Tag: union

Pitcher Perfect…5

…My dad worked there until his death in 1971, about 8 years. He loved this job: worked right downtown in the heart of the city and even won some favour and recognition with a few promotions. Just when things were finally improving financially for him, and with his oldest daughter being engaged, he dropped dead of congenital heart failure at the young age of 54.  Of course he loved his Pilsner, his Buckingham’s and did little exercise in his later years except by getting up off of his butt to change the television channel.

Sitting there with my mom on that stoop on that summer evening of 1968, the excitement of my circumstances just seemed too trivial in comparison. I immediately got up off of the step, went into the house, found my dad sitting in his chair and gave him the biggest hug I could muster. I told him how proud I was to be his son and how much I loved him!

The next day and the days after that next day at work were gruesome. I may have been making three dollars and forty five cents an hour but no amount of money could compensate the physical pain and misery of that job. Shovelling gravel into those inanimate buckets, hour after hour, day after day, for the hottest summer on record was pure unadulterated torture. I was dreaming of them.  My bucket list! The only sound heard, besides Zal’s taunts for more “fucking pitch” being the grunts and groans from our bodies and the huffs and puffs of our laboured breaths with every shovelful of gravel taken.  Sweat just poured down every crease and crevasse of our beings. Taking stints up on the flat roof itself provided no relief with a hot glaring sun beating down mercilessly on our lithe bodies.  The humidity was a killer. The hard physical work and the potential for dehydration made it harder and harder to keep our pants above the waist.  As roofers we had the plumber’s crack in spades. It was kind of comical watching everyone on the crew continuously pulling up on their pants or tightening their belts as if stricken by a nervous twitch.  On top of that, by the end of the day, our calloused hands were the worse for wear as newly formed blisters would crack then burst, then sting, as the flayed skin would shed and coagulate with the pus and the blood, which became an ugly brownish red in colour.  The soles of our work boots expanded vertically, about 2-4 inches, as the tar and gravel stuck to the undersides of our boots as we walked around by the area of the hot tar kettle, the conveyor belt and the adjacent pile of gravel. It would take us some time to scrape the gooey mess off of our boots at the end of the day. We felt so tall in our high gravel heels! 

End of the day? Sore and bruised and filthy dirty in sweat and dust. The long ride home on the bus and subway, lost in thought, dead to the world and praying hard and fast for rain on the morrow or watching the clock, counting hard the seconds, minutes and hours before the whole miserable routine would repeat itself. Please, dear God, let it rain tomorrow for when it rained roofers didn’t work. It was Murphy’s Law and not God’s law that ran the day for it only rained on the weekends.

The summer finally ended.  I was in great shape physically, well tanned and had a few bucks saved in the bank. I helped out at home financially, naturally, but I didn’t have to give the majority of my earnings to my parents as I no longer went to the Catholic private high school for boys. I thank God for that! Looking back on that hot and humid summer, my first real well paying job, I could have easily said that life was good. In some respects that summer was Pitcher (sic) Perfect.

 

Zal is dead. His crew is gone. The Maritime Foreman died relatively young. No one could understand his eulogy.

My uncle’s roofing business no longer exists. Jimmy Hoffa disappeared never to be seen or heard from again.  Hal Banks was discredited for corruption and is also dead. 

Everyone has the right to work, union or otherwise.

Pitcher Perfect…3

…I was not a union man. I didn’t have the union card, the union number. I couldn’t talk the union talk so I couldn’t walk the union walk. I didn’t know the secret handshake or the secret code word. I was scab. No I was worse than a scab. I was the bloody cut under the scab, that was oozing scab puss from scab blood from the scab scar under the scab or so they told me.  Now what?  

The local union rep must have taken pity on me as he approached me a few minutes later.

“You have to be a union member to work this site.”  he said

“But I am only working for my uncle, for the summer.” I pleaded

“Doesn’t matter.” he reiterated. “No union card, no work. It’s that simple.”

