Salamanders

This morning was our monthly safety meeting, held in the structural department fabrication shop, a building about 200 feet long by 100 feet wide and maybe 35 feet to the roof. 350 or so workers standing on the concrete and steel plate floor for 40 minutes listening to the company safety manager drone on with his cordless microphone. Or not listening (or not hearing) because either the mike wasn’t up to the task or his mike technique needs work, because it was impossible to hear anything he said except an occasional snippet. In one of these audible snippets he informed us that our eyes wouldn’t grow back if we lost them. (Did we think we were salamanders?) That was enough to satisfy me that I wasn’t missing anything by not being able to hear.

Starner, my supervisor, came back to work today after laying out Monday and Tuesday. He’s the one who last week lectured us on not missing time. Must have been some of his problems getting the best of him, because he showed no sign of being sick when I last saw him on Saturday, nor did he show any sign of being ill today.

Speaking of seeing him on Saturday, he did something strange. He was really pushing the part of the job that Vince has been working on, such that on Saturday he told me to help Vince rather than working my own job. Then, while I stood there, the two of them spent a long time reminiscing about an out of town job they had worked together, where Vince had paid a Hooters waitress $50 for her outfit - - top and shorts - - and how she had gone right then and there to the bathroom and changed out of them for him. What he did with these togs he didn’t say and I didn’t ask. But he insisted on pulling up a photo of himself with her on his cell phone. Well, this whole thing was weird - - both Vince with the Hooters outfit and Starner wasting all that time shooting the bull about it. During this same interlude, Starner showed that he, too, was no stranger to sexual weirdness. He was talking to Vince about doing something that required him to get into a tight spot, and Starner said by way of encouragement, "I could get in there with my 275 pounds," or something to that effect. Then he added, "and 50 pounds of dick." This comment came out of the clear blue. There were no women present (who he might have imagined to be interested in this information), and I’m reasonably sure Starner isn’t gay. Or maybe it was a delayed response to the Hooters discussion. Fortunately, Joe came in late Saturday and Starner put him with Vince. He sent me back to my own job.

Not Well

This morning Starner didn’t come in to work at all. My mate, Elmore, didn’t come in either, nor did his son. Among the contractors, that is to say, temps, I've seen many good, skilled shipfitters. But for some reason or other, no matter how solid they seem, you can’t depend on them to show up every day. Maybe that’s why they don’t hold permanent jobs. Not that the permanent yard workers don’t have plenty of problems. They have them all - - alcoholism, broken marriages and the burdens of child support, sometimes to more than one ex-wife, and of course, serious health problems for themselves and their spouses. On the subject of health, I've known very few shipyard workers who take care of themselves. Bad diet, smoking, failure to use protective equipment at work - - all of it. They have diabetes, high blood pressure, heart conditions, breathing problems. I don’t know what the average age of shipyard workers is, but I’d guess it’s around 50. In any case, it’s an ageing workforce. It seems like every year somebody in our yard dies of heart attack.

A couple of weeks ago Kenny, a burner, was showing around a real estate agent’s flyer with a photo of a house up for sale. What’s this, I asked. He said it was the house of a worker on night shift - - a guy whose name I didn’t recognize, although I must have recognized him if I’d seen his face. This guy, Kenny said, had hung himself in that very house two years ago. Apparently he was despondent over his deteriorating health - - diabetes and other conditions. Kenny himself is about 50. He has long, unkempt hair and mustache, always seems to have gone several days without shaving, and looks like a very big sack of potatoes. He’s also a heavy smoker.

Many shipyard workers work all the overtime they can get to pay their bills - - sometimes necessary bills, sometimes frivolous spending - - $40,000 pickup trucks and the like. I know people who’d work 12 hours a day seven days a week if they could. They don’t seem to have any lives at all outside the yard. When they get older all they think about is retirement. But 6 months or a year after they retire many of them are dead. So what’s it all for?

