Revisiting a "Working" Class Classic
There's nothing new under the Sun.
Back about a week before Christmas, my wife and I were visiting some friends in town whom we had just helped move into their new home. Given that I love Christmas Trees, I spent most of the time sitting in the front room, in front of their tree, which also happened to be where they kept most of their books.
As one is want to do, I had a nosey glance around the bookcases to see what, if anything, stood out from this library, and I happened upon this -
By pure coincidence, the high school teacher who had told me about this wonderful book passed away not long after the holidays -
I can’t remember what the context was for Mawson recommending the book to me, but I respected Mawson so much that I basically read everything he mentioned; so it was that as a teenager, I dove into Studs Terkel’s 800 page collection of interviews with working people titled simply enough, ‘Working’.
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Back before Blogs, podcasting, The Internet, or Color TV, Studs Terkel interviewed everyone from MLK, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa and many other celebrities for radio, and right on down to the average working person for his many books and other publications. He had quite a career, of which you can read more at his Wiki entry.
Nearly 30 years later, I borrowed my friend’s copy of ‘Working’ from the library next to the Christmas Tree, and re-visited the chapter on a truck driver named Frank Decker.
Now, dear reader, I am going to share the entirety of this lengthy interview with Mr Decker, a steel hauler who worked between the mills of Gary and Hammond, Indiana, and various locations in Wisconsin. ‘Working’ has passed into Public Domain, and you can download a pdf of it basically anywhere.
You will notice sections emphasized in Bold Italics as examples of some things never changing, and worthy of your consideration.
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He had been hauling steel “out of the Gary mills into Wisconsin. They call this a short haul, about 150 miles in radius.” He had been at it since 1949 when he was nineteen years old. “I figure about 25 hundred trips. Sounds monotonous, doesn’t it?”
Most steel haulers are owner-operators of truck and trailer. “We changed over to diesel, about fifteen years ago. Big powerful truck. You lease your equipment to the trucking companies. Their customers are the big steel corporations. This is strictly a one-man operation.”
Since the wildcat strike of 1967 he’s been an organizer for the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers (FASH). “Forty-six months trying to build an association, to give the haulers a voice and get ’em better working conditions. And a terrific fight with the Teamsters Union.”
Casually, though at times with an air of incredulousness, he recounts a day in the life of a steel hauler.
I’ll go into the steel mills after supper. Load through the evening hours, usually with a long waiting line, especially years ago before the Association started. We’d wait as high as twelve, fifteen hours to get loaded. The trucking companies didn’t charge the corporations for any waiting time, demurrage—like they did on railroad cars.
We get a flat percentage no matter how much work we put in. It didn’t cost the trucking company anything to have us wait out there, so they didn’t charge the steel outfits anything. They abused us terribly over the years. We waited in the holding yard behind the steel mill. The longest I’ve ever waited was twenty-five hours.
You try to keep from going crazy from boredom. You become accustomed to this as time goes by—four hours, eight hours, twelve hours. It’s part of the job to build patience. You sit in the cab of the truck. You walk a half mile down to a PX-type of affair, where you buy a wrapped sandwich in cellophane or a cup of coffee to go. You sit in the mill by the loader’s desk and watch the cranes. You’ll read magazines, you’ll sleep four hours, you’ll do anything from going nuts. Years ago, there was no heat in the steel mills. You had to move around to keep from freezing. It’s on the lakefront, you know.
Following the ’67 wildcat strike, the trucking companies instituted a tariff that said four hours we give the steel mill for nothing, the fifth hour we begin to charge at $13.70 an hour. We get seventy-five percent of that or ten dollars. And when we deliver, they got four free hours at our point of delivery. So we start every day by giving away eight potential free hours. Besides your time, you have an investment ranging from fifteen to thirty thousand dollars in your truck and trailer that you’re servicing them free. The average workingman, he figures to work eight hours and come home. We have a sixteen-hour day.
If I were to go in the mill after supper, I’d expect to come out maybe midnight, two ’ in the morning. The loading process itself is fifteen to thirty minutes. Once they come with the crane, they can load the steel on it in two or three lifts. Maybe forty-five to fifty thousand pounds.
