Working

by Studs Terkel

  Following the ’67 wildcat strike, the trucking companies instituted a tariff that said four hours we give the steel mill for nothing, the fifth hour we begin to charge at $13.70 an hour. We get seventy-five percent of that or ten dollars. And when we deliver, they got four free hours at our point of delivery. So we start every day by giving away eight potential free hours. Besides your time, you have an investment ranging from fifteen to thirty thousand dollars in your truck and trailer that you’re servicing them free. The average workingman, he figures to work eight hours and come home. We have a sixteen-hour day.

  If I were to go in the mill after supper, I’d expect to come out maybe midnight, two ’ in the morning. The loading process itself is fifteen to thirty minutes. Once they come with the crane, they can load the steel on it in two or three lifts. Maybe forty-five to fifty thousand pounds.

  We protect it with paper, tie it down with chains and binders, tarp it, sign our bills, move toward the gate. It takes you fifteen to twenty minutes to get to the front gate. I must weigh in empty and weigh out loaded. Sometimes, even though you’re all loaded, tarped down, and everything, you get on the scale and you’re off-weight. If you scale in at twenty-five thousand pounds empty and you come out weighing seventy-two thousand pounds, you’re five hundred, six hundred pounds off the billed weight. You have to go back and find out who made a mistake. Let’s say it’s over the one percent they’ll allow. They have to weigh everything again and find out that some hooker made a paper mistake. That’s happened many times to haulers. Prior to ’67, we never got paid a penny for it.

  Years ago, we ran through city streets, alongside streetcars, buses, and what have you. It was a two-hour run from the mills of Gary to the North Side of Chicago. Some seventy-six traffic lights. Every one of them had to be individually timed and played differently. If you have to stop that truck and start it, it’s not only aggravating and tiring, but you’d wear out the truck twice as fast as you would if you made those lights. It was a constant thing of playing these lights almost by instinct.

  This is all changed with the expressways. It’s just as if automation had entered the trucking business. Now you pull out of U.S. Steel in Gary and you don’t have a light until you drop off at the expressway in the city of Milwaukee. It’s a miracle compared to what it used to be. So much easier on yourself, on your equipment.

  A stop at the Wisconsin state line, a place to eat. Big trucks stop there. Maybe meet a bunch that have been in the steel mill all night. Coffee-up, tell all the stories, about how badly you’re treated in the steel mill, tell about the different drunks that try to get under your wheels. Then move towards your destination and make the delivery at seven ’ in the morning. We’re talking about thirteen hours already. My routine would be to drop two days like this and not come home. Halfway back from Milwaukee take a nap in the cab at a truck stop. You use the washroom, the facilities, you call your dispatcher in Gary, and pick up another load. Went home for a day of sleep, wash up, get rejuvenated, live like a human being for a day, come back to the mill after supper, and be off again. During the last ten years almost everybody bought a sleeper truck. It has facilities behind the seat. If you were to get a hotel room every night you were on the road, why, you’d be out of business shortly.

  On weekends, if you’re lucky enough to be home, you’re greasing the truck and repairing it. It’s like a seven-day week. There’s nobody else to do the work. Years ago, the rate of truck repair was five dollars an hour. Today it’s eleven, twelve dollars an hour. You do ninety percent of the work yourself, small repairs and adjustments.

  I would make two round trips to Milwaukee and pass within four blocks of my house and never go home. You can’t park a big truck in the neighborhood. If the police have anything to do with it, you can’t even park on an arterial street more than an hour. It’s a big joke with truckdrivers: We’re gonna start carrying milk bottles with us. Everywhere we go now, there’s signs: No Truck Parking. They want you to keep that thing moving. Don’t stop around here. It’s a nuisance; it takes up four spaces, which we need for our local people. You’re an out-of-town guy, keep moving.