"Progress" - - At A Tedious Pace

Thursday, February 19

Yesterday I was working on another aluminum bulkhead with a contractor named Elmore. Elmore is a tall, skinny black man with a hatchet face and a goatee. He has a 24-year-old son who is also working on our ship and is a dead-ringer for his father - - or at least a dead ringer for how his father must have looked 24 years ago - - right down to the goatee. Elmore Sr. is quiet and not articulate, but a good worker, a "self-starter," and a competent, knowledgeable fitter.

Well, we got in a couple of hours work before we came to a dead stop because we needed some tack welding. We had a welder assigned to us, but no firewatches, so the welder couldn’t even strike an arc. Some bean counter had cut the number of firewatches on our ship. They are short of aluminum welders, but because of the lack of firewatches two aluminum welders spent the entire day idle. Makes sense to cut costs like that, right? Should I have been surprised to see this kind of incompetence and disorganization? I see it nearly every day. Well, Elmore Sr. and I joked that today we would have the firewatches but no welder. We were wrong. They still hadn’t resolved the firewatch problem and one of the aluminum welders laid out, so we had neither.

We had just come up with a couple of things we could do without a welder, when Starner, who was late again this morning, came and threw a monkey wrench in our plans. He said that because we didn’t have a welder or firewatches he was going to put us on another job for the day - - a job helping Vince. Vince is working on another part of the aluminum job and he already has a helper. Starner said some things had to be finished on that part of the job for the 50 percent progress review, which is coming up in a few days. Just to refresh your memory, a couple of weeks ago he told us they’d already had the 50 percent review and we were over our quota of hours. Obviously, that was bullshit, at least the part about the 50 percent review having taken place.

There are two related motives for wanting to show certain progress for this review. Starner and the other supervisors are under pressure from their bosses to show progress, but in the end it’s about money. (Surprise!) For one thing, if the ship isn’t completed on schedule it means big fines for the company. But also, the government pays in installments based on the percentage of work completed. The problem here is that what Starner wants done can cause disruption of the production plan. That is to say, of Vince’s production plan.

Vince, or Vicente, is a Chicano from California, close to retirement age and hard of hearing. He is an affable, humorous guy, but he’s very plodding and methodical in his work and he is going to do things his way come hell or high water. He’s also a pack rat. He spent at least two weeks assembling materials and tools for the job before he began any work at all. He’s got I don’t know how many fish boxes containing every tool known to shipfitting and then some, as well as hoards of every kind of supply from earplugs and respirator cartridges to saw blades, grinding wheels, and extension cords. As I watched him marshal this war chest it reminded me of Gen. George McClellan during the Civil War, who built up a huge, well equipped army around Washington for a never-to-happen invasion of the South. (It was this that prompted Lincoln to make his famous quip, "If you’re not going to use this army, I’d like to borrow it for a week.")

Unlike McClellan, Vince did eventually get under way, but at his own pace - - a tedious pace - - and with the help of several assistants. But Starner’s attempt to dictate a faster and the order that Vince would do things resulted in almost nothing getting done today, either by Vince and his helper, who I call "Glitch," or by Elmore and myself, since we weren’t about to step in and take over Vince’s job.

Tit for Tat

Wednesday, February 18

After lecturing us on attendance Monday, Starner was late to work yesterday and today, no doubt because some of those problems were catching up with him. Anyway, for two days we have been deprived of his words of wisdom at our shape-up meetings. Amazingly, however, after three months, somebody has finally noticed the time being wasted at these meetings, because this morning Ronnie Wilson told us that from here on out we are going to be on our jobs within 15 minutes of the start of our shift. But he tried to blame the problem on the stragglers who don’t show up at the trailer until 5, or in the odd case 10, minutes after the start-of-work whistle. Of course he made no mention of the fact that usually most of us are there waiting for the supervisors to arrive, or of the time wasted on their unbelievably slow roll-call, or their rambling, pointless speeches, or their disorganization in dispatching us to our jobs, which in most cases we don’t need to be dispatched to anyway, because we are continuing with the same job we had the day before.

