A "SORTA" MILL STORY
A “SORT OF” MILL STORY
My neighbour’s on strike. He’s a bus driver and is absolutely pissed off that the lawyers are telling the Union that they can’t walk the picket line and disrupt traffic. They have to sit in a designated place and not move beyond an imaginary line. Hey can walk; they can picket, but only in a designated area.
“That’s not how it used to be! I tell you why. It’s those fuckin’ Hindus! All they fuckin’ want is money, money, money. They don’t care about the fuckin’ Union, or what we’re asking for. They don’t give a fuck. I told them we need a pension and we shouldn’t back down until we get one. I also told them to bank their fuckin’ overtime. I banked mine. I saved it because I knew we were going on strike. But I fuckin’ told them. I warned them. But nope. Dumb fuckers, all they want is money. That’s all they can think off. So I was bringing home $1800 every two weeks and they were bringing in $2500 because they were working all the overtime they could get. So now, the dumb fuckers don’t have anything, and they want is this thing settled—pension or not. The fuckin’ Company’s not even talking to the fuckin’ Union—and they won’t be talkin’ until fuckin’ August.”
“Wow man, that sucks,” I said.
He’s a large man, my neighbour. My wife calls him a hunter/gatherer because he goes out every October with his friends to hunt deer and moose. He’s a burly man, with a Grizzly Adams type beard he starts to grow out in September. They go North, up near Prince George and into the high country where the trees are basted in hoar frost most mornings. He doesn’t really need to go hunting. They have two freezers on the garage and both of them are stuffed. They can’t possibly eat that much meat.
He doesn’t say ‘fuckin’ Hindus’ lightly. He isn’t a bigot, but rather a man who grew up rough. He was a bully, and will tell you it’s the biggest regret of his life. He was also a bar fighter. He played rugby, and used to drink a lot. We used to sit in the backyard of our townhouse complex drinking Southern and pineapple juice. My wife and I are used to his ways, and we’re always calling him out. He says he doesn’t hate Hindus, he just calls them that. If you tell him they’re not Hindus, because Hinduism is a religion, he says, ‘How do you know they’re not? And if they’re not, then what are they?’ he asks. ‘Indians,’ I say. ‘Like my wife,’ I say, and point to her. ‘Oh, so then do I call them Pakkis?’ ‘No, Pakkis are from Pakistan.’ ‘Well, I don’t care, they’re fuckin’ selfish, greedy, Indians then—and here he used air quotes—‘and they make me sick because they want me to fight they’re grievances for them, even though I told them I’m not on the Committee anymore.’
“You should’ve come picketing with me,” I said. “The mill’s on a dead end road.”
“So?”
“So? So we only had to do one day of picketing, four hours a day. Each rotation was four guys. Sometime there were five. Each of them brought a case of beer. The Indians always brought scotch.”
“They do like their scotch.”
“And somebody always had a joint, or three. We’d get right fucked up. There’d be a big fire in the middle of the parking lot. Somebody threw a sofa on the fire one year. They were telling me about it. They said the flames were almost hitting the telephone wires. It was just one big party. The foremen would come out from behind the gate, sit down, and have a drink with us. We’d all be smoking dope, passing joints around. They never said anything. Hell, Joe Bubba was a foreman, and we did a shit load of drugs together. Me, him, and Tommy.”
“Ah, Tommy,” he’d smile. He used to go to school with Tommy and they dropped acid together.
“It wasn’t as if they didn’t know who was smoking dope,” I laughed. “We’d be in lawn chairs, shooting the shit. The cops would always come by once a week. Sometimes there’d be eight or ten guys because the other rotation would stay and party, or maybe somebody who lived close by would drop in for a visit.”
“And only one day a week? Did you get strike pay?”
“Fuck all. My first strike? I don’t know. I was just a kid, still living at home. I think it was about thirty dollars, or maybe seventy. A days’ wages pretty well. What do you have to do?”
“Five days a week. Five hours a day, out in fuckin’ Coquitlam. ‘You gotta stay in the box,’ these fuckin’ losers are telling me. ‘What box?’ I say. ‘You can’t go past this line and you can’t say anything to anyone.’
“I tell you, that’s not how it used to be. You want to shake things the fuck up. You want to disrupt the fuckin’ status quo. So we were sitting there, and this bus stops to pick up some passengers. Only he’s crosses the picket line to do it, and he doesn’t fuckin’ care.”
“They’re not on strike?”
“Different company. They have a contract; we don’t. We keep telling our membership that we want parity.
“Anyway, I fuckin’ lose my shit. I yell at the driver and tell him to honour the picket line. He yells at me and gets out his phone right away and…I don’t know. I guess he’s calling his super. I tell them dumb fuckin’ Hindus, ‘Watch this. This is what you’re supposed to do.’ I get up and walk across the line. ‘Don! Don! You can’t walk outside the line. You’re over the line. Your chair’s over the line!’ I walk around the guy’s bus and stepped in front of it just as he’s about to leave. He hits the brakes and starts yelling at me. I tell him he’s got to respect the fuckin’ picket line.”
I look at him and shake my head. Who stands in front of a bus?
“They had flying pickets one year. I was young then, but not as young as I was the first time. But I was actually on the Committee. I was maybe 23? 24? I don’t know. I wasn’t married, yet. I know that. They’d drive to other mills and set up picket lines. The Union was trying something different. They were letting some places work, but you had to give a tithing—”
“What the fuck is that? A tithing?”
“Part of your wages. It means ten percent—”
“Why not just say ten percent instead of this tithing, shit?”
“Sorry. I should know better than to use big words.”
“No, I mean, well, Jesus. Who even uses a word like that? I’ve never heard of it before.”
“You never heard of a tithing?”
“It’s probably not even a real word.”
“Your fuckin’ wife is a Catholic. It’s from the Catholic Church. We weren’t giving ten percent. It was probably closer to a hundred bucks—”
“Well, there you go. The fuckin’ Catholics. Praise the Lord! Jesus is coming!”
“Anyway, the money went into the strike fund. But we had a lot of radicals in our mill. Guys who thought there was too much corruption in the Union, and they wanted to shut the fuckin’ Province down. They said the only way they could do that was to throw a picket line up at different mills. And they did. Problem was, our mill was still working. We were a small mill, so they left us alone.
“That strike lasted almost two months—”
“We’ve been out for seven weeks so far.”
“When are you retiring?”
“Not soon enough.”
“You’re fuckin’ older than me!”
“So…”
“So retire.”
“I probably will, but I wanted to go through this strike first.”
“Why?”
“I want them to get a Pension. Retirement’s a little easier when you have a Pension.”
That sounds like a fun time with a great guy!
Another great slice of life... Thanks Ben.