Got hired at Budd Automotive on my eighteenth birthday. It was a UAW shop. Union rules. I'd been a dues-paying member of the USWA for awhile before that, when I worked at the Black Lung Foundry. The Steelworkers didn't mind having sixteen year olds on the roster. At the UAW shops you had to be 18. That was quite a few years before Bob White took the Canadian autoworkers out of the UAW and started the CAW.
Budd was the biggest employer in the Kitchener area at the time. Paid good too. Made car and truck frames for all the major manufacturers. Budd is long gone now. Either cars and trucks don't have frames anymore or the work went somewhere else. I'm guessing Mexico, but that's just a hunch.
Got my first lay-off notice just a few months after I started. Helpful Herb offered to let me stay at his place. He was heading off on a holiday. Needed a house-sitter. Herb had a nice place nestled on the crest of a hill on the edge of town. House sitting there was going to be a sweet gig.
That was an era when you couldn't open a paper without reading about racial tension and racial this and that. The Detroit riots and the Watts riots were a pretty recent memory. All I can tell you is this; when the black brothers and the white brothers and even a few Chinese brothers walked out of Budd with their lay-off notices, we were all brothers in unemployment.
Herb and Mrs. Herb were off to Europe or the Caribean or someplace. All I had to do was water the plants and keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder. I know! There's a gift from heaven just when you get a lay-off notice.
The deal with the squirrels was that they ate all the bird food and if they got a chance they'd eat the birds too. So Helpful Herb left me the keys to his gun cabinet and I went at it. Must have plinked off half a dozen the first day.
Bob White was probably the greatest union leader since C.S.Jackson. No nonsense guy. When Bob was negotiating for the UAW, or later the CAW, nobody ever made the mistake of thinking that the bosses and the workers were going to be sitting around the campfire singing Kum-by-ya together anytime soon.
So I dispatch the first round of feeder-raiding squirrels, and I realize that other squirrels, just waiting in the shadows, come zooming in to take their place. I take care of them, and there's another wave. And another.
The first act of working class resistance that I personally witnessed, I witnessed at Budd Automotive. There were eight welders working at an assembly station, two at each corner of a frame. The bumboys, unskilled labourers like me, would slap the frame parts in the jig, automated clamps would grab everything and hold it together, and these welders would weld it all up.
The automated clamps were all run off hydraulics. At each clamping cycle, which lasted about thirty seconds, one of the welders would stick the end of his mig gun into a hydraulic hose. Next cycle, the guy beside him would do the same. Enough cycles, and eventually the hydraulic hose would spring a leak and the station would be down for an hour or two. Eight welders, be they black or white or Chinese, would get a two hour break. It was a beautiful thing.
So eventually I got the squirrel problem winnowed down to one super-smart squirrel. Darwin's theory in action. But this guy is good. If you miss him on the first shot he's running zig-zag patterns to avoid the next shot. I swear he turns around and gives me the finger while he's zig-zagging away.
So I figure fuck Darwin, I'm gonna kill the furry fuck. I climb up on the roof, where I've got a downward shot at the birdfeeder. I'm peering through the scope, waiting for him to put his head up, and he's moments away from going to that big birdfeeder in the sky. Then, HOLYSHIT!!! A cross-country skier comes a-gliding through my field of vision! Then another one. And another...
Just lucky I had the scope. Without it I wouldn't have even seen the skiers! Can you imagine the newspaper headlines the next day? CARELESS HUNTER BAGS CROSS-COUNTRY SKIERS. Ya right. As if that woulda been my fault.
I eventually got the fucker with the twelve gauge, but I had to buy Herb a new bird-feeder.