Yesterday, while we were standing around waiting for the shape-up meeting to start, I "got into it" with Sanjay. Sanjay, a contractor, is an East Indian who comes not from India but from one of the Pacific islands. He is also a born-again Christian and a self-styled preacher, of which we have many in the shipyard. Normally, I am tolerant of these Jesus people -- that is, so long as they leave me alone. But Sanjay is self-righteous and annoying, so I was baiting him. "Hey," I said, "What's the 'H' stand for in Jesus' name?" "What? There is no 'H'" Sanjay replied. "Sure there is," I said. "Jesus H. Christ?" Sanjay was apoplectic. Lana, of course, jumped in to bail him out. "It stands for 'Hosannah'" she said. "'Heaven,'" another quick-witted Christian offered. Lana is a black woman, short and stout, probably somewhere in her 50s. She is another of the Jesus people. Nominally, Lana is a burner.

Burning is support craft. Burners aid the shipfitters by cutting steel with gas/oxygen torches -- scrapping out old steel that is to be replaced and trimming new steel to fit. Lana came into the shipyard 30 or more years ago, when the feminist movement was opening up industrial jobs to women and companies with government contracts were under pressure to add women to their workforces. But Lana is no feminist. Far from it. She is content to do any work they give her that is not burning. At the moment, they are keeping her in the office trailer doing paperwork. This she is good at. She is also intelligent and articulate. But she doesn’t have a good reputation as a burner. (In my opinion that’s because she does so little of it.) There’s no shortage of supervisors who’ll give her other work either because they don’t trust her to burn or because, especially in the case of the black supervisors, they regard her as a mother figure in need of protection.

Lana has been assigned to work with me a couple of times on past jobs. The last time I tried to get her to do the work believing that she was competent, or would be competent if only she would get some practice at her trade. But my efforts were frustrated by another -- male -- burner who was hanging out on our job and insisted on burning for her. Not only didn’t Lana object to this, she told me it was a woman’s place to defer to a man. Lana can be annoying for other reasons. She’s always good-humored, even "chipper," which is sometimes hard to take, especially first thing in the morning when you really don’t feel like being there. And then she’s obsessed with cleaning. Now we are supposed to clean up our work areas at the end of the day, because the Navy demands it. I comply with this. But Lana is always cleaning, not only the debris that we make, but everything else as well. The other job I remember her working for me, before she would cut anything for me I had wait for her to finish cleaning whatever it was she had taken a notion to clean. Very hard to take.

So, yesterday at lunchtime, Lana tried to pay me back for giving her pal Sanjay a hard time. She invited me to their lunchtime bible study meeting. Sure, I said, I’ll be right there. Then I plunked down in my usual spot, an unused corner of the office trailer, opened my lunch pail and got out the book I’m reading.

Double Talk

This morning at our shape-up meeting Starner exhorted us to come to work every day. “I got more problems than any of you,” he said. “But I’m here at work every day.” I turned to Summerfield, who was standing beside me. “I’d like to know what work he does,” I said. “Chasing pussy,” he replied. Summerfield, a redneck with snaggle teeth and long gray hair, is about 6’3” tall and 240 lbs. He’s got a waterfront home on which he’s struggling to make $1700 a month mortgage payments, so he doesn’t need a pep talk about coming to work. He also told me he’s got a gun collection including, I think, 39 hand guns and three AK-47s.

Later in the day Summerfield asked if he could borrow my firewatch. I said yes, because Joe and I didn’t have a welder and couldn’t do any hotwork. He said Starner had assigned him to cut some steel pads off the deck of a fan room with an angle grinder. But the firewatch coordinator had no firewatches to assign him, so Starner told him, “You’re your own firewatch today.” Starner, who always says “Safety first” (the official company line), knows very well that not only isn’t Summerfield qualified to firewatch, but firewatching for oneself is both against company policy and a violation of government rules. Luckily Summerfield wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that one, because if he’d been caught Starner would have denied telling him to do it.

Wasted Hours

Tuesday, February 10.

Starner, my supervisor, has a large mouth shaped like an upside down crescent, so that he is permanently scowling. He looks like a bulldog with a bad case of indigestion. For some reason he’s the one who talks most at our morning shape-up meetings, even though he’s not at all articulate and talks in a bark or growl. The thing of it is, he never has anything to say beyond repeating platitudes about safety and production and threatening us over various alleged infractions. He talks like a prison guard. But he always ends his rant by telling us to have a “nice and blessed day.” This has become something of a joke, with some of the workers saying the words for him. I will say this for him, at least he has enough sense of humor that he tries to grin at this.