He gave me the address for the union hall, somewhere downtown. As we were out in the East end burbs on this job site it would take some time for me to go there.  I left and I did and arrived there about mid afternoon. It turned out that my particular skill set – manual labourer – was a sub-sub section of a sub section of the section of another section of the Teamsters charter. Oh, I had heard of these guys. Jimmy Hoffa and all of that. Or Hal Banks and his band of the great lakeside reprobates.

Into the union hall I went to a chorus of boos and hisses as my reputation and celebrity status at the job site had preceded me.  I waited a short while but was soon greeted by an elderly lady, late middle age, heavily made up with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.  She wore thick, black rimmed glasses and reeked of nicotine. A chain smoker I surmised as memories of my grade seven school teacher came wafting back to me

“Follow me,” she ordered, just like the best of them. It would seem to me that assertiveness was part and parcel of being a Teamster, part of the job, or so I thought.

I did follow her and before too long I was ushered into a room on the second floor.  It was a smallish room cramped with oversized furniture, which smelled of stale tobacco and cheap whiskey, or perhaps it was stale beer.  I wondered if anyone here had been sick or shot or murdered or worse or something in these chairs. Perhaps their legs had been broken, or their arms. Was anyone garrotted here? I thought. I kept looking behind me.  My mind was racing and getting way ahead of any rational thought. I have to stop watching Elliott Ness and the Untouchables.

An oversized desk was stationed just in front of a pane glass window, which appeared as if it was shaded in a ghastly shade of yellow, especially when set against the afternoon sun.  The whole room seemed to be permeated with tobacco smoke and reeked of stale air. The scene was suffocating.  It was surreal.

“Sit down” a very high pitched voice, almost feminine like, cracked from the vicinity of the desk. I couldn’t quite make him out due to the glare coming from the mid afternoon sun through the mid afternoon window.  On further inspection, on sitting down, opposite from where I sat, I was confronted by a very large, grossly overweight man, very old, about 40. Balding with a comb over, his face was pudgy with puffy cheeks and puffy lips with a puffed out bulbous snout that was riddled with reddish and purplish veins, all puffy, which over stepped its bounds above a small puffy mouth and an equally puffy triple chin. Like a sommelier, his nose was so big and puffy that it must have seen, sniffed and sensed its way through too many cheap whiskeys.

“So,” he said.  “How did we get ourselves into this predicament?”

“We?”  I thought. He went on.

“This site is a union site young man.  In fact all of the construction sites in this city are union sites.” he waved his hands to no one in particular as he was prone to talk with his hands.

“Now, you wouldn’t want to shut down all of the construction sites in this city would you? Would you?” he repeated, his voice rising somewhat, in a sort of lilt, as he stressed his point. His two hands locked in what appeared to me as a karate chop manner aimed at my face!

“Uh, uh, no sir.” I stammered in a nervous stammer.

“So,” he said so a lot. “All you have to do is join the union and all will be fine with the union world.” After all, the union is there to protect you and provide you with a fair wage.”

My interest perked and piqued. He suddenly had my full attention. Fair wage? Wasn’t a dollar and twenty five cents an hour considered a fair wage?

Sensing my confused interest with what must have been an equally confused and dumb look on my face, he went on.

“Three dollars and forty five cents an hour” he proffered. And all you have to do is pay us twenty five dollars a month, in union dues of course”

“Let’s dues this” I thought but hesitated, thinking about my uncle’s reaction.

“But what about my uncle” I said. “He may not want to pay me that rate of pay.  After all, he offered me this job at my fathers urging.”

“Your uncle knows the rules full well. In fact he hired another student just yesterday and at the union rate. You are being conned I’m afraid.  It always seems to occur in families”

I was kind of pissed off.  At my uncle. “Why would he do this to me” I thought?

