Working

by Studs Terkel

  Maybe you don’t want to make a deal? Oh, you have to make bond and appear in court, that’s twenty-five dollars. If you’ve got an out-of-state chauffeur’s license, they’ll take your chauffeur’s license. So if you’re going to come up with a ten, he’ll hold court right there and he’ll tell you never do it again. But if you’re gonna be hardheaded—I’m gonna fight this thing —he’ll say, “Okay, we’re gonna take you in the neighborhood out here and we’re gonna park your truck and we’re gonna take you over to the station in a squad car.” I can’t swear to it, but there’s a story goin’ around that these cops are working with the people in the neighborhood. So you park your car out on those streets. While you’re at the station making bond you come back and there ain’t much left to your truck. The tires are gone, the cab’s been broken into, the radio’s gone. That’s what happens to thousands of truckdrivers.

  The cops tell you, “You get back on your truck any way you know how.” Because they don’t want to be there when you see your truck. You take a cab over there and there you stand. Now you call the copper, this official paragon of law and order, and he tells you, “How am I gonna find out who wrecked your truck and stole everything off?” A truck tires costs a hundred dollars. You’re liable to come back from the station, trying to fight your ticket, to have four hundred-dollar bills gone right off the trailer.

  Why the devil do you do it, right? There’s this mystique about driving. The trucker has a sense of power. He has a sense of responsibility too. He feels: I know everything about the road. These people making mistakes around me, I have to make allowances for them. If the guy makes a mistake, I shouldn’t swear at him, I shouldn’t threaten him with my truck. You say, “That slob can’t drive. Look at that dumb woman with her kids in there. Look at that drunk.” You’ve got status!

  Every load is a challenge and when you finally off-load it, you have a feeling of having completed a job—which I don’t think you get in a production line. I pick up a load at the mill, going to Hotpoint in Milwaukee. I take a job and I go all through the process. You have a feeling when you off-load it—you see they’re turning my steel into ten thousand washing machines, into a hundred farm implements. You feel like your day’s work is well done when you’re coming back. I used to have problems in the morning, a lot of heartburn, I couldn’t eat. But once I off-loaded, the pressure was off. I met the deadline. Then I could eat anything.

  The automobile, it’s the biggest thing in the country, it’s what motivates everybody. Even that model, when they drape her across the hood of that car . . . In the truck stop, they’re continually talking about how they backed into this particular place in one swing. The mere car drivers were absolutely in awe. When you’re in that truck, you’re not Frank Decker, factory worker. You’re Frank Decker, truck owner and professional driver. Even if you can’t make enough money to eat, it gives you something . . .

  There’s a joke going around with the truckdrivers. “Did you hear the one about the hauler that inherited a million dollars?” “What did he do with it?” “He went out and bought a new Pete.”39 “Well, what did he do then?” “He kept running until his money ran out.” Everybody knows in this business you can’t make no money. Owning that big Pete, with the chrome stacks, the padded dashboard, and stereo radio, and shifting thirty-two gears and chromed wheels, that’s heaven. And in the joke, he was using up the inheritance to keep the thing on the road.

  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.

  “We picketed for eight days on the mills. It built till we had five hundred, six hundred guys—most of ’em from out of town. Parked their trucks all over town. We hung on them gates. Sometimes we’d get down to two, three guys and we thought it was all over. But there’s a new carload of guys come in from Iowa or from Detroit or from Fremont, Ohio, or something. They’d heard about this rumble that was going on and they come to help.

  “We picketed the steel mills and we talked to any steel haulers that come in, told them not to load, to join the picket line. Some of the haulers tried to run you down. You’d have to jump for your life. Other guys would come up and they wouldn’t know what to do. They recognized a lot of faces. We met each other in truck stops for years. You know the guy—Tom, Dick, or Harry. But you never knew much more about him than just a service stop. We began to build relationships down here with these guys we’d seen for years, but we didn’t know where they lived or anything else. They’ll say, ‘What kind of truck you drive again?’ They recognize you by your truck, see?

  “So we’re having meetings. The guys call from Detroit. They shut down Armco Steel or Great Lakes Steel. Then we heard they’re picketing at Pittsburgh and finally they’re picketing in Philadelphia. And then we heard they blew up two trucks with dynamite in New Jersey. The Jersey crowd, they’re always rough. It spread clear from here to the east coast. And it went on for nine weeks.