Anyhow, this morning he told me to go to the drydock and work for Ronnie Wilson. They’re getting the ship ready to come out of drydock and we would be working on the shrouds that cover the propeller shafts, which have been removed from the ship for rework. But before I tell you about that I need to explain what I did yesterday.

You’ll recall that I was working with Joe. That was up topside doing some structural modifications to the aluminum superstructure. We’d been waiting for a new bulkhead to be fabricated and hoisted by crane onto the ship. It finally arrived over the weekend and the riggers brought it into the space. But we had to get it in place so we could trim it to fit. Normally, hanging it in place would be the job of the riggers. We also needed a welder to get ready for the riggers. The bosses were in a big rush to get this bulkhead fitted up so they could show some progress on the superstructure work. But they were incapable of getting us the welder or the riggers we needed. So, apart from a little preparatory work, we had done hardly anything until after lunch, when another guy, Kenny, happened by. Kenny had nothing to do at the time, so he and Joe got the idea to “manhandle” the bulkhead into place rather than waiting for the riggers to do it with their chain hoists.

Now the bulkhead measured about 7 ½ by 9 ½ feet and had tee-bar stiffeners attached. Even though it was aluminum it was pretty heavy to move by hand, especially since we had a number of obstructions to get over or around. I was against our trying to move it because of the danger to ourselves and to some electrical cables that were in the way. If someone got hurt or a cable was damaged they’d blame us moving the bulkhead without the riggers. But Joe and Kenny were determined, so I did what I could to help, more or less directing them, but lending a hand when necessary. I improvised a lever to raise it over one stubborn obstacle. So we managed to get it into position despite my misgivings, and I came up with a way to raise it the 4 inches or so that we needed it to be off the deck so we could trim it. Then we found that the layout department, which had been in charge of fabricating the bulkhead and had sent their people at least three times to measure for it, had made it rectangular, when the hole wasn’t a true rectangle. And they hadn’t left enough added material to cover their screw up. This would have left an unacceptable gap in one corner. We were talking about what to do when I realized that if we rotated the bulkhead slightly on its horizontal axis and trimmed out a pie shaped sliver from the top, we could make it work. I marked out the cut and we lowered the plate. Joe made the cut with a reciprocating saw. That was as far as we got at the end of the day. We were just getting started fitting the bulkhead, and up to that point my help had been critical in getting the job right.

So this morning they took me off that job, leaving it to Joe, and as it turned out, Kenny, while they put me down in the drydock with a helper. It took Ronnie Wilson a full hour to come and to show us what he wanted. Then it turned out that the machinists and riggers were still getting the shaft back into place and weren’t even ready for us. So for the most part we stood around and did nothing. Sounds pretty dumb, huh? It only makes sense if you understand shipyard logic. The big shots were on our department to get the drydock work finished, so Ronnie Wilson charged our time to drydock work, even though they it was just wasted hours, so he, and our department, could be seen to be doing what they were told. In order to be in a “supervisory” position you have to be a yes man who doesn’t ask questions or make objections.

Wednesday, February 11.

Today they put me back on the aluminum job with Joe. Yesterday while I was in the drydock Joe and Kenny had finished fitting up the bulkhead. They had had to cut some more of the piece of pie we had cut out the day before, but the fit-up looked good. There was to be a check point at 10:30 where QA and the government inspector would come to inspect the fit-up and weld joint design before the bulkhead could be welded in place. But there had been another screw-up. We found out that we hadn’t been given the right blueprints – apparently there was a later version that none of the many supervisors had bothered to tell us about. So we had to partly remove the bulkhead again to fix problems with the joint design. The check point finally came off in the afternoon. But because they had to verify the joint design, we had to leave part of the bulkhead loose; that is, not tack-welded in place, and for that reason the government inspector would only sign off on the joint design and not the fit-up.