We protect it with paper, tie it down with chains and binders, tarp it, sign our bills, move toward the gate. It takes you fifteen to twenty minutes to get to the front gate. I must weigh in empty and weigh out loaded. Sometimes, even though you’re all loaded, tarped down, and everything, you get on the scale and you’re off-weight. If you scale in at twenty-five thousand pounds empty and you come out weighing seventy-two thousand pounds, you’re five hundred, six hundred pounds off the billed weight. You have to go back and find out who made a mistake. Let’s say it’s over the one percent they’ll allow. They have to weigh everything again and find out that some hooker made a paper mistake. That’s happened many times to haulers. Prior to ’67, we never got paid a penny for it.
Years ago, we ran through city streets, alongside streetcars, buses, and what have you. It was a two-hour run from the mills of Gary to the North Side of Chicago. Some seventy-six traffic lights. Every one of them had to be individually timed and played differently. If you have to stop that truck and start it, it’s not only aggravating and tiring, but you’d wear out the truck twice as fast as you would if you made those lights. It was a constant thing of playing these lights almost by instinct.
This is all changed with the expressways. It’s just as if automation had entered the trucking business. Now you pull out of U.S. Steel in Gary and you don’t have a light until you drop off at the expressway in the city of Milwaukee. It’s a miracle compared to what it used to be. So much easier on yourself, on your equipment.
A stop at the Wisconsin state line, a place to eat. Big trucks stop there. Maybe meet a bunch that have been in the steel mill all night. Coffee-up, tell all the stories, about how badly you’re treated in the steel mill, tell about the different drunks that try to get under your wheels. Then move towards your destination and make the delivery at seven ’ in the morning. We’re talking about thirteen hours already. My routine would be to drop two days like this and not come home. Halfway back from Milwaukee take a nap in the cab at a truck stop. You use the washroom, the facilities, you call your dispatcher in Gary, and pick up another load. Went home for a day of sleep, wash up, get rejuvenated, live like a human being for a day, come back to the mill after supper, and be off again. During the last ten years almost everybody bought a sleeper truck. It has facilities behind the seat. If you were to get a hotel room every night you were on the road, why, you’d be out of business shortly.
On weekends, if you’re lucky enough to be home, you’re greasing the truck and repairing it. It’s like a seven-day week. There’s nobody else to do the work. Years ago, the rate of truck repair was five dollars an hour. Today it’s eleven, twelve dollars an hour. You do ninety percent of the work yourself, small repairs and adjustments.
I would make two round trips to Milwaukee and pass within four blocks of my house and never go home. You can’t park a big truck in the neighborhood. If the police have anything to do with it, you can’t even park on an arterial street more than an hour. It’s a big joke with truck drivers: We’re gonna start carrying milk bottles with us. Everywhere we go now, there’s signs: No Truck Parking. They want you to keep that thing moving. Don’t stop around here. It’s a nuisance; it takes up four spaces, which we need for our local people. You’re an out-of-town guy, keep moving.
If I chose to park in the truck terminal, I’d have an eight-mile ride—and I don’t think I’d be welcome. The owner-operator, we’re an outcast, illegitimate, a gypsy, a fella that everybody looks down on. These are words we use. We compare ourselves to sailors: we sail out on the highways. The long-distance hauler is gone for a week, two weeks, picking up a load at one port, delivering it to another port.
You get lonely not talking to anybody for forty-eight hours. On the road, there’s no womenfolks, unless there’s a few waitresses, a couple of good old girls in the truck stop you might kid around with. They do talk about women, but they don’t really have the time for women. There’s a few available, waitresses in truck stops, and most of them have ten thousand guys complimenting them.
There’s not much playing around that goes on. They talk of women like all guys do, but it’s not a reality, it’s dreaming. There’s not these stories of conquest—there’s the exceptional case of a Casanova—because they’re moving too much. They’re being deprived of their chance to play around. Maybe if they get more time, we’ll even see that they have a little more of that. (Laughs.)