“Here, sign these forms and you’re in. We’ll take your dues off for the whole summer with your first pay docket. Good luck”

I shook his puffy hands, signed the forms then left, in a hurry, not quite knowing what to do. Damn, I forgot to ask about the secret handshake! Back downstairs and in the main hall I went for the pay phone and called the office.  My older cousin Russell answered. He was my uncle’s, his father-in-law’s estimator.  I explained what had happened and he told me not to worry. He would handle it with my uncle. Just show up for work tomorrow, same site.

Show up indeed.  With that I went home for the day. I couldn’t wait to pass this good bit of news on to my Mom and Dad…

Pitcher Perfect…2

…What could one do for the kettle and the kettler were at ground level. The cook could only move that pitch as fast as the kettle could heat it up and melt the black tar into a gooey black sludge or black liquid paste and pump it up to the roof. Zal would pour it from a spigot into a bucket from where it would be moved by members of the crew to the next section of the flat roof.  This was tough, hot and hard physical work. You had to wear gloves, boots and thick textured long pants, always, to prevent indirect scalding.  When it was hot and humid outside, as it was everyday during the summer of 1968, hell seemed a luxury.

My job was to shovel gravel into a bucket that, when full, was drawn up to the roof via a conveyor. Once there it would be moved manually to where a fresh batch of pitch had been laid. The gravel would then be spread out over the tar to await curing then hardening to a gravelled white, charcoal glazed blanket of surface protection against all elements.  My uncle liked to brag that one could depend upon him as he was leak proof. Watching this operation I could see why.  When we were at full tilt that conveyor could turn 4 to 5 buckets in a line.  We couldn’t always maintain that rate of pace for it was hard exhausting work shovelling gravel into those buckets but Zal, for some inexplicable reason, was always trying to get the most out of us.  For all of his gruffness, his bravado, his hubris, and his profanity, his was a unique form of leadership. We all respected him. Perhaps it was out of fear but I think it was more out of valued appreciation for the dedication and loyalty he continually demonstrated for a job that was dirty and more than menial in its descriptive sense and less than compromising in its expected output.

My uncle was a self made man.  He was full of life, confident, fun loving with a devious, mischievous charm. Yet he wasn’t the brightest lamp in the shed either, sometime operating at less than full wattage. An interesting sidebar occurred with my summer employment that almost cost him dearly.  As a favour to my dad, he agreed to hire me for the summer at an hourly rate of one dollar and twenty five cents and hour. For me this was more than I had ever dreamed of making. Sixty dollars a week. I had arrived. This was my first real job and I was thankful for his largesse and his confidence in my physical ability and aptitude to meet the demands of the roofing industry.

When I arrived at the first work site I was greeted by the work crew and began with small labour related tasks, manual work. I was in awe of the other more experienced roofers but also with the other construction workers and skilled journeymen at this work site. During the first coffee break one of the construction men sat down beside me and sensing my trepidations struck up a conversation.  Somehow, I think I told him how thankful I was in making a dollar and twenty five cents an hour. How great it was for school, spending money etc. He just looked at me, funny like, then got up and left. I finished my coffee and went back to work. Before Zal could scream for more pitch, sirens went off, scores of contractors, journeymen, labourers and the like came out of the work site and walked off the job like a swarm of carpenter ants leaving the nest for work, only in reverse!

“What’s up?” I asked no one in particular.

“Fucking scab work site” I heard someone yell. Another, then another, then others joining in, yelling, screaming.  Everyone was off the site in an instant.

“What is going on” I thought to myself but dared not to go any further on site so as not to inflame the sensitivities around this work area.  In a flash I was approached by a few older guys in white hardhats. They bee lined it straight toward me, then surrounded me and in no uncertain terms asked me to follow them… off site. I complied and followed then into a car park that was situated about 200 yards from the work zone. Stopping then stopping me they told me to “Fuck Off” and never to return here and show myself anywhere on this or any other union job site if I knew what was good for me.

“Okay” I whimpered.