A False Step

Monday, 02-09-2009

Today was another example, although a minor one, of how my survival skills aren’t the best. It’s a comment I made to Joe. But first let me tell you about Joe. I’ve been working with him, off and on, for the last couple of weeks.

Joe is a big guy. I don’t mean “big” as a euphemism for fat or obese. Joe is about 6’ tall, 210 lbs., affable, always smiling, always kidding around. But he’s nervous when he has nothing to do. Can’t stand still. So even though he jokes around about doing as little as possible, he’ll make work for himself. He also happens to be one of those guys, common in the shipyard, who don’t drive a car because their license is suspended for D.U.I. But the bosses consider him one of the go-getters. I’d say he’s average as a shipfitter in terms of ability. He’s neither precise nor careful. During the time I’ve been working with him I’ve caught him in several mistakes. He will also work unsafe frequently, like today, when he was working straddling a stepladder – one foot on a step, the other on a cross brace. And he sometimes uses an angle grinder without wearing a face shield. That kind of thing. Not really serious, but enough to get him written up if a safety inspector saw him. I didn’t like Joe at first, in part because of his tendency to kiss up to the supervisors, but now I’ve come to like him. We complement each other, sort of. I let him be the go-getter, because I have a Bad Attitude. Meanwhile, I keep my eye on him and make corrections when necessary. Oddly enough, though, it’s often me who makes a suggestion that moves things along while he’s just spinning his wheels.

So, for what I said. In the morning our nominal supervisor, Starner, seemed to be camping out on our job. He just stood there, saying nothing. It gave me the heebee jeebies. I kept waiting for him to leave, but he didn’t. After a while, right outside the space, I said to Joe, “Is he going to hang out here all day?” Later, Joe told me Starner said to him, “He knows I heard him, doesn’t he?” And I thought, “Uh oh, I screwed up.” I didn’t think he could hear me. But then, as I thought it over, I remembered having this split-second flash as I said it, that was like, maybe he can hear me, but I don’t care. Well, it wasn’t really a big deal anyway. Joe said, “He did get off our job.” But somebody else suggested the real reason Starner left. There were no women there for him to hit on. The week before he’d hung out for a couple of days on Joe’s job, first trying to hit on a woman electrician, then on the firewatch.

Headache Volunteer List

Last Saturday I had a good job, so it figures that yesterday I would have a bad job. Yes, I signed up to work on Saturday again. Even though I’m not really hurting for money, I am paying out of pocket for materials to complete an extreme makeover of my house, and I can use more of a cushion than I have, especially in these uncertain times.

Although the job I had yesterday wouldn’t win the academy award for worst job in the shipyard, it might easily be a nominee. They sent me to another ship for the day, down in a ballast tank with half a dozen contractors (temps), needle-gunning paint. The ship must have run aground or hit something because the bottom shell was dented in and a number of the web frames – the ribs of the ship – crumpled. Our yard will scrap out and replace the damaged steel.

For safety reasons having to do with the danger of fire and fumes, the paint around the affected areas must be removed before the steel can be cut out with burning torches. To do this we use needle guns. These are compressed-air-powered tools weighing about 10 pounds, the business end of which consists of about 30 steel “needles” about 3/32” in diameter. When you press the trigger these needles vibrate and pulverize the paint. They are extremely loud, even with earplugs worn, especially when you’re in a tank echoing with 6 or 7 needle guns going at once. And the vibration is enough to shake the fillings of your teeth loose. Actually, few of the needle guns were going at the same time because there was no supervision in the tank. In fact, when the supervisor assigned me to the job, he didn’t even show it to me himself, but told one of the contractors who’d been working the job to show me where it was. No one had even marked up the paint that had to come off. Still, I found a place that I knew had to be needle-gunned..

My productivity goes way down when they give me a job that isn’t commensurate with my experience and skill level. In my opinion, for what it’s worth, assigning work appropriately is one of the criteria for a good supervisor, and placing people in the jobs they can do best is a precondition for efficient production. Needle-gunning is some of the least skilled work we have. That isn’t to say that all of us don’t have to hew wood and draw water once in a while. If a house is burning down no one should be exempt from passing a bucket unless they’re the only one who knows how to get the pump working. Of course if I said this stuff to management they’d go berserk and howl about how we have to be ready to do whatever job they assign us, etc. etc. But that’s just laziness on their part.