Truckers fantasize something tremendous. When they reach a coffee stop, they unload with all these ideas. I’ve seen fellas who build up such dreams when they come into a truck stop they start to pour it out, get about three minutes of animated description out of it, and all of a sudden come up short and realize it’s all a bunch of damn foolishness they built up in their minds. It’s still that they’re daydreaming from the truck. He builds a thing in his mind and begins to believe it.
You sit in a truck, your only companionship is your own thoughts. Your truck radio, if you can play it loud enough to hear—you’ve got the roar of the engine, you’ve got a transmission with sixteen gears, you’re very much occupied. You’re fighting to maintain your speed every moment you’re in the truck.
The minute you climb into that truck, the adrenaline starts pumping. If you want to have a thrill, there’s no comparison, not even a jet plane, to climbing on a steel truck and going out there on the Dan Ryan Expressway. You’ll swear you’ll never be able to get out the other end of that thing without an accident. There’s thousands of cars and thousands of trucks and you’re shifting like a maniac and you’re braking and accelerating and the object is to try to move with the traffic and try to keep from running over all those crazy fools who are trying to get under your wheels.
You have to be super alert all the time. Say I’m loaded to full capacity, seventy-three thousand pounds. That’s equivalent to how many cars—at four thousand pounds a car? I cannot stop. I got terrific braking power. You have five axles, you’ll have fourteen tires on the ground, you got eight sets of brakes. You have to anticipate situations a block ahead of you. You’re not driving to match situations immediately in front of you. A good driver looks ahead two blocks, so he’s not mousetrapped into a situation where he’ll have to stop—because you can’t stop like a car’s gonna stop. You’re committed. It’s like an airplane crossing the ocean: they reach that point of no return. Your commitment’s made a hundred, two hundred yards before you reach the intersection. It’s really almost impossible.
You have to get all psyched up and keep your alertness all the time. There’s a lot of stomach trouble in this business, tension. Fellas that can’t eat anything. Alka-Seltzer and everything. There’s a lot of hemorrhoid problems. And there’s a lot of left shoulder bursitis, because of the window being open. And there’s a loss of hearing because of the roar of the engine. The roar of the engine has a hypnotic effect. To give you an idea of the decibel sounds inside a cab, nowadays they’re beginning to insulate ’em. It’s so tremendous that if you play the radio loud enough to hear above the roar and you come to a tollgate and stop, you have to turn it down it’s screaming so loud. You could break your eardrums. And the industrial noises in the background . . . I’m sure his hearing’s affected. There was a survey made of guys that transport cars. You’ve heard the loud metal noise, where the different parts of the gates comes together. They found these fellas have a great loss of hearing. It’s one more occupational hazard. There has been different people I’ve worked with that I’ve seen come apart, couldn’t handle it any more.
I’ll tell you where we’ve had nervous breakdowns, when we got in this ’67 thing, the wildcat. We’ve had four people associated with us in Gary have had nervous breakdowns. And at Pittsburgh, they’ve had several. The tension of this labor thing, forty-six weeks, is real strong. The tension’s even greater for a guy with a family to support . . .”
There seemed an unusual amount of fellas having problems with their family, with the wife in particular. They’re average guys with their wives going through the change and so forth.
Really, that’s an awful problem for the wife, because she has to raise the kids, she has to fight off the bill collectors on the phone. She can’t even count on her husband to attend a graduation, a communion, any kind of social function. She’s just lucky he’s home Christmas and New Year’s. He’s usually so darn tired that he’d much rather be home sleeping than getting ready to go out Sunday night.
Sure, truckers eat a lot of pills. It’s a lot more prevalent than I thought. I heard fellas say they get a better price on bennies if they buy them by the thousand. We know a lot of individuals we consider hopheads off on benzedrine. A couple of guys I know are on it, even though it’s on the weekends when they don’t need to stay awake. It’s become a habit.
The kids call ‘em red devils. In trucking, they call it the Arkansas Turnaround—or whatever your destination is. A lot of ’em are dispensed by drugstores on prescription for weight control. So their wife gets the pills and the old man ends up usin’ ’em to keep awake, because they’re a benzedrine base. It’ll be the little black ones or the little red ones . . .
