Sloane brought our paychecks around one Friday and with them was our bonus check for that quarter. I opened the envelope containing my check before Sloane could walk away.

“A fucking $9.86 bonus?!” I yelled.

Shaun opened his as well. “Look at that, dude, $8.41. That’s some bullshit.”

Others shouted the amounts of their checks and several bolted toward Sloane who tried to make a getaway into the foremen’s office building, but failed and found himself surrounded. I joined them.

“Gentlemen,” he pleaded, his hands raised, “I do not control the amount of money you get for your bonus.”

An older man with a thick red beard and mustache pushed himself at Sloane to the point that their noses were touching.

“We work like fucking dogs! You tell me how we work that goddamned hard and this is all we get for a bonus?!”

Sloane backed up and the men behind him gave him a bit of room.

“Your bonus is calculated on the number of hours you work,” he explained.

I looked around me at the faces of the others as the realization hit us: the harder we worked the more work we completed, the more work we completed the more orders we filled, the more orders we filled the more money the company made, and the fewer hours it took us to fill the orders the smaller our bonus check would be. Our faces hardened and with one mind we seemed to agree that dismembering Sloane on the spot wouldn’t change this overarching structure of the whole damned world.

[...] We worked so hard and so fast that we had completed the current order of barges – at least the open-topped, hopper barges – ahead of time. But somehow this seemingly obvious and significant fact didn’t affect the foremen’s need to see me working, or for that matter, the whole, goddamned world’s need to have me work. The company and the union must make me work, no matter what, no matter if work is finished, completed, unnecessary, wasteful, counter-productive or even deadly. I must be made to work, not because any work needs to be done, since clearly nothing needs to be done. This thing I need to do then couldn’t be called “work” if by that term we mean something productive and necessary. What was required of me was a negative action, a doing that prevented a set of other actions from taking place. What could I have been doing? I could have been drawing, painting, writing, I could have been building something wonderful. I could have been building a house for someone without a home. I could have been repairing someone’s roof who couldn’t afford the repair work. All across Louisville, across Kentucky, across the United States and the entire globe, I had friends and acquaintances not working, but instead doing this other thing, this “unwork” that stood as an obstacle to positive, creative and necessary labor. I drew and wrote in the roar of winter and imagined what wasn’t happening. I imagined another world entirely, swirling in a technicolor womb, its birth canal blocked by unwork.

[...] Our understanding of ourselves and how we function is a product of the study of the privileged – those wealthy enough or whose parents were wealthy enough not to be bothered by unwork or to be able to fully foist that burden on others, able to pay for therapy – and, on the other side, those folks on the desperate edge who can no longer get along at all in the society in which they live.

The overwhelming majority of people fall outside these two categories. We don’t fit into the society in which we live: we are made to perform the tasks that keep the society running, made to do these things through laws and prisons and weapons and entertainment and education, but we haven’t totally succumbed to these pressures. Instead we’ve learned a unique skill, a technique I would compare to the skill of a prehistoric human crossing a frozen tundra with a bundle of grasses and a burning ember inside them. We learned to keep the flame alive, the flame of our selves, our souls, despite the brutal demands of our masters. What our society calls “psychology” refers to an understanding of the inner lives of people with very few – if any – boots on their neck, or it refers to those who have crumbled. The other fields of psychology pertain to methods of manipulating us in cost-effective ways, often through implanting in us the means of self-manipulation and self-deceit. The majority of human experience lies outside these understandings.

“Ok, employees, we’re concerned about quality out there. We want to make sure we get the best work out of you and deliver the best product to our customers.”

He turned to the easel and picked up some charts.

“What we’re gonna be doing is cross-checking. We’re gonna help each other be the best we can be.”

We looked at one another as he explained the QDC idea.

“The people who work beside you are gonna get trained on your job as well and they’re gonna inspect your work and you’re gonna do the same for them.”

Paul pushed back from the table.

“We’re going to spy on each other?!”

Sloane put the charts under his arm and waved his right hand.

“It’s not spying, it’s helping!”

He pulled the charts out again, stared at them, put them on the easel and turned to us.

“Like hell I’m spying on somebody!” an old man yelled.

“I was flatwelding on top of a barge,” he said, “when somebody tapped me on the shoulder to let me know it was time for lunch. I started to walk down the ladder but all I could see was that glowing spot and I ended up falling. Broke my hip in five places when I hit the ladder and bounced off the concrete.” He paused, choked up for a second, then roared, “Here’s a crocashit for you! The insurance barely covered anything. It’s an 80/20 plan and they backed out of half of their share! This shipyard’s chartered in the state of Indiana and in Indiana they got the laws so as you can’t sue your employer! You know how much those surgeries cost?! I got pins all in me now. I’ll be paying on it the rest of my life!” He yanked a cigarette from his shirt pocket. He pulled a lighter from his pants pocket and tried unsuccessfully to light the cigarette. “Hell, I couldn’t even fuck my wife for months.” Someone threw him a pack of matches. He lit the cigarette and drew on it. “Here’s another thing: the only lawyer I could afford told me he didn’t even know who I could sue. Not my employer, not the insurance company, not the doctor, not the foreman, not the ladder manufacturer. I guess I could sue one of you or maybe myself.”

“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 brother found him hanging from a ceiling fan. His feet was twisted around his legs and his face looked like it was made out of dough and somebody’d squeezed it in their fist.”

He clenched his teeth and held his fist out in front of him. We three walked out of the gate in silence.

“At least he doesn’t have to work here anymore,” he admitted as a consolation.

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.

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!

[...] 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.