As it happened, I doubt I did 2 hours actual needle gunning during my 8 hour shift. Add to that an hour or so to check out a needle gun from the tool room and get set up. But get this: even though there is temporary lighting in the tanks, we’re required for safety sake to carry a flashlight in case the power goes out – which happens for one reason or another more often than you might think. Well, in the morning the cheap storeroom issue flashlight crapped out. So after lunch I went to get some new batteries, for which I needed a supervisor to write me an order. (You’d think that when they have a lot of people working in tanks they’d plan ahead and have batteries on hand, but they don’t.) I found one supervisor but he didn’t have any stores order blanks with him so he told me to go back to the supervisors’ office in the structural shop and find the other supervisor. Well, I had just come from there and wasn’t about to make the trek back again. Luckily I found a welder supervisor who had a blank. I filled it out myself and took it back to the first supervisor to sign. But then it turned out that the storeroom trailer by the drydock was closed, so I had to go all the way to the main storeroom, which is even farther than the structural shop. There, there was only one guy behind the counter and by the time I got back to the ship with a working flashlight nearly two hours had elapsed. But I don’t think any of the contractors did any more needle-gunning than I did. Still, I did enough needle-gunning to give me a headache. Don’t think I’ll sign the overtime volunteer list next week.

Lead Man From Another Planet

The most curious of the supervisors on my job right now, in terms of my relationship to him, is Hilton Dines. Hilton is a slim black man who makes me think of Barack Obama on speed. He is light-skinned, with green eyes and Caucasian features and he speaks in a refined and educated manner, although his bursts of machine-gun fire speech are staccato and telegraphic. He clearly doesn’t look or sound like he comes from the ‘hood. I don’t know what his background is, but I’ll bet it’s a military family. Under his hardhat he almost always wears a sweatshirt with the hood up. You also often see him wearing a cartridge-type respirator even when he’s out in the open air. When he takes this gear off, however, you see that his shaved head is strangely shaped. He might be the brother from another planet.

During the 5 years I was a QA inspector, I knocked heads with Hilton several times. Once, they had to call a special meeting with him and me and some of the brass from the QA and structural departments just to try to mediate between us. Given this past history, it should be no surprise that the first time I was assigned to work under Hilton after I came back to the structural department I thought maybe he might take the occasion to settle an old score with me. Much to my surprise, however, he was friendly and treated me with respect. I respect him as well, and not just because he respects me, although that’s a big part of it. Even though he’s much too hyper, he at least spends a lot of time on the ship, where a shipyard supervisor should be, and he’s conscientious and not corrupt. I don’t mean corrupt in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that. I mean that he doesn’t use his position to create an easy niche for himself or to manipulate overtime to maximize his own income as many of them do. And even though he’s on the ship a lot, he leaves you pretty much alone and when he talks to you it’s like the two of you are intelligent collaborators. He doesn’t come and tell you a lot of stupid shit you already know.

I hadn’t worked any overtime in a couple of weeks, so last Saturday I volunteered to come in, and because my own job wasn’t working, I worked for Hilton for the day. It was probably the best day I’ve had since I came on this ship. We have removed the king posts -- retractable masts used to support cables that hauled supplies to the ship during replenishment at sea. (Supplies will now be delivered by helicopter.) What I was doing on Saturday was filling in one level of deck in what used to be the trunk that housed the forward king post. Even though this section of deck was small, about 5 feet by 5 feet, we were putting it in in three sections of plate, in part because the deck changed thickness here from 7/16 inch to ¼ inch, but also because it wasn’t an even plane here, but had a knuckle offset of about 10 degrees. This meant that the T-bar stiffener that supported it underneath also had to have a knuckle. Now 19 out of 20 shipfitters would have done the obvious and usual procedure, which would be to fit the plate sections in the deck, then piece in the T-bar underneath. But if they had done that they would have found themselves in trouble, and likely ended up with a mess, because when I trimmed the center plate section to size and fit it temporarily in place, I saw that it had a bow in it. Unless they straightened it first with a temporary stiffener on top, they would not have been able to correctly fit in the sections of T-bar underneath. And this process would have been very time consuming. I chose instead to first make up the T-bar with the proper knuckle in it and fit that up first. It would then be easy to fit the plate sections on top of it. Because of the location and various obstructions, it wasn’t easy to pick up the correct angle from the existing deck, but I came up with a simple solution using a piece of scrap steel angle I found lying around. My burner and I made up the T-bar and tack welded it together. I checked it and the knuckle seemed perfect or close to it. It needed 1/4 inch trimmed off to fit, however, and we had run out of time. Hilton wanted night shift to finish the job, so I marked off where it needed to be trimmed. I was afraid, however, that night shift wouldn’t understand what I was doing and would screw it up. But when I came in and checked it on Monday, they had the whole thing together right and it looked great. Did anybody notice or care? I did, and that’s all that matters to me. Hilton was happy with the job, although I don’t think he fully appreciated the genius involved in my work (ha!).