They’d like to pick up the kids, hitchhikers, if it weren’t for the prohibitions. I think the biggest transporters of hippies would be the owner-operators, because they want company. For years you didn’t see a hitchhiker, but now with the hippie, with kids traveling across the country, every interchange has got a bunch of long-haired, pack-sacked kids hitchhiking from one end of the country to the other. It’s a reborning . . .
It’s a strange thing about truckers, they’re very conservative. They come from a rural background or they think of themselves as businessmen. But underneath the veneer they’re really very democratic and softhearted and liberal. But they don’t realize it. You tell ’em they’re liberal and you’re liable to get your head knocked off. But when you start talking about things, the war, kids, when you really get down to it, they’re for everything that’s liberal. But they want a conservative label on it. It’s a strange paradox.
In the steel mill, the truck driver is at the absolute bottom of the barrel. Everybody in that mill that is under union contract has some dignity, has some respect from management. If he’s the fella that sweeps the floor, he has job status. The man in the crane, if there’s no work for his crane, he doesn’t have to do anything. If the fella that pushes the broom in Warehouse Four, if he’s got everything groomed up, they can’t tell him, “No, you go and do another job.”
Now comes the steel hauler. Everybody in that mill’s above somebody, from top management down. At the bottom of the ladder, there’s the hooker on your truck. He wants to feel that he’s better than somebody. He figures I’m better than this steel hauler. So you get constant animosity because he feels that the corporation looks down on this steel hauler, and he knows he can order him around, abuse him, make him wait. It’s a status thing. There’s a tremendous feeling.
The first couple of years when I got abused, I howled and I yelled and I did my dance: “You can’t do this to me.” After a few years, I developed a philosophy. When I scream, it gives them pleasure, they can put it to me. They’re sadists. So the average steel hauler, no matter how abused he is, you always give them that smile and you leave it go over your head. You say to yourself: One day my time will come. If you don’t take this philosophy, you’ll go right out of your mind. You cause an incident, you’re barred from the mill. It’s such a competitive business that you dare not open your mouth because your company will be penalized freight—and you get it in the neck. You try to show ’em a cockiness like you could care less.
Over a number of years, your face becomes familiar. It breaks the ice. The loader considers you an old-timer, he has some identity with you. You might find, on rare occasions, friendship. The loader is the foreman on the shift for truck loading. He has a desk in between all the piles of steel and he lays out the loads that are gonna be placed on the truck. If the hookers see the loader’s giving you respect, they’ll accept you.
The newer people get the most grief, do the screaming, and get the worst treatment. Younger fellas. The fella that comes into this business that’s over forty takes his life’s savings and buys a truck because somebody told him there’s big money to be made and he wants to get in his own business. If you last the first five years, you last the worst hardships. Success means you survive. If you don’t make a dime on your investment, but you’re still in business after five years, we say he’s a regular. Those first five years is your biggest nut to crack. You don’t know the ropes, you don’t know how to buy and service your truck reasonable, you make all the mistakes. Fifty percent turnover in our business every year. They drop out, lose their trucks. That’s the only reward: In your mind, you feel you’re in business.
There’s been a change since the ’67 wildcat. It spread across the country like wildfire. We’re respected in a lot of places now because they know we stand up and fight for our rights. As much as it was a money problem, it was a problem of dignity.
“Ninety percent of the fellas were Teamster Union members, but you’d never know it. Outside of the dues money they take out of your check, they did absolutely nothing. They did less than nothing. We know that a few telephone calls by high Teamster official to steel mill officials could have changed our picture completely. If they would call up and say, ‘Look, you’re abusing our people and if you don’t straighten it out we’re gonna do something about it.’ They could put one man down there at U.S. Steel, for instances, and say, ‘I’m a Teamster official. We’re asking you guys not to load in this mill until they treat you fairly.’ In twenty-four hours we’d be getting loaded out there so fast we couldn’t keep our hat on our head.