  If I chose to park in the truck terminal, I’d have an eight-mile ride—and I don’t think I’d be welcome. The owner-operator, we’re an outcast, illegitimate, a gypsy, a fella that everybody looks down on. These are words we use. We compare ourselves to sailors: we sail out on the highways. The long-distance hauler is gone for a week, two weeks, picking up a load at one port, delivering it to another port.

  You get lonely not talking to anybody for forty-eight hours. On the road, there’s no womenfolks, unless there’s a few waitresses, a couple of good old girls in the truck stop you might kid around with. They do talk about women, but they don’t really have the time for women. There’s a few available, waitresses in truck stops, and most of them have ten thousand guys complimenting them.

  There’s not much playing around that goes on. They talk of women like all guys do, but it’s not a reality, it’s dreaming. There’s not these stories of conquest—there’s the exceptional case of a Casanova—because they’re moving too much. They’re being deprived of their chance to play around. Maybe if they get more time, we’ll even see that they have a little more of that. (Laughs.)

  Truckers fantasize something tremendous. When they reach a coffee stop, they unload with all these ideas. I’ve seen fellas who build up such dreams when they come into a truck stop they start to pour it out, get about three minutes of animated description out of it, and all of a sudden come up short and realize it’s all a bunch of damn foolishness they built up in their minds. It’s still that they’re daydreaming from the truck. He builds a thing in his mind and begins to believe it.

  You sit in a truck, your only companionship is your own thoughts. Your truck radio, if you can play it loud enough to hear—you’ve got the roar of the engine, you’ve got a transmission with sixteen gears, you’re very much occupied. You’re fighting to maintain your speed every moment you’re in the truck.

  The minute you climb into that truck, the adrenaline starts pumping. If you want to have a thrill, there’s no comparison, not even a jet plane, to climbing on a steel truck and going out there on the Dan Ryan Expressway. You’ll swear you’ll never be able to get out the other end of that thing without an accident. There’s thousands of cars and thousands of trucks and you’re shifting like a maniac and you’re braking and accelerating and the object is to try to move with the traffic and try to keep from running over all those crazy fools who are trying to get under your wheels.

  You have to be superalert all the time. Say I’m loaded to full capacity, seventy-three thousand pounds. That’s equivalent to how many cars—at four thousand pounds a car? I cannot stop. I got terrific braking power. You have five axles, you’ll have fourteen tires on the ground, you got eight sets of brakes. You have to anticipate situations a block ahead of you. You’re not driving to match situations immediately in front of you. A good driver looks ahead two blocks, so he’s not mousetrapped into a situation where he’ll have to stop—because you can’t stop like a car’s gonna stop. You’re committed. It’s like an airplane crossing the ocean: they reach that point of no return. Your commitment’s made a hundred, two hundred yards before you reach the intersection. It’s really almost impossible.

  You have to get all psyched up and keep your alertness all the time. There’s a lot of stomach trouble in this business, tension. Fellas that can’t eat anything. Alka-Seltzer and everything. There’s a lot of hemorrhoid problems. And there’s a lot of left shoulder bursitis, because of the window being open. And there’s a loss of hearing because of the roar of the engine. The roar of the engine has a hypnotic effect. To give you an idea of the decibel sounds inside a cab, nowadays they’re beginning to insulate ’em. It’s so tremendous that if you play the radio loud enough to hear above the roar and you come to a tollgate and stop, you have to turn it down it’s screaming so loud. You could break your eardrums. And the indust
rial noises in the background . . . I’m sure his hearing’s affected. There was a survey made of guys that transport cars. You’ve heard the loud metal noise, where the different parts of the gates comes together. They found these fellas have a great loss of hearing. It’s one more occupational hazard. There has been different people I’ve worked with that I’ve seen come apart, couldn’t handle it any more.

  I’ll tell you where we’ve had nervous breakdowns, when we got in this ’67 thing, the wildcat. We’ve had four people associated with us in Gary have had nervous breakdowns. And at Pittsburgh, they’ve had several. The tension of this labor thing, forty-six weeks, is real strong. The tension’s even greater for a guy with a family to support . . .”

