Hermeneutics of the welding shop

We finally got Bubby into a home.

Just temporarily though. She's recovering from a broken wrist on account of her last fall.

That's just one of the shit-sucking side-dramas of getting older. You fall. You break stuff.

You're in a home.

So a couple years ago my old pal Tom had a tree fall and break the roof of his cabin on an island in the middle of a lake out in the Muskokas. Tom and I go way back to when he was an up-and-coming young academic and I was accidentally parked in a fourth year sociology course at the U of G.

In fact, we go back even further than that.

When I was an up and coming welder-fitter at Kearney National in Guelph, I'd often see Tom handing out commie propaganda at the plant gates. That was common around Guelph in the middle '70s. After all, the Communist Party of Canada got its start in a barn off the Silvercreek Road just behind the General Electric plant.

One thing I profoundly respect about the Bubbinator is that all her clan, at least the ones who managed to dodge the death camps in the WW II, came away dyed-in-the-wool commies. Then they washed up on these shores and became entrepreneurs.

Capitalists.

It's a crazy fucked-up thing, but when you talk to elderly Jews you'll find a lot of heart-felt respect for socialist ideals, no matter how rich their families got playing the entrepreneurship game in the New World.

The reason so many got into the entrepreneur game was because that was the most viable path open to them, especially if you arrived here from Russia or Poland without the benefit of a serious education. Interestingly enough, most of your Jewish entrepreneurs who made it big in the New World came from Eastern Europe where they were denied education opportunities.

By contrast, up till the Nazi era, German Jews were, as a class, the most educated Jews and the most educated Germans in all of Europe.

But I digress.

Tom was in a bit of a flap about fixing the roof of his shack out there on his island in the middle of the Muskokas. He was ready to call in a contractor.

Here's something you might want to know about contractors in the Muskokas.

First of all, they assume anyone who has property in the Muskokas is filthy rich, and they therefore price their work accordingly.

My pal Tom is a humble university professor, rather "poor" by Muskoka standards. He is not seen as a lucrative target to the local contractor community.

But he still needs the roof of his cabin fixed. The tree that fell on it fractured a couple of the roof trusses. It wasn't hard to see what the local contractors would recommend; peel off the roof, replace the trusses, replace the roof... you'd get out of that for maybe ten grand, probably closer to twenty.

I got up there and eye-balled the situation. Looked to me like we could jack up the roof, and then through-bolt a couple of pieces of angle iron on the fractured trusses. That would be a "temporary" fix, but "temporary" might mean twenty years.

We headed into town to fetch some angle iron.

I spent my working years, or at least a goodly percentage of them, working in welding shops large and small, from Saint John Shipbuilding on the east coast to Harjim Machinery Works on Vancouver Island. One thing I know is that you can't bullshit welding. Nor can you bullshit a roof repair on an island in the Muskokas.

That roof's gonna stay up or it's gonna fall down.

No amount of bullshit will keep it up if the fundamentals of physics say it's gotta fall...

Kearney National was a good place to fine-tune my chops. I still remember to this day the lads I learned from and worked with.

Dudley. Magician with the pipe bending machine.

Cheech Contini. Me and him did some serious boozing in the back shop on the afternoon shift. He taught me how to cover my tracks.

Manny in shipping...

So me and Tom end up at this little fab shop in Gravenhurst, looking for a few lengths of 1/4 x 3 angle iron with the holes knocked in just so. It's a fab shop that looks just like every other small-town welding joint; everybody who works there looks like they're outlaw bikers waiting for their probation to end.

We just wandered in the back door and helped ourselves to the chop-saw and the iron-worker. Buddy at the front desk when we checked out enquired sarcastically whether my flip-flops had steel toes. Ministry of Labour rules or some such horse-shit.

I told him ya for sure...

Tom got the roof of his cabin fixed for a couple hundred bucks instead of ten or twenty thousand.

Last I heard, that roof is still keeping the warm in and the weather out.

When pacifists built warships

Ya, I know that ain't a warship.

But here's my point; I spent a couple years at Irving Shipbuilding back in the early '90s, working on the Frigate Program.

It was a good gig. Strong union, sensible management, fair wages.

I was a welder/steel-fitter with pacifist inclinations. As a shop floor guy who needed to feed his family, my attitude to the big questions has always been; if I didn't do that job somebody else would.

I realize at some level that's a cop-out. Any Nazi death camp commandant could make the same argument.

But back to the picture above.

