Sausagegate

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Petty corruption is common in the shipyard. I'm not talking about bribes, kickbacks, or that sort of thing. I mean corruption that takes the form of people engaging in business enterprises, legal or illegal, while on the company payroll, which means on the taxpayers dime, since almost all the work we do is Federal contracts.

People run gambling pools for football or basketball. There is, or I strongly suspect there is, prostitution. I've heard of instances of people being caught and fired for having sex while working (or supposed to be working) aboard ships. That's easy to do on night shift when there are few people around and practically no supervision. Knowing the people in the shipyard as I do, I'd strongly suspect that in a case like that a commercial transaction was involved. I also heard of a worker, or two workers sharing, who paid a firewatch $100 a week for sex on a regular basis. In that case I doubt that any sex took place on the job, but the transaction was certainly set up there. Anyhow, it gives an indication, tip of the iceberg so to speak.

I once had a firewatch working for me over a period of time, a black woman about 35. Her mother was career army, and she had lived all around the worlk. She she was unusually well-educated and well-spoken for a firewatch. We talked a lot, which upset another firewatch, a lesbian who had a crush on this woman. My firewatch didn't have a car, and since she lived along my route home, I offered her a ride. On the way, she asked if we could stop at a 7-Eleven and asked me for a couple of bucks to pay for whatever it was she wanted. I gave her rides a couple more times, but stopped when I saw that the mooching was becoming a regular habit. Some weeks later I learned that she'd been arrested for prostitution and her lesbian friend had been bailed her out. I never heard anybody accuse that woman of hustling on the job, but I mention her story because I'm sure there are others like her among the firewatches, the lowest echelon of female shipyard workers, who rely on casual or part time prostitution to supplement their otherwise erratic income.

Another form of corruption in the shipyard involves union officials. When I first came to work at the place where I work now, 30 years ago (I left after 5 years, then returned many years later), the union president was a welder. The company gave him an especially easy job. He never had to go out on a ship, but stayed in the welding shop all day and did little gravy jobs from time to time. He had a refrigerator there, and sold sodas and snacks. He had his gravy job and ran his little side-line business with the full knowledge of the company. You think he accepted those favors from the company and didn't give them anything back?

The current vice-president of the union is also a supervisor, in name at least, which to me is a conflict of interest in itself. He has the rank and pay of a supervisor, But the real reason he has it is that he's a so-called 'apprentice instructor.' In reality he does little or no instructing of the apprentices. All he does is monitor their attendance, disciplinary problems they may have, and the notebooks in which they are supposed to record what they have done on the job. But he is in a position of power over them. The union pays a bounty of $20 or $30 per head for each new union member that someone signs up (we're in a 'right-to-work' state). So this guy uses his authority over the apprentices to get them to join the union, then collects the bounty on them. It probably doesn't amount to much money over the course of a year, a few hundred bucks at most. But he also uses his position to get overtime work whenever he wants it, although he does almost nothing when he does comes in on overtime apart from walking around and acting like a big-shot. Using their position to arrange overtime for themselves is something many of the supervisors do, by the way.

But here's the case I wanted to talk about. My job was shut down temporarily so we could concentrate on jobs that have to be finished for 'PCD,' or 'partial completion date.' Yesterday Starner had me helping Vince. But this morning he told to help Harry Edwards, the crew leader, who's working under Marc Malloy, not Starner. Night shift had put in a large, curved side plate of thick aluminum. They'd 'made up' (fitted together flush) the butts, or the edges of the plate, but hadn't pulled it in to the longitudinal beam that is part of the framework of the ship. Edwards wanted me to fix it, which meant undoing almost everything that night shift had done and doing it over again. That wasn't difficult, but the odd thing was that Edwards already had three fitters and an apprentice working on this job, not to mention a welder. I ended up supervising all these people as well as working with the tools myself, which is what the crew leader is supposed to do. So I'm thinking, well, they must be giving Edwards too much to do if he can't be here taking care of this himself.

When we had the job most of the way finished, I went looking for Edwards to report. That was at 11:10 am, 50 minutes before lunch. I couldn't find him anywhere, but I ran into Marc Malloy and asked him if he'd seen him. "No," he said, "But he's probably back in the shop making his food." What he was talking about was that Edwards sells sausage and onion sandwiches at lunch time from the locker room over the fabrication shop. These he prepares using one of those big, banquet size slow cookers.

I'd known about this little sideline of Edwards's, because I'd seen him doing it one day when I came to work around 11:30 am after a doctor's appointment. At the time I wondered how he got away with it, but I didn't think about it any more until sometime later when I ran into him collecting money, during working hours, for his football pool. He was doing it right out in the open - - in the supervisors' trailer. I've heard that a lot of the supervisors are Edwards's lunch-time customers, including Bobby Lee Palmer, the assistant foreman of our department. Go figure.