“But they’re establishment. They’re interlocked with the steel mills and the trucking companies. They don’t even know who their members are. Our guess is between twenty and thirty thousand steel haulers. Nobody can come up with the figures. A Teamster official was maybe a truck driver twenty-five or thirty years ago. Fought the good fight, built the union, got high on the hog. So many years have passed that he doesn’t even know what a truck looks like any more. He now golfs with his contemporaries from the trucking companies. He lolls about Miami Beach at the Hollywood Hotel that they own. To him, to have a deal with a truck driver is beneath his station. It’s awfully hard when you get to the union hall to talk to a Teamster official. They’re usually ‘busy.’ That means they’re down at the Palmer House, at the Steak Restaurant. It’s a hangout for ’em.”
Truck drivers used to spend ninety percent of their time bitchin’ about how they got screwed at the mill, how they got screwed by the state trooper. Troopers prey on truck drivers for possible violations—mostly regarding weight and overload.
It’s extremely difficult to load a steel truck legally to capacity. If you’re a thousand pounds over, it’s no great violation but you have to get around the scales. At regular pull-offs, they’ll say: Trucks Must Cross Scales.
You pull in there and you find, lo and behold, you’re five hundred or a thousands pounds over. You’ve got to pay a ticket, maybe twenty-five dollars, and you have to move it off. This is a great big piece of steel. You’re supposed to unload it. You have to find some guy that’s light and break the bands on the bundle and transfer sheets or bars over on the other truck. Occasionally it’s something that can’t be broke down, a continuous coil that weighs ten thousand pounds. You work some kind of angle to get out of there. You wish for the scale to close and you close your eyes and you go like hell to try to get out of the state. You have a feeling of running a blockade in the twenties with a load of booze. You have a feeling of trying to beat the police. Or you pay the cop off.
Most state troopers consider truckers to be outlaws, thieves, and over-loaders. The companies and the union don’t try to upgrade our image. They don’t go to the police departments and say, “Stop abusing our members.”
Everybody’s preying on the trucker to shake him down. The Dan Ryan is unbelievable. They’re working deals you couldn’t believe, that nobody would care about, because they’re out of state truckers. Who cares what happens to them? What would you think of a trucker coming up the Dan Ryan for the first time? He’s coming from Pittsburgh with an overload. He approaches the South Side of the city and it says: All Trucks Must Use Local Lanes. But the signs aren’t well enough marked and he’s out in the third lane and gets trapped. He can’t get over because of the other cars, he goes right up the express lane. Well, there’s cops down there makin’ their living off these poor guys. They pull him over and they say, “Hey buddy, you’re out where no trucks are supposed to be. We’re gonna have to lock you up.” They go through their song and dance about they’re horrified about how you’ve broken the law, endangering everybody. And they’re hinting around that maybe you want to make a deal.
Maybe you don’t want to make a deal? Oh, you have to make bond and appear in court, that’s twenty-five dollars. If you’ve got an out-of-state chauffeur’s license, they’ll take your chauffeur’s license. So if you’re going to come up with a ten, he’ll hold court right there and he’ll tell you never do it again. But if you’re gonna be hardheaded—I’m gonna fight this thing —he’ll say, “Okay, we’re gonna take you in the neighborhood out here and we’re gonna park your truck and we’re gonna take you over to the station in a squad car.” I can’t swear to it, but there’s a story goin’ around that these cops are working with the people in the neighborhood. So you park your car out on those streets. While you’re at the station making bond you come back and there ain’t much left to your truck. The tires are gone, the cab’s been broken into, the radio’s gone. That’s what happens to thousands of truck drivers.
The cops tell you, “You get back on your truck any way you know how.” Because they don’t want to be there when you see your truck. You take a cab over there and there you stand. Now you call the copper, this official paragon of law and order, and he tells you, “How am I gonna find out who wrecked your truck and stole everything off?” A truck tires costs a hundred dollars. You’re liable to come back from the station, trying to fight your ticket, to have four hundred-dollar bills gone right off the trailer.
Why the devil do you do it, right? There’s this mystique about driving. The trucker has a sense of power. He has a sense of responsibility too. He feels: I know everything about the road. These people making mistakes around me, I have to make allowances for them. If the guy makes a mistake, I shouldn’t swear at him, I shouldn’t threaten him with my truck. You say, “That slob can’t drive. Look at that dumb woman with her kids in there. Look at that drunk.” You’ve got status!