The Bad Boy and the Backstabbers

So, for my deficient survival skills. The reason I’m working on the ship I’m on now is that I got kicked off the last ship I was on.

The supervisor there, Dean, used to be a friend of mine, long ago, before he became a supervisor. Until the incident I’m about to describe, I still considered him a friend, although in the years he’s been a supervisor he’s become so “ate up” with the job that he’s not interested in anything else. This particular job was one that we were working at another shipyard nearby. The company I work for wasn’t the prime contractor on that one, but a sub. Anyhow, this ship was a rather old Navy amphibious ship.

Dean, after bouncing me around on several different jobs, all of them partly or completely screwed up by people who had worked on them before I got there, assigned me a work item that involved setting foundations in the overhead for new cooling units. These units are large - - roughly 5 feet long by 3.5 feet wide by 16 inches high and weigh several hundred pounds. There were four of them, all to be located in very cramped control rooms, the largest of which was about 10 feet by 15 feet. All these spaces were filled with various types of equipment and had several trades and different contractors working in them at the same time.

The units were to be bolted to the foundations which were made of steel angle welded to the deck above. For some reason our fabrication shop had made them all 2 inches too wide and in such a way that it was impossible to drill all the mounting holes in the right places. Okay, my helper and I solved that problem by drilling new holes in the mounting flanges of the units themselves and then transferring this new hole pattern to the foundation. Annoying, but no big deal. Then, it happened that in one of the control rooms the Navy’s plans called for mounting the unit in a location so close to an adjacent bulkhead that when it was raised into place it was almost impossible to get the bolts in. But my helper on this one, “Sancho Panza,” and I managed to do it somehow. I have long arms, but because of all the equipment, piping, electrical cables, etc. in the way, I had to stretch up at a very awkward angle while standing precariously on a ladder that wasn’t under me because of equipment in the way. Plus I had to get both arms up behind the unit, one to reach up over to hold the nut, while I turned the socket wrench with a long extension the other. The unit, meanwhile, teetered on a table jack that the riggers couldn’t center under the unit properly, again because of the equipment in the way, equipment that couldn’t be moved. All in all, not a safe situation. Nevertheless, we made it happen, as they say. But when I got down from the ladder I couldn’t straighten up for quite a while. I had pulled a muscle in my back. It was the end of the shift and I wasn’t going to go back to our yard to report to first aid, knowing there was nothing they could do beside waste my time sending me somewhere for x-rays and ultimately giving me some pain killers. Anyhow, I wasn’t in a lot of pain and my back was better the next day. Okay, I know, I’m sounding like a whiner. But I have to give this background.

A couple of weeks went by. Then some inspector discovered that whoever had put up that foundation had failed to cut off some pieces of an old foundation they were supposed to rip out. It didn’t make any difference, because the cooling unit covered it up, but the prime contractor insisted the unit had to come down again and the old foundation removed. Dean, who had never checked behind the guys that screwed up here -- he wasn’t checking behind anybody -- ordered me to do it. (Dean, in fact, almost never came on the ship at all. He just went to meetings and did paperwork in the office trailer.) By this time I had lost what remaining respect I’d had for this ex-friend. Actually, he didn’t order me directly, he did it through Myron, his go-fer. Myron had just made supervisor a month after graduating from apprentice school. Now, apparently, he was an apprentice supervisor, because he didn’t do any supervising. He didn’t do anything except run errands for Dean.

