Maybe the silver lining is in a sequinned bra?

Look, guys, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this job market is seriously screwed up. Look at me–wise and witty, wielder of words and welder of steel, able to work twelve hours in a single shift and leap tall buildings…well, skip that last bit. Even if I could leap buildings, I’d be competing for one superhero job against a hundred people who could leap taller ones AND  play the bagpipes in flight.

I’m in a state right now which is reporting a surplus of job seekers vs. open jobs in every category. Manufacturing? I’m one of 870 competing for 36 jobs.  Management? One of 542 competing for 25 jobs.

While I was driving home the other night listening to NPR (one does not require employment to maintain a sense of internal classiness) I heard a guy say gleefully that since the local factories had closed down, there were a lot more good-lookin’  women circling poles at the local strip clubs.

At least somebody’s seeing the bright side.

 

Girling up

I never gave up femininity to work a traditionally masculine job.  I like my jewelry, my perfume (nothing brings out the smell of steel like sandalwood) and my pink Carhartt vest, but I gotta tell you, manufacturing work is hell on the manicure. So one of the perks to my unemployed status has been keeping my nails neat. It’s an emotional boost and I justify it by telling myself that potential employers won’t hire me if I have sloppy cuticles.

I feel pretty...

So I wander into this strip mall nail salon while killing time waiting for my glasses to be finished at EyeMaster’s and there’s a lot of female estheticians and  one lone Asian guy working on other people’s calloused feet. He gets done with his client first and comes to work on me. We don’t say much. We smile a lot. He talks with the woman who’s working on my hands and I finally interrupt to ask what language they’re speaking because it sounds a lot like Vietnamese (see Mr. Nguyen). It is, so I tell my Mr. Nguyen story, and it goes over well, and, in the course of the chatter, I find out that the guy who, at that moment, is painting my third toe from the left a lovely shade of jade, is actually a welder.

A welder is painting my toes. Damn it all, this is like incest. We don’t know what to do. I say, “Dude. Are you going to stay here?” He looks at me and whispers. “All women!” with a most expressive roll of the eyes. It doesn’t matter that his English sucks and my Vietnamese is non-existent…when you’ve worked in a place where it’s assumed that information is going to have to be transmitted from English to Spanish to Laotian to Vietnamese in multiple configurations, stuff like accents and articles becomes moot.

“What do you want to do?” I whisper. “Sheet metal,” he whispers back. Oh, sweetness. Word on the unemployed street is that the local base wants 300 sheet metal fabricators. He puts down the brush and runs to the office, coming back with the company laptop. Typing gingerly with freshly polished fingers, I find the website, the online application. I show him. “Bookmark?” Yes. I bookmark everything. This is a tangled mess of a website–government run, with a lot of text explaining how simple the application process is while concealing the fact that it takes a subtle master of logic and linguistics to find the nuggets of critical data.

We’re so happy. He tells me he came here too late to go to school for English, perhaps I could come back to help with the application?  No problem. Welders look after each other. Not usually through painting each other’s toenails–but these are strange times indeed.

 

Cheeseburger

I don’t want to give the impression that all the married guys at the plant were inveterate flirts (see “You know it’s fall…) Most of them worked their asses off for the women they loved, putting in godawful hours, going home burned, sore, weary, and hungry to sleep a few hours and do it all over again. Night shift had to be the toughest. Day shift guys went home and at least had the option of taking a shower, eating dinner with the family and watching a movie or going to a kid’s soccer game or open house. Night shift guys went home to a silent house, were asleep while the children went to school and back at work by the time they came home. The wives tended to hate the schedule also–feeling that they were left  to cope with the bulk of the childrearing and were lonely in their beds at 2:00 a.m..

If a guy quit though, he knew his family suffered. Wives weren’t happy with a husband who couldn’t put food on the table. So night shift guys dealt with a continual dilemma–take a day shift job (if anything was available) that paid less and deal with arguments about  money, or stay with night shift and deal with arguments about time.

Management knew this. Management did the best they could. If a guy got a call on his cell that the burglar alarm had gone off or that a kid was sick, we let them go deal with the situation without repercussions. Night shift supervisors talked to anxious women, angry women, jealous women, assuring them that their husbands were both safe and on the premises.

We had a kid we called Cheeseburger working night shift. He was in his 20′s–a big guy, not particularly skilled or coordinated, but he showed up and he did his damndest to try to figure out what the blueprints were all about and that was ok by us. He had a new wife and she called a lot and she was pretty pissed off a lot of the time about where exactly he was and what he thought he was doing away from her all night long and the kid was upset, but he kept working. We gave him old-folk-type pep talks about how hard it can be the first few years and how it was important to keep your mind on your work, etc. etc.