Every load is a challenge and when you finally off-load it, you have a feeling of having completed a job—which I don’t think you get in a production line. I pick up a load at the mill, going to Hotpoint in Milwaukee. I take a job and I go all through the process. You have a feeling when you off-load it—you see they’re turning my steel into ten thousand washing machines, into a hundred farm implements. You feel like your day’s work is well done when you’re coming back. I used to have problems in the morning, a lot of heartburn, I couldn’t eat. But once I off-loaded, the pressure was off. I met the deadline. Then I could eat anything.
The automobile, it’s the biggest thing in the country, it’s what motivates everybody. Even that model, when they drape her across the hood of that car . . . In the truck stop, they’re continually talking about how they backed into this particular place in one swing. The mere car drivers were absolutely in awe. When you’re in that truck, you’re not Frank Decker, factory worker. You’re Frank Decker, truck owner and professional driver. Even if you can’t make enough money to eat, it gives you something . . .
There’s a joke going around with the truck drivers. “Did you hear the one about the hauler that inherited a million dollars?” “What did he do with it?” “He went out and bought a new Pete.” “Well, what did he do then?” “He kept running until his money ran out.” Everybody knows in this business you can’t make no money. Owning that big Pete, with the chrome stacks, the padded dashboard, and stereo radio, and shifting thirty-two gears and chromed wheels, that’s heaven. And in the joke, he was using up the inheritance to keep the thing on the road.
You have to figure out reasons to keep from going crazy, games to try to beat yourself. After a number of years, you begin to be a better loader. They come with a thirty-thousand-pound coil. If you set it down on the truck three inches forward or backward of where it’s supposed to be, you’re misloaded. So there’s a challenge every time you load. Everybody’s proud of that. At the truck shop they’ll flash a weight ticket: “Take a look at that.” They’ve loaded a balanced load.
Now as we approach ’67, I’ve about had it. I’m trucking seventeen years. There’s nothing left to do. I never dreamt that our hopes of getting together some day was gonna come true. It was just a dream. I’ll finish out the year, sell off my truck and trailer, and I’m gonna build a garage up at the Wisconsin-Illinois state line. I’m gonna service trucks in there. The guys needed a garage where they could get work done. The commercial garages—you got a bunch of amateurs working on your truck. To be an owner-operator, you gotta be a mechanic. I had a three-car garage when I was seventeen. So I was gonna build this garage . . .
But I met an old-timer I’d seen around for years. This was at Inland Steel on a Thursday night. One of my last hauls—I thought. We sat for about six hours waiting to get loaded. He said to me, “Did you hear about the rumble going on down in Gary?” He showed me this one-page pamphlet: “If you’re fed up with the Teamsters Union selling you out and all the sweetheart contracts and the years of abuses, go in front of your union hall Monday morning at ten ’. We’re gonna have a protest.”
Friday I talked to everybody. “We’re finally gonna do something. We’ve been talkin’ about it for years . . .” I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me. “Ah, hell, that’s all you ever talk about.”
Well, Monday morning I went out to Gary. There was twenty guys picketing. We didn’t get much help through the day. We decided to go to the steel mills and intercept our people, who were coming in from all over the country with their trucks. You got the picture? Ninety percent of the guys didn’t know where the union was at. For years, they paid dues as an extortion. They’re hurting. Most of ‘em are one paycheck away from the poorhouse. So we went there and tried to tell ‘em, “Park your truck and come and picket.” Well, it turned into something because the time was ripe. Everybody knew something had to happen.
“We picketed for eight days on the mills. It built till we had five hundred, six hundred guys—most of ’em from out of town. Parked their trucks all over town. We hung on them gates. Sometimes we’d get down to two, three guys and we thought it was all over. But there’s a new carload of guys come in from Iowa or from Detroit or from Fremont, Ohio, or something. They’d heard about this rumble that was going on and they come to help.