  There seemed an unusual amount of fellas having problems with their family, with the wife in particular. They’re average guys with their wives going through the change and so forth. Really, that’s an awful problem for the wife, because she has to raise the kids, she has to fight off the bill collectors on the phone. She can’t even count on her husband to attend a graduation, a communion, any kind of social function. She’s just lucky he’s home Christmas and New Year’s. He’s usually so darn tired that he’d much rather be home sleeping than getting ready to go out Sunday night.

  Sure, truckers eat a lot of pills. It’s a lot more prevalent than I thought. I heard fellas say they get a better price on bennies if they buy them by the thousand. We know a lot of individuals we consider hopheads off on benzedrine. A couple of guys I know are on it, even though it’s on the weekends when they don’t need to stay awake. It’s become a habit.

  The kids call ‘em red devils. In trucking, they call it the Arkansas Turnaround—or whatever your destination is. A lot of ’em are dispensed by drugstores on prescription for weight control. So their wife gets the pills and the old man ends up usin’ ’em to keep awake, because they’re a benzedrine base. It’ll be the little black ones or the little red ones . . .

  They’d like to pick up the kids, hitchhikers, if it weren’t for the prohibitions. I think the biggest transporters of hippies would be the owner-operators, because they want company. For years you didn’t see a hitchhiker, but now with the hippie, with kids traveling across the country, every interchange has got a bunch of long-haired, pack-sacked kids hitchhiking from one end of the country to the other. It’s a reborning . . .

  It’s a strange thing about truckers, they’re very conservative. They come from a rural background or they think of themselves as businessmen. But underneath the veneer they’re really very democratic and softhearted and liberal. But they don’t realize it. You tell ’em they’re liberal and you’re liable to get your head knocked off. But when you start talking about things, the war, kids, when you really get down to it, they’re for everything that’s liberal. But they want a conservative label on it. It’s a strange paradox.

  In the steel mill, the truckdriver is at the absolute bottom of the barrel. Everybody in that mill that is under union contract has some dignity, has some respect from management. If he’s the fella that sweeps the floor, he has job status. The man in the crane, if there’s no work for his crane, he doesn’t have to do anything. If the fella that pushes the broom in Warehouse Four, if he’s got everything groomed up, they can’t tell him, “No, you go and do another job.”

  Now comes the steel hauler. Everybody in that mill’s above somebody, from top management down. At the bottom of the ladder, there’s the hooker on your truck. He wants to feel that he’s better than somebody. He figures I’m better than this steel hauler. So you get constant animosity because he feels that the corporation looks down on this steel hauler, and he knows he can order him around, abuse him, make him wait. It’s a status thing. There’s a tremendous feeling.

  The first couple of years when I got abused, I howled and I yelled and I did my dance: “You can’t do this to me.” After a few years, I developed a philosophy. When I scream, it gives them pleasure, they can put it to me. They’re sadists. So the average steel hauler, no matter how abused he is, you always give them that smile and you leave it go over your head. You say to yourself: One day my time will come. If you don’t take this philosophy, you’ll go right out of your mind. You cause an incident, you’re barred from the mill. It’s such a competitive business that you dare not open your mouth because your company will be penalized freight—and you get it in the neck. You try to show ’em a cockiness like you could care less.

  Over a number of years, your face becomes familiar. It breaks the ice. The loader considers you an old-timer, he has some identity with you. You might find, on rare occasions, friendship. The loader is the foreman on the shift for truck loading. He has a desk in between all the piles of steel and he lays out the loads that are gonna be placed on the truck. If the hookers see the loader’s giving you respect, they’ll accept you.

  The newer people get the most grief, do the screaming, and get the worst treatment. Younger fellas. The fella that comes into this business that’s over forty takes his life’s savings and buys a truck because somebody told him there’s big money to be made and he wants to get in his own business. If you last the first five years, you last the worst hardships. Success means you survive. If you don’t make a dime on your investment, but you’re still in business after five years, we say he’s a regular. Those first five years is your biggest nut to crack. You don’t know the ropes, you don’t know how to buy and service your truck reasonable, you make all the mistakes. Fifty percent turnover in our business every year. They drop out, lose their trucks. That’s the only reward: In your mind, you feel you’re in business.

