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.