One night Cheeseburger shambled past me blindly, going down the bay at a run. He was sobbing and bleeding. I chased him, finally hanging onto his arm to slow him as he clocked out, incoherent with spit and tears. “She’s gonna leave me…” he said. “I gotta go…” I looked at his bleeding hand, cut from when he threw down his tools. He ran out into the yard and down the street.

“Why didn’t you give him a ride?” asked the night foreman when I reported in. “He lives five miles from here and his wife has their only car.”

“I dunno,” I said. “Geez, you think if his wife saw a girl dropping him off it would make things better?”

“Aw, shit.”

Don’t talk to me about corporate insensitivity or the anonymity of the assembly line. I’ll tell you about kids like Cheeseburger running down a street at night to prove his love or about people like me and a dozen decent bosses keeping both the line and the lives running as smoothly as we could.

 

You know it’s fall when you smell the tamales

Cooler weather makes me smile. Leaves turn, frost twinkles, sky blue, etc. etc. etc.. All good things. But I usually became truly happy when it got cold enough to fire up the space heaters in my plant, and you could smell the tamales across the yard.

This is not some flaky alternative fuel venture you haven’t  heard of. Our space heaters were natural gas fired, cylindrical, about three feet high, with flat steel tops. If you took a minute with a cutting torch and a scrap of expanded metal, you had a personal grill that fit perfectly on top.

At one time we had over 25 languages spoken in the plant. Do you know how many really great-smelling foods that translates to? About half-an-hour before lunch, those foods started getting slapped down on the grills. Tamales, egg rolls, grilled meats wrapped in foil warmed perfectly over the flames. Because my job had me moving throughout the plant, I got to have a version of this conversation every ten minutes:

“Hey, you need to come taste the tamales my wife made!”

“(me laughing) Hey, aren’t you the guy that tried to get me to go out with you this summer? Didn’t you swear you weren’t married? And now she’s making you tamales…Shame on you.”

“Yeah…well….” And we’d grin at each other, and I’d call him something professional like a lyin’ dog, and go on my way after sampling the meal.

Last year, around Christmas, it was so insanely cold in the plant, that I made my way from heater to heater like oases. It was late afternoon. The welders were staying warm in insulated coveralls, crouching over the heat of their fresh welds. I smelled something festive and made for the one heater with a promising haze of smoke. A Laotian leadman had brought chestnuts and was roasting them over the fire. We burned our fingers shelling them, then digging the meats out with bits of wire.

Love those holiday traditions.

 

Making cool stuff out of steel

Photographer: Henry Henkelmann

Why would a manufacturing job have such a hold on me? I’ve told you it was hot in the summer and freezing in the winter, that we welded with snow drifting across our work, that I was there at 2:00 a.m., 10:30 p.m., and all hours in between.

Because it was the coolest thing ever.  We made stuff. We made big, impressive stuff that people would line up outside the fence to snap pictures of. Those rail cars we rolled out were known by rail buffs. There are models for sale online of cars I built. People are proud they made those cool little models and they should be. But I and a bunch of other lucky people got to build the real ones, the ones that go rattling past you at railroad crossings, the ones that shake the ground as they pass.

You know how one learns to see the world in terms of her or his profession or avocation? I was married to a man who made picture frames.  When we went to the arts festival, he would tell me which frames his company had in stock and whether the art would have been better suited by the molding with the acanthus leaves rather than the ivy. God bless the poor soul in a car with me when a train is going by. I rattle with the train—naming off the types: centerbeams, hoppers, tanks, gondolas (high and low-sided). I look for defects: a delineator a bit off center, an unseated truck spring.

Do you know how railcars are attached to their wheels? It will enliven your next wait at a crossing. The wheels are part of an assembly called a “truck.” It consists of a bolster running perpendicular to two sidebeams. The sidebeams generally are set atop two axles, making each truck a four-wheeled assembly.  The bolster has a centerplate—a hefty chunk of flat topped cast metal. A vertical rod is anchored to the centerplate.

Photo by Sean Lamb

The car itself is assembled separately, wending its way down the line. When it is essentially complete, aside from some brake work and other details, it is “landed” on the trucks. Each car has a centerplate on each end, corresponding to the centerplates on the trucks. Each centerplate has a hole in it, corresponding to the vertical rods on the truck assemblies.

We lifted the railcar by crane (just imagine!) and swung it around a 90 degree turn,  positioning it gingerly over two truck assemblies waiting on a track. As a person maneuvered the car with a remote control and a rope, like flying a steel dirigible, another two people squatted by the trucks, nudging them a hair this way or that, until the rods in the trucks aligned with the holes in the car centerplates. Then the car would be gently set down, landing with a deep “clunk” on its wheels.

