"Takin' Care of Business and Workin' Overtime"

Before I forget, I drove by the Secretary of State office today and saw that they had a big sign advertising their website:  http://michigan.gov/sos 
I was surprised to find out that you now need all the same documents to get your first driver's license as you need to get a state ID card. I suppose that's just the way it is in the post 9-11 world.

I saw something on the news this evening about Obama's overtime proposal. At first I thought, "There he goes again, doing something on his own without congress!" It seems, though, that what he's doing is telling the Labor Department to change their regulations a bit, which I guess he has the authority to do. It's not a new law or anything like that, all it does is clean up the definition of "supervisor", which is long overdue. It wouldn't affect me, if I was still working, because I was always hourly.

When I first started at the paper mill, I used to work a lot of overtime because I was young and had the energy. They were supposed to ask you if you wanted the overtime and, if you turned it down, ask somebody else. One day, they scheduled me for a 72 hour week without even asking, and I told the boss I wasn't going to do it. He threatened to fire me, I threatened to quit, and I stormed out of the office. Then somebody told me to go see my union steward, which I did. The next day we had a meeting with my boss and my boss's boss. The first thing my boss said was, "I don't understand the problem here, forty years ago everybody worked 72 hours a week." Well, we got it straightened out, but it wasn't the last time I had to argue with those people about their precious overtime.

It wasn't about the money, they were happy to pay the time and a half, it was about the way they just assumed you were going to do it, like there was something wrong with you if you didn't. According to our contract, you could be obligated to stay if your relief partner unexpectedly didn't come in, but you couldn't be forced to work non-vacancy overtime. If the vacancy was known about ahead of time, they were supposed to offer the overtime to you first and, if you didn't want it, they were supposed to try to find somebody else. If they couldn't find anybody else to take it, you were obligated. It was actually more complicated than that, I'm giving you the short version but, suffice it to say, there was a procedure that they were supposed to follow, and sometimes they didn't. A big part of the problem was that most of the guys would take the overtime without complaint, so the managers got used to the idea that everybody wanted it. I lobbied for years to get stronger language in the contract, but nobody was interested. What really pissed me off was when they laid a bunch of people off and then expected the rest of us to work overtime to make up the difference. I tried to tell people that, if we all refused to work the overtime, they would have to recall at least some of the laid off people, but again, nobody listened to me. Like Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

There are probably a number of reasons for the decline of the labor unions in this country, but I think at least some of the blame falls on the union members themselves. Like you said, our predecessors fought and died to organize those unions, but our generation seemed to just take them for granted. I don't know if it was the same all over, but our local union people spent more time and energy arguing with each other than they did with the management. There didn't seem to be any agreement about what it meant to be in a labor union, each person having their own version of it.

When the mill was closing down, and the company was trying to sell it to anyone they could, I tried to get people interested in getting together and buying it ourselves. It wasn't my original idea, United Airlines had recently gone through something like that, and so had a much smaller local company, Detroit Tap and Tool. For some reason, everybody thought it was just a big joke, and I soon gave up on the project. Three years later, one of our own managers got together with some outside interests and did indeed buy our little paper mill. He's had his ups and downs with it, but he's still running it today. It's nothing like it used to be, but it's still in business. The worst part is that I think he got the idea from me, and then he wouldn't even hire me back. The ungrateful bastard!