Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (46 page)

You have to figure out reasons to keep from going crazy, games to try to beat yourself. After a number of years, you begin to be a better loader. They come with a thirty-thousand-pound coil. If you set it down on the truck three inches forward or backward of where it’s supposed to be, you’re misloaded. So there’s a challenge every time you load. Everybody’s proud of that. At the truck shop they’ll flash a weight ticket: “Take a look at that.” They’ve loaded a balanced load.

Now as we approach ’67, I’ve about had it. I’m trucking seventeen years. There’s nothing left to do. I never dreamt that our hopes of getting together some day was gonna come true. It was just a dream. I’ll finish out the year, sell off my truck and trailer, and I’m gonna build a garage up at the Wisconsin-Illinois state line. I’m gonna service trucks in there. The guys needed a garage where they could get work done. The commercial garages—you got a bunch of amateurs working on your truck. To be an owner-operator, you gotta be a mechanic. I had a three-car garage when I was seventeen. So I was gonna build this garage . . .

But I met an old-timer I’d seen around for years. This was at Inland Steel on a Thursday night. One of my last hauis—I thought. We sat for about six hours waiting to get loaded. He said to me, “Did you hear about the rumble going on down in Gary?” He showed me this one-page pamphlet: “If you’re fed up with the Teamsters Union selling you out and all the sweetheart contracts and the years of abuses, go in front of your union hall Monday morning at ten ’. We’re gonna have a protest.”

Friday I talked to everybody. “We’re finally gonna do something. We’ve been talkin’ about it for years . . .” I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me. “Ah, hell, that’s all you ever talk about.”

Well, Monday morning I went out to Gary. There was twenty guys picketing. We didn’t get much help through the day. We decided to go to the steel mills and intercept our people, who were coming in from all over the country with their trucks. You got the picture? Ninety percent of the guys didn’t know where the union was at. For years, they paid dues as an extortion. They’re hurting. Most of ‘em are one paycheck away from the poorhouse. So we went there and tried to tell ‘em, “Park your truck and come and picket.” Well, it turned into something because the time was ripe. Everybody knew something had to happen.

 

 

Truckdrivers are known as an awful lot of deadbeats. They live off credit and lay on everybody. Deprive their family, two legs ahead of the bill collectors, charge fuel at the new guy’s station that’s givin’ credit to everybody and then, when they run up a big bill, they’ll go by. All to keep that truck going. I don’t think they’re worse responsible than anybody else. But they get in a position like a businessman: you owe everybody and his brother and you start writin’ paper and you try to survive. You get in deeper and deeper and deeper . . .

So we formed an organization—the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, FASH. We organized like hell, leading up to the contract time again. We went on a nationwide strike because we didn’t hardly scratch the door the first time. This time we asked the Teamsters Union to represent us, which they never did before. Fitzsimmons
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promised in the agreement he’d set up a committee to meet with us. He sent us the very thieves that had locals where the steel haulers had members. These guys had vested interests to keep things the way it was. We met with ‘em a couple of times and saw they weren’t about to do nothin’.

 

 

In January ’70, we went out on strike to reinforce our demands for. recognition. We filed with 167 companies that employed steel haulers under Teamster contract. When the hearings began in Pittsburgh, there were thirty-seven lawyers from the carriers and Teamsters and two of our attorneys—one guy and another guy helping out. The hearings lasted sixteen days. It cost the Teamsters $250,000 for their legal costs. There was ten thousand pages of testimony. The National Labor Relations Board ruled against us. We think it was a politically inspired ruling. Nixon was playing footsie with Fitzsimmons.
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We were fighting the mills, the union, the carriers, the President. Who else is there left?

I talked with a fella who sold trailers. He said, “You guys are nuts. You’ve taken on all these big people. You don’t have a chance.” But there’s just one thing—we feel that we’re a revolution. There’s people’s power here and truck power. And there’s a lot of people in the Teamsters Union watchin’ us. If they start to see that we don’t get our heads busted, that we’re tough enough to lead, they’re gonna come out of the woodwork.
They
all want to know where their pension money went. What’s wrong is that they’re all scared.