And then it would go on down the line to the brake shop, the paint shop, and to a crossing near you. No welding, no bolts, no Elmer’s glue, just 30-80 tons or more of steel held in place by gravity.  And I got to watch that happen every day. Tell me that wasn’t a cool job.

 

Health Insurance

I listened to Obama speak to Congress tonight about the proposed health insurance reform.  I was in my car, in Oklahoma, a heartily Republican kind of a place, where the legislators are encouraged to put a stop to all that Socialist nonsense.

Look, I didn’t want to tell you this. I figure a lot of other people have stories worse than mine. But I’m the only one with my story. That make sense?

Here goes.

The job I lost allowed me to buy health insurance at a reasonable cost for the first time in my life. My ex-husband had worked at a small company that couldn’t afford to insure its folks. He’d also been self-employed. In both cases, costs were prohibitive and coverage was spotty.

My shoulder had ached for a year. Then my hand went numb. When I turned my head to the right, my left leg went numb. I went to a neurosurgeon. While waiting to see the doctor, a woman and I traded stories.

She had a degenerative disease of the joints that was attacking her spine. She had no spinal fluid left to cushion the spinal cord. If she fell or moved abruptly, she could become paralyzed. She couldn’t work. Her daughter had left college and taken a minimum wage job to live with and care for her mother. The mother had worked her whole life to send her child to school. She was waiting for her pain medications, the only treatment that was available to her. She had no insurance. She was five years older than me.

Within an hour I had my diagnosis. I had the same disease. It was a Monday. I was scheduled for surgery on Wednesday morning because of the severity of the pain and the danger of allowing the degeneration to proceed without intervention. By Wednesday afternoon I had an artificial vertebrae. The bone spurs that were growing into nerve tissue had been removed. I had a titanium plate stabilizing my spine.

By Saturday I was back at work.

Two years later I’m out of work.

Now I have a pre-existing condition. I’m afraid I may never get coverage again. I don’t want to bankrupt my children of their money or their time. I don’t want to live in the kind of pain that woman experienced.

Be safe, be cautious, ask questions, write letters, visit your Congress person, but for the love of God and me and the people whose stories are infinitely worse, do your damnedest to find a way that we can afford health-care.

I’d really appreciate it.

 

Us and Them

My son, whom I love, read the post “14.5 Million Unemployed” ( 2 September, 2009) last night, choked up a bit, and called me a manipulative bitch.

Ok, he’s got a point. The bit about a scrap of child’s rain-soaked bedding was a calculated bit of verbiage to hook you into caring about all of us laid-off folks as individuals instead of being sceptical or overwhelmed about us as statistics. And isn’t that a goal worth a bit of linguistic overkill?

See, I’m tired of the bias against people who get dirty doing their jobs. I think it’s contributed to a sense that our losing those jobs doesn’t matter all that much. I’m getting a master’s degree now. I’m sitting in classes full of professional educators these days, and way too many teachers and administrators talk in terms of “us” and “them.”

“Us” is the pack o’ college educated suburban folks, who are assumed to have stable marriages, decent parenting skills, and professional careers that allow them to own houses with technology and quiet places where their blessed children can do their homework in peace.

“Them” is the blue-collar folks at the core of the city, assumed to be a migratory, unstable group of high school dropouts, with corresponding lack of success in family life. They’re considered to be the frequently incarcerated, the ones who don’t value eating dinner at the dining room table, who don’t care enough about their kids’ success in school to put them to bed on time.

So one day in class, I blurted out this story. Careful. It’s both true and manipulative as hell.

When we were working 6 12′s, that’s six days a week, twelve hours a day, two shifts a day, families got strained. Guys who worked night shift came in at 3 p.m. and went home at 3 a.m.. Kids weren’t home from school when their dads left for work. Kids were tip-toeing around in the morning ’cause Daddy was still asleep.

Lunch came at 10 p.m. Moms would prepare meals and bring the food and the family up to the parking lot. They’d serve from the tailgates while the children ran and screamed with laughter, playing soccer with their fathers by the yellow glow of the security lights.

Yeah, they were going to be tired for school. Maybe school can adapt. God only knows we’ve learned how that’s done.

 

Mr. Nguyen

When I started at the company, I was trained by this Vietnamese guy who was like me in that he was older and smaller than most of the other welders. He taught me grudgingly, and in gestures, smacking my hand when I made an error in programming the path of the automatic welder.  “You make much trouble!” he would say, reprogramming with motions so fast I couldn’t follow.