That's a "megaload" making its way from Idaho to the tar sands developments in Alberta. Every Teamster, Ironworker, etc. on this job is approaching it in the same way I approached my shipyard gig; if I didn't drive this truck somebody else would, and I've got a family to feed.

I don't think we need to judge those folks for making that decision.

Many years ago I used to work for one of the biggest megaload contractors in eastern Canada, Lackie Brothers.



They had a lot of work taking big loads up to the Bruce Nuclear development.

I don't have any use for nuclear power. I think it's stupid to pursue energy sources when you haven't figured out how to deal with the waste from your energy-producing process. But again, me refusing to work on anything to do with nuclear energy is hardly going to slow down the development of the Bruce.

The theoretical socialists would of course point out at this juncture that if none of the overalls crew went to work, nothing would happen.

That's true in the long run. In the short run, the kids you feed need three meals a day whether daddy has a job or not.

So you fold up your principles and stuff them in the back pocket of your Big Bill coveralls, and you go to work.

I'd like to say that Lackie Bros. was a good gig but I'm not so sure. I came along at a time when the elder Lackie who had started the company was giving way to his offspring. I never saw any evidence that the offspring had any interest in the business other than storing their boats in the fenced yard of the shop on Centennial Ave. in Kitchener.

That's the shop where I worked.

Lackie Bros was what's known as a closed shop. You had the Ironworkers Union representing the outside guys, the Ironworkers Shopmens local representing the shop guys, and if I'm not mistaken, the Teamsters representing the drivers.

The shop was located in Kitchener, and had a lot of folks of German descent on the floor. There is something about the German attitude that looks askance at questioning authority. They just want to follow orders.

I'll never forget the day this German guy asked if he could leave early for his daughter's fourth birthday party. Most guys would just have left without bothering to ask. This guy asked, and the weasel who was our shop floor boss told him "no".

I saw that middle-aged man cry because his boss told him he couldn't go to his daughter's birthday party.

This was a completely closed union shop where one would presume that the union called the shots.

It doesn't work like that.

The machinery of intimidation works across union lines. The same kind of anti-authoritarian attitude will challenge authority in either environment; the difference is that in the union shop he will likely keep his job after that challenge.

My quibble in the shop was that the stewards had pretty much become management bumboys. They'd be writing their own overtime tickets and look the other way when that management weasel was pushing around some of the meeker guys.

I remember going at it with the shop steward over an issue that touched me personally. The outside guys were a bit slow, and some of them were brought into the shop just to keep them busy. I found myself welding flanges onto the end of a pipe while an outside Ironworker was welding the same flanges onto the other end of the same pipe.

At the time the Shopworkers rate was twelve bucks an hour, while the outside guys were making $20. That didn't work for me.

I took it up with the shop steward, an affable enough guy who spent 100% of his time building Lackie their own custom-spec floats. He was accustomed to writing as much time and a half and double time work for himself as he felt like doing.

Like I said, nice enough guy, but he could not see my problem. At the end of the day his concluding remark was, "well, we're not going to tell the boss how to run the business."

Well, that was enough for me. Remember, this was back in the day where if you could read a blueprint and run a bead you were pretty much golden to a lot of employers, so instead of staying and fighting the good fight I left for a job at Dick Cheney's Dresser Industries for a bit more money.

That's what you do when you have a family to feed.

The political economy of screwing workers

I was absently scrolling through the interweb when I happened upon a review of a book called The Political Economy of Work in the 21st Century by Martin Slick.

That caught my eye. Before I knew it I was reading an excerpt from said book concerning the divesture of Avondale Shipbuilding from the Northrop Grumman war-profiteering combine.

Northrop always had an awful time finding qualified workers to build its ships. I found that hard to believe, but even I, pro labor as I am, was starting to believe that maybe it's true; maybe Northrop and all the other contractors involved in heavy manufacture simply can't find the skilled workers they need in America.

I put it down to the sorry state of America's education system. America's education system is so fucked that you can't even train a high-school graduate to be a welder.

No offence to my brother welders, but we don't exactly need the creme de la creme of the education world to train as welders. At some of your more intricate fitting assignments you'd want guys who have a reasonable facility with math in general and geometry in particular, but generally speaking, welding is the trade that makes the least demands on the intellect.

So imagine my surprise when I make my way through Slick's book and discover this tidbit:

There is no convincing evidence of a shortage of welders. Avondales efforts (to bring in foreign workers on HB-2 visas) are a transparent effort to utilize immigration laws to pay substandard wages.

NO SHIT!!!

So it wasn't the education system after all!

It was about screwing the workers.