  “Steel mills got injunctions out against us. They took us into court and locked us up and everything else. The Teamsters helped the steel mills and the carriers to try to get us back to work. They come out in cars: a company official, a Teamster official, a marshal—pointing out who we were to serve papers on. They were working together.

  “Everybody’s telling everybody: ‘They’ll go back to work. They’re all broke. They can’t last more than a couple of weeks.’ But we hung on and we hung on, you know. (He swallows hard, takes a deep breath.) Some of the guys didn’t go home at all. We raised money by going around asking truck stops and truck dealers and tire dealers to donate money and help us. A lot of ‘em were dependent on us and knew we were poor payin’ and knew that maybe if they helped us out we could start gettin’ in better shape and start to pay our bills.”

  Truckdrivers are known as an aw
ful 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. Fitzsimmons40 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’.

  “So we demanded Fitzsimmons meet with us—not that we thought he’d do anything. He’s nothing but a dirty old man shuffling along and filling a hole for Hoffa. But we did feel we could get recognition if we’d meet with him. Nothing doing. He wouldn’t even talk with us. He sent a big bully, that’s Hoffa’s right hand, the head of the goons, guy with a prison record as long as your arm. He started tellin’ us all he’s gonna do for the steel haulers. We said, ‘You ain’t doin’ nothin’ for us.’ We told him we didn’t have to listen to his boloney. He said, ‘What do you want?’ We told him we want the International to give us charters for steel locals. We want to have elections and we want to elect our own people. We want autonomy. And then we told him, ‘We want you and your crooked pals to stay ten miles away from any of our halls.’ He said he’d take the message back, and that’s where it stands now.

  “We’d become aware, checking our rates with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Department of Labor, about their misuse of our pension fund. A nine-hundred-million-dollar pension fund that got about a billion finagled away. That’s our pension. We don’t have the freightside driver’s feeling for good old Jimmy Hoffa. They don’t care how much he steals. That ain’t us. That’s our pension money in that fund. He belongs in jail, a lot of ’em do.”

  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.41 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.

  The Parking

  ALFRED POMMIER

  He is forty-nine and has been a parking lot attendant for about thirty years. He bears a remarkable resemblance to the late Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer. “They call ‘em car hikers, they call ’em jockeys. They call me Lovin’ Al, the Wizard, One-Swing Al—I’m known from Peking to Hong Kong, from the West Coast to Pecos.” We’re seated in a car on this wintry afternoon, each of us puffing away at a fifteen-cent cigar.

  It is a flat parking lot “‘cause you don’t have no floors to go. We have forty, fifty cars, lots of room to park. When you come eleven o’clock, you can’t get in. You take two, you check out three. You gotta just work around ‘em, and people squawkin’, ‘May I get my car?’ ‘We’re workin’ on it.’ ‘Why you got so many cars?’ ‘Sorry, lady.’ But it’s easier than a garage, where there’s too many men and always som
ethin’ goin’ on.”

  He is one of two attendants. He’s worked at this corner fifteen years, six days a week. “When it rains, it gets a little hard. When it’s cold, it gets very hard, ‘cause you gotta wipe the snow off the windshield. Hard on everybody, you gotta get home, get rubbed down by my wife or your girl friend. It tells on me the next morning. I’m not gettin’ any younger.

  “I don’t know who owns the lot. You never know. You ask no questions, who owns this or that. They never have us in the office. We get our check where we work. Never see who owns it. It’s big business. But you have to make your tips to make your salary ’cause the union get you only what—$1.95? If I wouldn’t make no tips, I couldn’t survive.”

  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.”

  If I should hit a car, I wouldn’t say I have no bad feelin’ about it. Things can happen. When you talk to a man nice or a lady nice, then you calm ’em down. If you have a hot temper, then it’s just a big argument. I had only one real serious argument in thirty years, me and a manager. Never had another scrap with anyone. So that’s not a bad record for feelings. I’ve had customers that have called me names. Once I had this guy from Texas, I asked him, “Will you please pull it over?” But he was a Texan, he jumped out of the car, not pulling up, and he called me an m-f. And I called him one in exchange. He finally pulled up and that was the end of that. You got a temper and another guy got a temper, you got to have the police to come get one of you off or both of you off—or the ambulance. So why not cool it?