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.

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.

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.

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.

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.