Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Fri, Dec 15, 2000 at 11:32:21AM -0500, Austin, Roger wrote:
>  I'm with Steve. I grew up in a furniture factory in western NC. I've
> hammered nails on roofs of new houses as well as some other jobs before
> and during college. Most IT workers haven't seen bad working conditions
> yet. Job security is fairly stable if you want it and compensation is
> more than most comparable work.

I feel as though I should add a bit of historical commentary here, to
clarify my last message. When I graduated from college, with a
four-year degree (in the highly lucrative field of religious studies
and philosophy), the only options open to me were graduate school (a
path which would have led to a career as a teacher, in all likelihood)
and entering the job market. I had no marketable skills save four
years spent working behind a bar, some time doing landscaping and
facilities management and carpentry, and a collection of hand-drawn
flyers from four years of doing advertising for the bar where I worked
(which also catered to graduate students, FWIW - giving me a firsthand
view of the miseries unique to the higher education underclass ;)

I ended up working more carpentry, mostly refinishing work, and went
back home to Maine, where I found work on a Ford assembly line (putting
together steering shaft components for Topaz, Taurus, and an English
version of the Taurus). I worked twelve hour shift work, and had rust
so deeply embedded in the skin of my hands (from the metal shavings I
collected by working with freshly milled parts) that it took a month
or so for my hands to return to normal color after I left to go deliver
pizza. (I delivered pizza during a super bowl snowstorm and had my
brakes lock up at a stoplight, nearly sending me careening into a
cement truck, FWIW. To make the gas money I needed to leave town.)

I moved down here in February on 1993, and worked more carpentry,
printed t-shirts (on a press that was set to the perfect height for
the 4' 1" woman who owned the place, which meant deep knee bends all
day for me) in an old converted cinder block chicken slaughterhouse,
standing next to a curing belt oven running at 425 degrees or more.
We had a spot thermometer that we used to check the temperature of the
shirts as they came off the belt, to ensure that they were cured. A
quick check of the temperature around the room showed anywhere from
110 to 130 degrees at any given moment, when the curing oven was
running. Let's just say I drank a lot of bottled water, and that I
had to pay for it myself. I'm grateful to Bojangles, too, for the
salty food and giant iced tea with a lot of ice. I was eventually
laid off. I hear they're doing pretty well now, but at the time,
it was too much for them to pay me six bucks an hour (even though
I could have walked in the other t-shirt place up the street and
made ten, with free training, as I found out later.) Oh, and the
kicker - they almost didn't hire me because I *wasn't* gay. The
t-shirt place was owned by a lesbian woman, we had a lesbian sales
manager, and a gay designer. So I was the token straight guy :).

When I worked carpentry, we did finish work (mostly running base shoe
and trim - which meant working with coping saws and chop saws, to
which I owe this lovely inch-long scar just above the knuckle of my
right hand index finger - where I tried to chop it off one day due to
a malfunctioning brake on the chop saw) and framing work. One day, in
the rain, while we were unloading a bunch of floor joists off a truck
(with my boss standing on the top of a two-by-four wall, handing the
joists to me, nine feet below on the cement pad) he dropped a joist,
as it started to twist and he lost control of it. I managed to catch
it and fix the twist, keeping him from falling off the wall, just
after it bounced off my head and shoulder, driving me to my knees. And
the effort involved in keeping the joist from flipping over wrenched
my other shoulder, which was lame for a few days afterwards. I counted
myself lucky. He gave me a fifteen minute break.

When my boss hired his stoned brother to come work for him, too, I
finally left for good, as my night job doing document conversion had
turned into a full-time position. I was ecstatic - no more working
in hundred-degree heat, with risk to life and limb. We had comfortable
chairs, big monitors, fully-articulatable keyboard trays, and we got
to use these top of the line Sun workstations. :) Life was good.

I don't doubt that unions have been good for labor with respect to the
sorts of things I describe above - unsafe working conditions, giving
easily replaceable workers job security, fighting discrimination,
etc. I still have the scars to show for my time spent working without
union representation (and probably in complete ignorance of every
single state workplace safety regulation, too, for that matter).

I grew up in Maine, where my first memory of a union-related matter
was driving through Jay, Maine, during a mill workers' strike. I was
maybe sixteen, my brother twelve, and my mother took us through Jay on
our way to New Hampshire. We were stopped by men carrying baseball
bats wrapped in duct tape and shotguns, and asked what our business
was. Apparently, I looked like a scab. This was at the tail end of the
Reagan era, when International Paper - long known for its poor
treatment of workers and lax attitude towards workplace safety -
followed the practice of firing strikers and hiring permanent
replacements. I'm not embarrassed to say I was scared for my life.
And I'm sure my mom wouldn't mind me saying she chain-smoked all
the way to New Hampshire, with shaky hands. We found out later (from
a documentary, I forget which) that the point of the duct tape was
that if you hit someone with the bat, blood wouldn't soak into the
wood, and the duct tape could be stripped off and replace. *shiver*

They eventually lost the strike, and the failure has been a clarion
call for labor in America to wake up and rethink their tactics. I'm
only slightly comforted that there was a somewhat positive outcome
to the strike that led to my mother explaining to a man holding a
baseball bat that I was still in high school and that we were just
passing through - not that we were there to steal bread from his
children's mouths.

But the idea of workers at a high-tech startup forming a union seems
to me to be a mockery of what unions in more mature industries have
achieved and can achieve. And I'm sure the folks with the baseball
bats would agree with me.

Steve

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