Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (44 page)

 

Mrs. ROBINSON:
Will was written up once, because I got on the bus and we were talking about something. They didn’t know what kind of conversation it was, but they called him into the office. (Laughs.)

 

It wasn’t known she was my wife. I remember one morning, the bus was crowded and there was a lady standing right up over me. She was asking questions and talking all the way downtown. She was a stranger in town. A couple of days later, I was called in the office and they said I was holding a conversation with a passenger. It was one of the passengers wrote this in. Passengers can write you up. You have to spend your own time to go in there and answer the complaint.

Friday evening I had a little incident happen. It’s upsetting. The traffic was very heavy. Sometime the light’ll change before you can get all through. You’ll stop short so you don’t block the other traffic going in the other direction. I was a little far out in the street, but I stopped still, so the other traffic could go in their direction. There’s an automobile on the left side of me, he was farther out than I was. The people who was crossin’ the street couldn’t get past him, period. They had to go around him and then come in front of the bus to get across. One guy comes up to the bus window and says, “Why the hell don’t you move it back?” He didn’t say anything to the white fella in the auto who was really blocking everything. He had to say it to me. I knew what the reason was.

I think young bus drivers will kind of change things around. I don’t think they’re gonna go along with it too long. I think eventually something will blow up right there in the garage—with this superintendent. I don’t think they’ll take quite as much as the older ones, because if they get fired, they have a better chance of making it.

 

MRS. ROBINSON:
When the strike was called, it was the younger drivers. The older driver, he’ll play down these harasses, because he’s gotta keep up these mortgage notes. They’re really afraid.

 

The younger ones led the strike and practically all the leaders were fired.

 

MRS. ROBINSON:
I can always tell when Will’s had a bad day. He’s got a nervous twitch. I don’t think he’s even aware of it. I think Will is a very proud man, and he wants me to look upon him as a man. This is one reason I stopped riding his bus. I didn’t want him humiliated in front of me by the inspectors. He wants to talk back like a man. He’d be more likely to do that if I’m on the bus than he would be if I’m not there. I know if he goes too far, he doesn’t have a job. So Will doesn’t tell me much that happens. Much of it would be humiliating, so we don’t talk too much about the job. I just have to feel and tell by his attitude when he’s had an exceptionally hard day.
(
She leaves the room.
)

 

(He is obviously weary.) You’re trying to make schedules and at the end of the line you only get a ten-minute layover. Some guys’ll stretch out on the long seat and relax, some will read a paper, and some will sit there and maybe smoke two or three cigarettes. I smoke more than I ever did. In that short time, I may have to run about three blocks to the washroom, a filling station over there. It looks like you gotta smoke two or three cigarettes before you can ease the tension after that run.

A lot of guys want to sit around and talk after they get off from work. I just want to get out of there and head home. All I do now is get up in the morning, go there, and I don’t be thinking about that. Like a machine, that’s about the only way I can feel.

 

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—tike 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 accus-tomed 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 truckdrivers: 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 superalert 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.