  There’s been a change since the ’67 wildcat. It spread across the country like wildfire. We’re respected in a lot of places now because they know we stand up and fight for our rights. As much as it was a money problem, it was a problem of dignity.

  “Ninety percent of the fellas were Teamster Union members, but you’d never know it. Outside of the dues money they take out of your check, they did absolutely nothing. They did less than nothing. We know that a few telephone calls by high Teamster official to steel mill officials could have changed our picture completely. If they would call up and say, ‘Look, you’re abusing our people and if you don’t straighten it out we’re gonna do something about it.’ They could put one man down there at U.S. Steel, for instances, and say, ‘I’m a Teamster official. We’re asking you guys not to load in this mill until they treat you fairly.’ In twenty-four hours we’d be getting loaded out there so fast we couldn’t keep our hat on our head.

  “But they’re establishment. They’re interlocked with the steel mills and the trucking companies. They don’t even know who their members are. Our guess is between twenty and thirty thousand steel haulers. Nobody can come up with the figures. A Teamster official was maybe a tritckdriver twenty-five or thirty years ago. Fought the good fight, built the union, got high on the hog. So many years have passed that he doesn’t even know what a truck looks like any more. He now golfs with his contemporaries from the trucking companies. He lolls about Miami Beach at the Hollywood Hotel that they own. To him, to have a deal with a truckdriver is beneath his station. It’s awfully hard when you get to the union hall to talk to a Teamster official. They’re usually ‘busy.’ That means they’re down at the Palmer House, at the Steak Restaurant. It’s a hangout for ’em.”

  Truckdrivers used to spend ninety percent of their time bitchin’ about how they got screwed at the mill, how they got screwed by the state trooper. Troopers prey on truckdrivers for possible violations—mostly regarding weight and overload. It’s extremely difficult to load a steel truck legally to capacity. If you’re a thousand pounds over, it’s no great violation but you have to get around the scales. At regular pull-offs, they’ll say: Trucks Must Cross Scales.

  You pull in there and you find, lo and behold, you’re five hundred or a thousands pounds over. You’ve got to pay a ticket, maybe twenty-five dollars, and you have to move it off. This is a great big piece of s
teel. You’re supposed to unload it. You have to find some guy that’s light and break the bands on the bundle and transfer sheets or bars over on the other truck. Occasionally it’s something that can’t be broke down, a continuous coil that weighs ten thousand pounds. You work some kind of angle to get out of there. You wish for the scale to close and you close your eyes and you go like hell to try to get out of the state. You have a feeling of running a blockade in the twenties with a load of booze. You have a feeling of trying to beat the police. Or you pay the cop off.

  Most state troopers consider truckers to be outlaws, thieves, and over-loaders. The companies and the union don’t try to upgrade our image. They don’t go to the police departments and say, “Stop abusing our members.”

  Everybody’s preying on the trucker to shake him down. The Dan Ryan is unbelievable. They’re working deals you couldn’t believe, that nobody would care about, because they’re out of state truckers. Who cares what happens to them? What would you think of a trucker coming up the Dan Ryan for the first time? He’s coming from Pittsburgh with an overload. He approaches the South Side of the city and it says: All Trucks Must Use Local Lanes. But the signs aren’t well enough marked and he’s out in the third lane and gets trapped. He can’t get over because of the other cars, he goes right up the express lane. Well, there’s cops down there makin’ their living off these poor guys. They pull him over and they say, “Hey buddy, you’re out where no trucks are supposed to be. We’re gonna have to lock you up.” They go through their song and dance about they’re horrified about how you’ve broken the law, endangering everybody. And they’re hinting around that maybe you want to make a deal.