“We picketed the steel mills and we talked to any steel haulers that come in, told them not to load, to join the picket line. Some of the haulers tried to run you down. You’d have to jump for your life. Other guys would come up and they wouldn’t know what to do. They recognized a lot of faces. We met each other in truck stops for years. You know the guy—Tom, Dick, or Harry. But you never knew much more about him than just a service stop. We began to build relationships down here with these guys we’d seen for years, but we didn’t know where they lived or anything else. They’ll say, ‘What kind of truck you drive again?’ They recognize you by your truck, see?
“So we’re having meetings. The guys call from Detroit. They shut down Armco Steel or Great Lakes Steel. Then we heard they’re picketing at Pittsburgh and finally they’re picketing in Philadelphia. And then we heard they blew up two trucks with dynamite in New Jersey. The Jersey crowd, they’re always rough. It spread clear from here to the east coast. And it went on for nine weeks.
“Steel mills got injunctions out against us. They took us into court and locked us up and everything else. The Teamsters helped the steel mills and the carriers to try to get us back to work. They come out in cars: a company official, a Teamster official, a marshal—pointing out who we were to serve papers on. They were working together.
“Everybody’s telling everybody: ‘They’ll go back to work. They’re all broke. They can’t last more than a couple of weeks.’ But we hung on and we hung on, you know. (He swallows hard, takes a deep breath.) Some of the guys didn’t go home at all. We raised money by going around asking truck stops and truck dealers and tire dealers to donate money and help us. A lot of ‘em were dependent on us and knew we were poor payin’ and knew that maybe if they helped us out we could start gettin’ in better shape and start to pay our bills.”
Truck drivers are known as an awful lot of deadbeats. They live off credit and lay on everybody. Deprive their family, two legs ahead of the bill collectors, charge fuel at the new guy’s station that’s givin’ credit to everybody and then, when they run up a big bill, they’ll go by. All to keep that truck going. I don’t think they’re worse responsible than anybody else. But they get in a position like a businessman: you owe everybody and his brother and you start writin’ paper and you try to survive. You get in deeper and deeper and deeper . . .
So we formed an organization—the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, FASH.
[LOL - Gord] We organized like hell, leading up to the contract time again. We went on a nationwide strike because we didn’t hardly scratch the door the first time. This time we asked the Teamsters Union to represent us, which they never did before. Fitzsimmons promised in the agreement he’d set up a committee to meet with us. He sent us the very thieves that had locals where the steel haulers had members. These guys had vested interests to keep things the way it was. We met with ‘em a couple of times and saw they weren’t about to do nothin’.
“So we demanded Fitzsimmons meet with us—not that we thought he’d do anything. He’s nothing but a dirty old man shuffling along and filling a hole for Hoffa. But we did feel we could get recognition if we’d meet with him. Nothing doing. He wouldn’t even talk with us. He sent a big bully, that’s Hoffa’s right hand, the head of the goons, guy with a prison record as long as your arm. He started tellin’ us all he’s gonna do for the steel haulers. We said, ‘You ain’t doin’ nothin’ for us.’ We told him we didn’t have to listen to his boloney. He said, ‘What do you want?’ We told him we want the International to give us charters for steel locals. We want to have elections and we want to elect our own people. We want autonomy. And then we told him, ‘We want you and your crooked pals to stay ten miles away from any of our halls.’ He said he’d take the message back, and that’s where it stands now.
“We’d become aware, checking our rates with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Department of Labor, about their misuse of our pension fund. A nine-hundred-million-dollar pension fund that got about a billion finagled away. That’s our pension. We don’t have the freightside driver’s feeling for good old Jimmy Hoffa. They don’t care how much he steals. That ain’t us. That’s our pension money in that fund. He belongs in jail, a lot of ’em do.”
In January ’70, we went out on strike to reinforce our demands for recognition. We filed with 167 companies that employed steel haulers under Teamster contract. When the hearings began in Pittsburgh, there were thirty-seven lawyers from the carriers and Teamsters and two of our attorneys—one guy and another guy helping out. The hearings lasted sixteen days. It cost the Teamsters $250,000 for their legal costs. There was ten thousand pages of testimony. The National Labor Relations Board ruled against us. We think it was a politically inspired ruling. Nixon was playing footsie with Fitzsimmons. We were fighting the mills, the union, the carriers, the President. Who else is there left?
