The Union Shuffle.

I've done every kind of shit job.

by Louis Shalako

I’ve worked for unionized employers and I’ve worked for non-union employers.

The differences are not so extreme, but the game is played a little differently.

When I started at Fibreglas Canada, I made it through the ninety-day probationary period and then I was a permanent employee, and the deductions for union dues were there on my paycheque to prove it.

What I didn’t know, was that I was supposed to bid on a packer’s job. That’s how things worked. 

Otherwise I was just temporary. I might have done it once or twice, but somebody with two days more seniority beat me out and got the packer’s job. The next one came up and it was on S-4, the second line in the Wool Plant, and I liked working on S-3 just fine so I didn’t bid on it. Some guy on my crew bid on it and got the job. We were hired the same day. At some point, with guys of equal seniority, they would have gone alphabetically, so who knows, (as I can’t recall his last name.)

That didn’t bother me, as doing the same job, running the same machine, by shop rules I had to be paid the same.

What happens is some guy wants to change shifts. Maybe his buddy lives in the same outlying little town. They could commute together to work and maybe save some gas. They want to be on the same crew as their buddy.

And word gets around.

So some guy with a couple of years seniority bumped me off my shift, and while I had some seniority, a few months at least, I still didn’t have a regular position on any shift.

They didn’t have a damned clue what to do with me! And yet they couldn’t just pay me to show up and hang out all day, either.

What the company did was to put me in something called ‘Fab.’ The little crew in Fab took high-density fibreglass panels and cut them up for special orders. Some of them might have been for the tops of freezers, other sizes might have been for the sides of ovens and home appliances like washing machines and dryers and things like that.

And I still didn’t bid on a job. And why would I, completely clueless as I was. Fab was days only. Our shift rotated through the days of the week, but it was only one shift. In the Wool Plant, they had three eight-hour shifts, on the pipe insulation line and one or two other little divisions, in the acoustic ceiling tile part of the plant for example, they worked two twelve-hour shifts.

Guys will talk and I wasn’t so smart back then, and when some guy came nosing around I probably told him the same story myself, but soon enough I was bumped off of the Fab crew. Yeah, it was the nosy guy who replaced me.

I guess that sucked in some ways, but next I ended up on Aerocor line, which was basically a big roll of soft fibreglass, which we cut at a certain length and bagged up with a big suction machine to make it smaller. It took four guys to run the line, bearing in mind somebody’s always on clean-up or on break or lunch.

I worked a year at Fibreglas, and I ended up with a car, a girlfriend, and an apartment. All that sort of thing.

Eighteen years old, and the job was the last thing in the world I cared about. One day they laid me off and I soon got work at the other little insulation plant in town. The wages were low and the working conditions atrocious. It was non-unionized. Part of the problem was a different product, as white wool was soft and fluffy, and it came apart easily. We hated white wool at Fibreglas, but it was seldom run on the line.

White wool was sticky, it was like cotton batting only looser.

It hung in the air in clouds. I quit after four hours, and yet I stood the itch, the constant prickling of the skin even when you had been away for a few days, well enough over at the other plant.

Fibreglass got in your clothes, your laundry, your bed, it was in your car, it was in the freakin’ sandwiches that you ate.

But the difference between the two plants was that great. A year in one, four hours in the other.

***

In construction, unions divide up the work. They’re pretty jealous, they’re afraid of their rivals across town ‘ripping them off for their work.’

We were in the door business.

I was in the carpenter’s union and my partner was an ironworker. The local agreement stated that when working on an industrial door, you had to have a carpenter and an ironworker.

The carpenter’s union, in the plants, mostly built scaffolding, but that’s another story.

My buddy was senior man, up on a ladder, and he called down for me to get him a big hammer.

I went out to the service truck and when I came back there was some guy there.

He asked me what union I belonged to. I said the carpenters. So then he gave me shit for having a ball-peen hammer in my hands.

He was an iron-worker and he was shop steward of his particular crew, and in his eyes there was great harm in a carpenter holding onto a ball-peen hammer. He went to the construction foreman, and the plant foreman, and he raised a big stink about it. We got called on the carpet and then we had to defend our turf…

In his eyes, I was on his turf and ripping him off, and of course I had only been with the door company for a short time. I hated taking bullshit from people, so I might have said a few things myself.

But that’s what it was like at times.

Now for the non-union story.

I worked for another industrial door company, and it wasn’t unionized. The company founder and father-figure had done some fast talking and gotten some group health insurance, which included dental insurance. 

There were less than twenty employees, one big happy family, right?

At some point the insurance company asked me to go to the dentist to have ‘an assessment.’

They didn’t want to insure someone without knowing anything about him, and while I don’t want to make too much of it, I sort of came from a broken home, and when I got to a certain size no one could make me go to the dentist.

My old man had plagued me to ‘get your teeth all fixed up before you’re eighteen’ and I would no longer be covered. It didn’t mean much to me at the time. Just the old man talking, you know.

Well, my own dentist’s records must have showed I hadn’t been in there in a while.

Some time later, the boss told me that the insurance company didn’t want to cover me. But I had a chipped tooth that might have benefitted from some cosmetic work, and a couple of cavities, and God knows what all the assessment found.

Imagine the position he was in—and I’m not saying he was a bad guy, because in many ways he was a pretty good guy. I always got along well with him, and we never had any problems.

A week or two later I was laid off.

Why? Especially considering that when I went to pick up my last paycheque, he had hired a couple of real bozos, complete dummies to replace me?

But he couldn’t discriminate against me by not providing the exact same benefits that the other employees enjoyed.

What was he supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?

***

Dow Chemical was in town for five or six decades. They had this thing called ‘revamp’ which was a little in-house construction crew. Everybody in town knew the company would hire temporary workers, pay them good money, and then lay them off after 89 days. One day before your probationary period was done.

I got hired, they called me a ‘Carpenter II,’ based on past experience and they paid me something like $14.88 an hour, not bad money for 1984 or ’85. They stuck me with some old guy who kept telling me to slow down! He had one speed, not very fast, and he always had a pocketful of sunflower seeds, which he would chew and then spit out at regular intervals. The way he walked, I called it ‘The Union Shuffle.’

The man had learned how to survive there, but I didn’t. Perhaps that’s for the best. That’s what we’re supposed to think, right?

Yeah, but he was in the union—I just wanted to get in the union, plus the fact that standing around looking busy, or trying to look busy, was never really my thing. I was easily bored and preferred action, even work, to help get through my day.

Sure enough, they laid me off maybe ten or eleven weeks later. Me and another young guy named Pete were off somewhere on our own, and we were literally pretending to work (which should have been our first clue that something was up) when the foreman drove up just after break-time and told us to get in the truck. They had layoff slips all made out for us in the construction office, and then he drove us to the gate and said goodbye.

“No hard feelings, boys. It’s just that work’s a little slow right now.”

One kid I knew got in there full-time. He must have gotten enough weeks for unemployment insurance, and then they must have called him back before the benefits ran out, or he would have been looking elsewhere I’m sure.

He got lucky, as this happened two or three times, and they decided they liked him well enough, and they decided to keep him. And once you’re in, you’re in.

So that’s how it works sometimes, and I can’t quite remember where I drifted after that.

I’ve had all kinds of shit jobs in my life though.

Chalk it all up to experience and move on, that’s all you can do sometimes.

END 

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