I got to be pretty good at running the machine. Once Mr. Nguyen decided I wasn’t going to screw it up too badly, he started teaching me other stuff—how to use a come-along, how to lift pieces of plate with leverage instead of brute force.

We started eating lunch together, sitting on the half-welded boxcar sides. He had teenage children and a couple of toddlers at home. His oldest was starting to run with a gang and lose interest in school. “I want him to do well,” he said, “but my English is not good enough to help him with his studies.”

Our station was close to an overhead door through which forklifts brought materials in and out of the shop. In the winter, snow and strong winds would pour through the door as soon as it was opened.  Mr. Nguyen and I had the flu, but we were supporting families and couldn’t afford to take time off. We made a deal. Whoever had a temperature under 100° in the morning did the heavy lifting. The other programmed, standing at the control panel, feverish, shivering, and gulping tea.

We met up with other sufferers at breaks, trading antihistamines, cough suppressants, and analgesics. Mr. Nguyen got pneumonia and was hospitalized for a week. While he was gone I built side after side by myself. It was so cold that I would crawl up onto the work at lunch time and lie down on the steel plate between freshly made welds, falling asleep in the radiated warmth.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that workers over 45 are unemployed an average of 22 weeks as opposed to 16 weeks for younger workers. I have a B.A. and am going back to grad school. Mr. Nguyen has broken English and a wealth of knowledge specialized to a job that doesn’t exist.

 

14.5 Million Unemployed

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing has lost 2 million jobs since the recession began. 14.5 million people in the US are out of work. For me, that’s like looking at the swath of destruction cut by a F5 tornado—the wreckage of lives is overwhelming.

You wander the streets after such an event, disoriented, looking for anything familiar to remind you that this was a street, that was a house. Then you see a rain-soaked scrap of bedding caught on a beam and realize a child once slept nearby. After you understand how the disaster has upended one life, suddenly each pile of wreckage represents another, equally substantial, loss.

I want to put this unemployment disaster on a scale that we can understand.  Maybe telling our stories will help.

 

X-Ray Guys

My plant employed about three hundred people. As with most businesses, the economic effects of our operation affected not only the immediate employees–the welders, painters, and our eternally happy janitor, but local businesses as well. When we shut down, they all took a hit.

Even the nearby half-way house suffered; the industrial x-ray shop that partnered with us had hired ex-convicts on a regular basis. The jobs gave a lot of guys a chance to get out on their own for at least a few hours for the first time in years.

Seams have to be checked to verify that the welds are sound. After a tank car was welded, leadmen would call the X-ray guys. They’d bring out light-proof envelopes of film marked with little lead numbers identifying the exact location of each seam and intersection. Once the films were secured over the seams, the heavy X-ray machine would be lifted into position for the duration of the exposure. After the exposure was finished, the film was removed from the envelopes, run through the processor, put in order and brought to me or whatever inspector was on duty.

One bloody long hot night none of these steps went right. The tapes slipped, the lead numbers were missing, the welds were too hot causing the film to overexpose. Industry codes require that none of these happen. I rejected hundreds of pieces of film over three hours. My two x-ray guys at that time had a combined weight of five hundred pounds plus and impressive rap sheets. When I told them to go reshoot that damn tank again, they got what we agreed later to call “testy.” The door slammed, the stairs shook, and I pondered how my mama had probably not raised me to piss off ex-cons while sitting alone in a flimsy trailer at 2:00 a.m..

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. “Could you come over?” they asked. I locked up and headed to the x-ray shack. It was cool and immaculate inside; they’d been cleaning. Tom pushed the best chair at me and I sat. Oscar loomed behind me. “We’re sorry,” Tom said.

“Yup,” said Oscar.

“We got out-of-sorts,” said Tom.

“Uh-huh,” said Oscar.

“Oscar’s made you something,” said Tom. “Haven’t you, Oscar?”

An enormous tattooed arm descended over my shoulder, handing me an exquisitely made paper flower with a refreshing and puzzling scent of mint.

“We got back here and figured we got no reason to say those ugly things to you.” Tom went on. “You‘re just doing your job. So we figured you‘d like something pretty. Good thing Oscar keeps toothpaste on hand.”

So that was the source of the minty smell and the odd squishy consistency of the flower‘s stem.

“Toothpaste and toilet paper?” I asked.

“That’s right. Oscar’s got a real way with art,” said Tom.

Oscar was blushing.

“You should see what he could do if we’d had some M&M’s.”

Oscar nodded. “You spit on the candy and touch it with the toilet paper. The dye comes right off. I coulda made you a whole bouquet of roses. All different colors.”

God, I miss my job.