were the typical, beaten-up rides most of us drove. From them men and women emerged and they brought folding tables on which they placed coolers and bags that turned out to contain sandwiches and fried chicken and soup. I walked over to get some soup as I hadn’t eaten in the excitement. No one spoke of what was happening; instead we talked about the sort of food we preferred; turkey or bologna, peanut butter with jelly or with honey or simply by itself, white bread versus rye or wheat or potato bread. We joked a bit and then settled into eating the simple, wonderful lunch we had been given. The only significant detail I took from this moment was that no one seemed to know these people. They saw what was occurring and they helped us. This happened again and again throughout the week.
ahhh i love this
We stopped by my place briefly and I printed up more emails which kept pouring in. That night, I began to read the emails to the crowd at gate one and they were stunned that people in Brazil and Russia were aware of what we were doing and were saluting us, thanking us.
“Why would anybody in South America care if a bunch of hillbillies are getting shit on?” a lady asked me. I answered that what we have to deal with most people across the planet are dealing with, some a bit better, some much worse.
I walked toward the next gate and read more emails to those sitting on chairs or standing in between these points and my voice was growing hoarse from shouting and talking. A bald man I recognized from the machinists’ crew handed me a megaphone and I thanked him. Before I arrived at gate five, another fellow asked if I’d like a platform, meaning the bed of his pickup truck, from which to read and I gladly accepted his offer. For hours throughout Tuesday night, we toured the gates and anywhere people were gathered. He stopped the truck and I stood in the back with the megaphone reading, letting people know that there were many, many others watching us and supporting us. Those people on that picket line listened, many of them puzzled, incredulous, or even astonished to learn that anyone gave a damn about our lives, but all of them seemed touched and transformed by that awareness.
this always gets me
About a month after the attacks the company began a series of meetings with us. These were small meetings with no more than twenty or so of us gathered at a time. The company had administrators or some group they hired to bring in a collection of charts and big pads of paper and place these on an easel. While pointing at the graphs and little pictures on these items, these folks explained to us that there was a structure to American business. There was the company, the stockholders and the workers. In one of these lessons, the triangle replaced the company with the government. They explained that the company was doing great financially and had to share this profit with the stockholders (or, in the one instance, generously give some to the government) but couldn’t share that prosperity with us. The fact the company and stockholders couldn’t share profit with us was explained to us very unclearly by these charts and pictures, but the upshot was that our contract couldn’t give us a raise or take care of our insurance. If we understood that we couldn’t get anything for our work, we would understand that another wildcat next year was pointless. The company, the stockholders and even the government could return nothing. To strike at all, to harm American business, was a form of terrorism since it wounded America. In fact, to cause problems on the job at all was aiding America’s enemies.
lol...
(this is in the epilogue)
It is of little consequence that we remember the streams, the flora and the fauna of an area that is now a subdivision, but it is of great consequence that we remember the titles on that land held by families and the acquisition of these titles by developers and corporate interests, and it is of further interest to note subsequent corporate or wealthy individual owners. It is vital to know how much money these title-holders have made from the land and how much more there is to be made. Similarly, if you read the history of JeffBoat (or almost any other large company) or if you visit the museum across the street from JeffBoat, you encounter a concentration of memories telling the story of JeffBoat’s owners, the story of how the things made at JeffBoat were utilized by other companies or by the US government, the achievements of JeffBoat’s administration and its parent company. The people who worked there, whose creations are the very reason for JeffBoat’s existence, are noted and there are photos of some of them along with their tools, but these images are displayed more as curiosities or, at best, as secondary incidents, the relatively insignificant details of the implementation of the desires of power (company, government, corporate entity). The workers – or “workforce” – are unnamed and of course their lives, their injuries, and their deaths are unmentioned.
man this chimes deep
We take it for granted that many of these actions – preparing lunch or so-called “outside interests” – should not be included as part of a workplace history, but why do we take it for granted? Why is it an obvious point that money, ownership and the role played in the maintenance of power are the central facts of a workplace? For that to be an obvious point, a decision or set of decisions had to be made about what is valuable, a decision that is now forgotten, and it is in part this subterranean decision and our consent to its dictates that denudes us of our effectiveness. If we knew of these unsanctioned memories, recounted them and valued them as part of our history and part of the history of a place or institution, we could build on our efforts and accomplishments. Doing this, however, would ultimately render us uncontrollable to those in power, for it is on this directed forgetting that much of power rests.
love this
[...] Any period to which its own past has become as questionable as it has to us must eventually come up against the phenomenon of language, for in it the past is contained ineradicably, thwarting all attempts to get rid of it once and for all. The Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence…for as long as we use the word “politics.” This is what the semanticists, who with good reason attack language as the one bulwark behind which the past hides—its confusion, as they say—fail to understand. They are absolutely right: in the final analysis all problems are linguistic problems; they simply do not know the implications of what they are saying.