I talked with a fella who sold trailers. He said, “You guys are nuts. You’ve taken on all these big people. You don’t have a chance.” But there’s just one thing—we feel that we’re a revolution. There’s people’s power here and truck power. And there’s a lot of people in the Teamsters Union watchin’ us. If they start to see that we don’t get our heads busted, that we’re tough enough to lead, they’re gonna come out of the woodwork. They all want to know where their pension money went. What’s wrong is that they’re all scared.
We did extremely well this last strike. We didn’t make it in this strike. There were some defections in our ranks. They voted to go back to work. We were about gonna grab that brass ring when we dropped it. So there’s been a lot of disillusionment on the part of a lot of guys. But we gained so much in these three years that a lot of guys are stickin’.
We’re treated with quite a bit more respect, I’ll tell ya, than we were before 1967. Sure, we’re havin’ problems. The Teamsters are trying to get the carriers to blackball us, trying to control the steel haulers. But they know they’ve lost us. We have membership stickers on the trucks. The sticker alone sometimes gets ’em loaded twice as fast. What they’ll say, “You better load that guy, he belongs to that outfit and you don’t load him you’re gonna have to pay for it.” We got a good reputation.
Our people are very cynical. They are always suspicious of leadership sellin’ ’em out. They’ve seen the Teamsters. They gotta pay their dues whether they’re workin’ or not. So they turn on us. They’re supercritical—every little thing. Between the day the strike started until March ’68, I didn’t pull a load of steel—that’s eight months I didn’t draw a penny. I been, since then, on a fifty-dollar-a-week salary, full-time for FASH, out of the Gary office. Had one guy tell me, “You only get fifty dollars a week, but that’s how Hoffa started.” Had another guy tell me, “I wouldn’t have anybody that dumb working for fifty dollars a week to represent me.” The cynicism is unbelievable.
First thing they figure, These guys are after soft, cushy jobs. They’re after Hoffa, they’re after the same thing we’ve been taken advantage of. What you have to do is rebuild confidence. These people don’t trust nobody. They don’t even trust themselves no more. “You’re workin’ in a crooked system and you gotta be a crook.” So the guy figures, I wouldn’t do it for anybody else, why this guy? Another typical thing is: It won’t work. You can’t beat ’em. They’re too big. The Teamsters are too big. The steel mills are too big. Everything’s against us. If you fight it, you get hurt.
You gotta re-educate ‘em, you gotta climb up on the cross every day. What you build, eventually, unfortunately, is a following that will follow you no matter what you do. That’s why you end up with Hoffa, with them sayin’ “I don’t care if Jimmy stole a million dollars, he’s okay with me.” It’s a shame that people are that much sheep.
We’re not getting the grass-roots backing we’d like to have. They’re too busy, they go to their families. Sometimes I wonder why I’m in this thing. But it’s rewarding. There’s nothing like dealing with people, dealing with situations. It’s like a crash course to educate yourself. It’s something I really enjoy doing because it’s something I thought should have been done all these years. After eighteen years of trucking, a change to do this work . . .
If I thought I could hand-tailor a job that I’d like to do, it’s this job I’m doing right now. I never worked so hard at anything in my life. Most of this forty-six months has been seven days a week. I get weary but I never get tired of doing the job. I’m enjoying every minute of it. We’re up against a lot of big people, big corporations. It has the feeling of playing chess with the top contender. It can affect people’s lives, even people that don’t even know.
If you win, the stakes are high. It’s not just whether you’re gonna make a buck. All of a sudden, you feel catapulted into these levels of decision-making that I never dreamed I’d ever reach. All of a sudden, you’re no longer the guy smiling and putting up a front and waiting all the time in the truck. All of a sudden, you found your own sense of self-respect. The day’s finally here. Now.
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I hope you enjoyed this little piece of history, and had a laugh to yourself in seeing the reflection of today in a document from 1974.
G
The last cowboys in my opinion. Great read. Thanks
Excellent read. Thanks, Gord.