Anyhow, it was Myron, delivering the message from Dean, who told me to take the cooling unit down again. After all the grief getting it up, I was pissed. I told him the back of the unit was impossible to get at, that I’d messed up my back putting it in place, and that I wasn’t going to risk messing it up again. This, after all, was a company that constantly harangues us about safety and made us all sign a pledge not to do anything unsafe. Myron didn’t know what to say. He hemmed and hawed, then said he’d talk to the superintendent in charge and see if there was some other way of solving the problem. That was in the morning. Then, as I was on my way to lunch, Myron stopped me and told me that the riggers would be in the control room right after lunch to take the unit down. “Okay,” I said. That was all. I knew what he meant, because in our company we, the shipfitters, are the ones who have to unbolt stuff. Then the riggers remove it. But he didn’t tell me to be there, and I’m not getting paid to read minds. After lunch I didn’t go to that space, except to pass through and get something I’d left there (the riggers hadn’t arrived yet). Instead I went to another location that Myron had told me to take care of. About 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon I came off the ship and there was Myron. He asked me where I’d been and claimed they’d been looking for me all afternoon. Then he lied and said he’d told me to be in the control room to unbolt the cooling unit for the riggers. He ordered me to pack up my tools and go back to our yard and report to the foreman. I said I was going to talk to Dean, which made him furious. Dean wasn’t around, however. When I finally got hold of him on his cell phone he said he was in a meeting but when he was done he would meet me in the control room to look at the situation of the cooling unit. But he never showed up. By then it was the end of the shift. Next morning at the start of the shift I did report to the foreman. I explained about the cooling unit, but he claimed to know nothing about this whole business. He phoned Dean, who denied that sending me back to the yard had anything to do with anything except that he was cutting back on manpower and didn’t need me any longer. That was total bullshit. Kicking me off the job was about Myron’s ego and power and Dean just decided to bail on the whole issue. Later, I learned from one of the other supervisors that the buzz in the supervisors’ office at the yard was that I had trouble taking orders from young black men. It had to be “young” because at least half the supervisors are black and I’ve never been accused of having trouble taking orders from any of the others. More on this later.

Asleep at the Wheel

Today at the shape-up meeting at the start of our shift, Starner, my supervisor, told the crew that we were “in the red” for hours expended on our job. They had just held the 50 percent progress review, we were nowhere near finished, but we had already used up all the hours allotted to the job. Now every week they have progress meetings where they go over the job item by item. The progress in work completion is supposed to match or better the calendar. That is to say, when we have used up, say, 10 percent of the days allotted for the job in the contract they are supposed to be able to report the work as 10 percent completed. Likewise, each supervisor makes out time sheets each day showing the number of man hours spent by each worker on each work item worked that day. They also have printouts showing the hours budgeted overall to each work item. So how is it possible that they suddenly discover at the halfway point that we are “out of hours?”
Even more astounding, Starner blamed it on us for “messin’ off.” “Now we got no hours, there ain’t no messin’ off,” he declared. Those were his exact words. “You gonna have everybody and their momma walkin’ the ship,” he said. Then Ronnie Wilson, who is over Starner had his say. “You can’t come here every day and expect to steal money from the man,” he told us. “You’re putting his job on the line,” he said, referring to Starner. “You’re putting my job on the line.”
Now how can it be that these supervisors have just now discovered that we’ve been “messing off” and stealing the man’s money for over two months without their knowing it? Either this whole thing about being out of hours is bullshit (the general opinion) or they have been asleep at the wheel. Or both. I vote for both. But I do know where a lot of lost hours have gone. On Friday we all spent the last two hours of the day pulling back lines – extension cords, air hoses, and welding lines – this was to impress somebody – and then we had to run them again this morning in order to do any work. And then there’s all the hours wasted on these bullshit meetings.