Tag: work

Pitcher Perfect…4

…Excitedly, I told them the whole story. They were very pleased for me yet I sensed a bit of disappointment, sadness, or melancholy perhaps from my mother as I related the story, especially about my new hourly wage.  My pop just seemed to take it all in stride. Later, on the front stoop, alone with my mother, I questioned her about my bit of good news.

“Are you not happy about this” I said.

“No, no, no, not at all, I mean of course I am happy for you” she reassured me.

“Then what’s the problem” I pressed

“It’s your dad” she said. “Sometimes I feel so sorry for him.  This is nothing against you, don’t get me wrong, but he has been working all of his life and all he has to show for it now is ninety dollars a week. While I am very happy for you, as I am sure your Dad is, it just seems so unfair to me that you are making almost one hundred and forty dollars a week – in this your first real job.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t too excited any more. It did seem so unfair. I was so proud of my dad. He did work hard all of his life. It wasn’t his fault that circumstances beyond his control dictated the path he would take in life.  He was a product of the great depression, a World War Two vet, fought for us and his country then had to make do with whatever non skilled work there was in the big city after the war.  He and thousand upon thousand of other vets were vying for too few good paying jobs. And while he did luck out as a junior accounts shipping and receiving manager for a very large aerospace company, he became a victim of the vagaries of the cold war with its politics and policies and geopolitical mumbo jumbo and smoke and mirrors.  What was lost in translation in all of this political posturing was delusion and the reality that thousands upon thousands of highly skilled professionals, skilled and non skilled workers, lost their jobs in what was to become the city’s, the country’s “Black Friday,” a precedent setting day of a bargain basement deal in the global aerospace industry. The country bowed to international pressures and cancelled a highly sophisticated interceptor aircraft that out performed anything that currently existed or was even planned for.  The aircraft was well ahead of its time and that was its problem.  No, Black Friday, 1959, was not a day of bargain basement deals but a day of financial mourning.  Fourteen and a half thousand direct jobs were lost that day with another fifteen thousand indirect jobs gone that were tied to the company’s supply chain.  On top of the financial and employment woes the country lost a great deal of intellectual property and prestige as well as a great many aerospace engineers and technologists as they ran for the exits never to return again.  My dad was no engineer but no less vulnerable as a human being as these highly skilled men and women. 

I never thought of money, really, or the disparities of a working wage or the harshness, unfairness of life until that very moment.  A sixteen year old shouldn’t have to think about these things. To me it was all a lark. We were living the life.  Our school, the priests, the nuns, my friends, sports, play, have a good time, smokes, and the movies and on and on she goes. I never contemplated where or how we had the means to have a house in the burbs, a car, food on the table, clothes, or the ability to attend the private catholic high schools at St Basil’s and St Mary’s. Never to want for anything! Always excited and never to be let down at birthdays or at Christmas. Looking back on those days now I marvel at the financial ingenuity and discipline of my parents.  How did they do it while managing a host of demands from us kids and responsibilities on such a meagre wage?  How did they get by without granite?

Even at a young age in 1959, I sensed that something terrible had occurred to my dad. After all, I remember one of my boyhood friends, “Nibs” Van Vlyman, left our neighbourhood suddenly with his family for California. I couldn’t connect the dots, of course, and I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that happened. To their credit, my Mom and Dad kept this away from us.  We did not know or fathom how close we were as a family to losing it all, the house, everything.  

My Dad could not afford to be choosy. He had to do anything and everything that came his way to make ends meet. Digging ditches, yes, working for the municipality as a manual labourer, yes, an Orderly in a mental hospital? Yes. Praying hard? Yes. I can clearly visualize his big boots and canary yellow rain gear drying out in the furnace room in our basement. I remember our teachers stressing to us all in those days that if we didn’t get an education all we could hope for in the future was to be a ditch digger for the city.  Imagine my thoughts and horror, shock and utter sadness, in seeing my own father doing just that.  It wasn’t that my dad wasn’t smart or lacked education. No, he was very smart. He was just a product of his times, a discarded remnant of his government’s folly. Not a real person just a statistic.  Yet he was a member of the greatest generation this country ever had.  It is no wonder to me, or surprise, that he threw all of his war medals into the city’s harbour.

After a few years of doing many manual and soul destroying jobs, he did manage to get a junior position at one of the country’s major banks. He acquired this position through his brother-in-law, who convinced him to swallow his pride and accept the job. Being a bank it didn’t pay all that well but it was a living wage and being a bank it was very secure.  In those days, bankers, especially investment bankers, were not the rock stars or the amoral financial wankers that they are today. At best or worst they were extremely conservative, boring and pedantic…

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.