A Big Mistake

It's been more than six months since I've posted an entry here. The main reason is that I had nothing new to report. It was all "same old, same old" at work and I didn't want to harp on the same crap over and over again.

For five months I worked next door in the "junkyard" under my old/ex- friend Dean, who as I mentioned in my last post had just moved out of his house, with his wife initiating divorce proceedings. We have several echelons of supervisors in the yard. The lowest, a Step 3, is in the union bargaining unit, and thus has union protection/representation, such as it is. In theory (if I can even use such a word in the context of the place where I work) a step 3 is not in charge of a job--that is to say an entire ship. But Dean was a Step 3 for many years, and for the last several had been acting as a Step 2, running many jobs for our department, including those we worked next door at the junkyard, where our company wasn't the prime contractor. Even though the higher-ups tried to persuade Dean to accept promotion to Step 2, he declined for a long time, mostly to keep the union representation and union pension plan. Then, a few months ago, he finally relented. He couldn't have foreseen that this would be a fatal error.

A few weeks ago we learned that Dean had been arrested and jailed, charged with sexually molesting his adolescent step-daughter. Now I have no way of knowing whether there was any truth to the charges. But what made the whole thing suspicious was that, as I mentioned in my last entry--last June--Dean had then just separated from his wife, so presumably since then hadn't been in a position to molest his step-daughter. I suspected that some of this must have been connected with his increasingly messy divorce.

In any event, Dean spent eight days in jail, and when he tried to come back to work they told him he was fired. (They could do this at will since he was no longer a member of the bargaining unit.) Dean had been with the company for over 30 years, having begun as an apprentice. Well, he made a number of phone calls to old friends, as he told me later, "begging" them for his job back. They were able to get him rehired--but only as a "new hire"--a shipfitter with no seniority, and thus subject to layoff whenever the work gets slack. In addition, he went from having four weeks annual vacation to only one as a new hire. Furthermore, the HR director told him that if he spends any more time in jail he'll be out for good.

After this I ran into him in the shop and talked to him for a few minutes. He told me his wife offered to drop the molestation charges if he'd agree to sign the house over to her. I can't be certain that there's nothing to the charges, but even if there is, why did she wait so long to make them if it wasn't simply to use it against him in the divorce proceedings. Property-wise, I'm told, everything belongs to Dean, not his wife, including the house, which he already owned when he married her. (He always provided for the family on his own, he says, as she never worked.) Anyhow, if Dean had stayed in the bargaining unit instead of accepting the Step 2 position they could have busted him back to shipfitter, but not taken away his seniority and vacation.