We did extremely well tiH this last strike. We didn’t make it in the strike. There were some defections in our ranks. They voted to go back to work. We were about gonna grab that brass ring when we dropped it. So there’s been a lot of disillusionment on the part of a lot of guys. But we gained so much in these three years that a lot of guys are stickin’.

We’re treated with quite a bit more respect, I’ll tell ya, than we were before 1967. Sure, we’re havin’ problems. The Teamsters are trying to get the carriers to blackball us, trying to control the steel haulers. But they know they’ve lost us. We have membership stickers on the trucks. The sticker alone sometimes gets ’em loaded twice as fast. What they’ll say, “You better load that guy, he belongs to that outfit and you don’t load him you’re gonna have to pay for it.” We got a good reputation.

Our people are very cynical. They are always suspicious of leadership sellin’ ’em out. They’ve seen the Teamsters. They gotta pay their dues whether they’re workin’ or not. So they turn on us. They’re supercritical—every little thing. Between the day the strike started until March ’68, I didn’t pull a load of steel—that’s eight months I didn’t draw a penny. I been, since then, on a fifty-dollar-a-week salary, full-time for FASH, out of the Gary office. Had one guy tell me, “You only get fifty dollars a week, but that’s how Hoffa started.” Had another guy tell me, “I wouldn’t have anybody that dumb working for fifty dollars a week to represent me.” The cynicism is unbelievable.

First thing they figure, These guys are after soft, cushy jobs. They’re after Hoffa, they’re after the same thing we’ve been taken advantage of. What you have to do is rebuild confidence. These people don’t trust nobody. They don’t even trust themselves no more. “You’re workin’ in a crooked system and you gotta be a crook.” So the guy figures, I wouldn’t do it for anybody else, why this guy? Another typical thing is: It won’t work. You can’t beat ’em. They’re too big. The Teamsters are too big. The steel mills are too big. Everything’s against us. If you fight it, you get hurt.

You gotta re-educate ‘em, you gotta climb up on the cross every day. What you build, eventually, unfortunately, is a following that will follow you no matter what you do. That’s why you end up with Hoffa, with them sayin’ “I don’t care if Jimmy stole a million dollars, he’s okay with me.” It’s a shame that people are that much sheep.

We’re not getting the grass-roots backing we’d like to have. They’re too busy, they go to their families. Sometimes I wonder why I’m in this thing. But it’s rewarding. There’s nothing like dealing with people, dealing with situations. It’s like a crash course to educate yourself. It’s something I really enjoy doing because it’s something I thought should have been done all these years. After eighteen years of trucking, a change to do this work . . .

If I thought I could hand-tailor a job that I’d like to do, it’s this job I’m doing right now. I never worked so hard at anything in my life. Most of this forty-six months has been seven days a week. I get weary but I never get tired of doing the job. I’m enjoying every minute of it. We’re up against a lot of big people, big corporations. It has the feeling of playing chess with the top contender. It can affect people’s lives, even people that don’t even know.

If you win, the stakes are high. It’s not just whether you’re gonna make a buck. All of a sudden, you feel catapulted into these levels of decision-making that I never dreamed I’d ever reach. All of a sudden, you’re no longer the guy smiling and putting up a front and waiting all the time in the truck. All of a sudden, you found your own sense of self-respect. The day’s finally here. Now.

 

There’s always people trying to get something for nothing, saying their car was hit when it wasn’t. Some people get very arrogant and talking that they may get their lawyer. Oh yeah, we have a lot of people that have holy feelings about their car. It don’t have a scratch but they check it and go around it. So I go around with ’em. There were no scratches, but it was good exercise.

Another guy, he’ll pull in, get his ticket, and leave. Then he comes back and goes around the car. I’ll say, “Why don’t you go around when you come in?” He’ll say, “I went around just in case you hit it.” I say, “If I’d a hit it, you got to see if it’s fresh or it’s old. ’Cause we don’t have to tell you no story if we hit your car. The company’ll pay you. We don’t have no jive about that. Me and George who work here, we don’t hit cars.”