Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (59 page)

When I first started you carried all baggage by hand. Later, when we worked for individual airlines, you got two-wheel carts. Some fellas can put as many as eighteen to twenty bags on a cart. I’ve done it many times, but I don’t do it any more. ’Cause I’m a little old now. I don’t press myself.

The skycap came into being with the jet aircraft. We were called porters, redcaps. The man you meet now at the curb cannot be a dummy. He has to read tickets, he has to sell tickets. He has to get someone to take hotel reservations. You’d be surprised at the things people ask you to do.

We have to do a lot more than the general public thinks. They think of us as a strong back and a weak mind. They don’t realize that what we’re doing is the same thing they get when they walk to a counter. All the agent does is look at his ticket and check his bag. We have schedules in our pockets. I know if there’s a meal on the plane. I know if there’s cocktails, movies, and so forth. No one has to tell me this. From memory I know most flights on my ships—where they go, what time they go, when they arrive.

We’re the first and the last people to meet the passengers. We meet them when they get out of their cars or cabs and we meet them at baggage claim. Old people, especially, are anxious to talk to anybody that’s working for the airlines. They want to be reassured. I tell them silly little stories: “You’re not going to get the thrill you get on a roller coaster. There ain’t nothin’ gonna happen. Just relax and enjoy it. When you come back, I want you to look me up.”

I look at everybody at eye level. I neither look down nor up. The day of the shuffle is gone. I better not see any one of the fellas that works for me doing it. Not ever! You do not have to do anything but be courteous and perform your job. This is all that is necessary. That perpetual grin I just don’t dig. I have been told that I don’t smile, period. I said, “I don’t think it’s necessary.” I smile when I have something to smile about. Otherwise I don’t. If I make the passenger happy, that’s all that’s necessary. I don’t have a problem with people. Maybe it’s the way I carry myself. I’m strictly business at work. People just don’t run over me.

I had a sailor one night who walked up to me and said, “Boy, where can a man get a drink?” I took him down to the end of the terminal, under the steps, and cracked him in the mouth. He was half-drunk and I didn’t try to hurt him. I said, “Now what were you telling me a few moments ago?” He said, “Can’t you take a joke?” I said, “Okay, boy, you can get a drink across the street.” I just thought I’d teach him a lesson. I was much younger then. It was about twenty years ago.

The skycap makes a good living. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t stay. We have fellas here with all kinds of degrees. They make more money doing what they’re doing. It’s just that simple. Most fellas here are from forty-six years old and up. You can’t get this job and be a young man. There are no openings. There will be an opening when somebody retires or dies. I haven’t known anyone to quit and I’ve been here twenty-six years.

I wouldn’t have a job that didn’t make tips. But I would not be a cabdriver. I would not be a waiter. I never wanted to be a Pullman porter. These people here have a dignity all their lives.

Yet I think I’m grossly underpaid in salary, because of what we really do. There are fellas here that sell three or four thousand dollars worth of seats a week. They don’t come anywhere close to making the salary that agents make, that are doing absolutely nothing by way of selling. We have people at the ticket counters who make two hundred dollars a month more than the average skycap. I’d say the average skycap sells a thousand dollars a month more than this man.

There are many people that will leave at the spur of the moment. Salesmen, especially. There’s no reservation or anything. He just comes to the airport and wants to know what airline has what flight going as soon as possible to his destination. It’s up to you to sell him your line. I don’t think our value is recognized. At the quarterly meeting the company tells us how important we are, but they don’t say that on the UG-100s, when it comes to salary raises.

But we make it on tips. Every time I walk through that door I get money. And don’t you think these people know I’m making money? I think most agents have a little animosity towards skycaps because they feel we’re doing quite well. The ramp service man makes something more than five dollars an hour. He’s the guy who puts the baggage in the pressurized cabins, brings them into the claiming area, and puts them on the belt. I take ‘em and the man gives me four dollars. (Laughs.) He does all the work out in the cold and here comes Tom gettin’ money. (Laughs.)

Supervisors don’t bother us. If a supervisor comes to me and tells me he wants skycaps to do something and I say no, there isn’t anything he can say about it. Would I ever want to be a supervisor? Of course not. He doesn’t make as much money as I make. (Laughs.)

We prefer not to have a union. We make more money than most people out there. We get more benefits than the guys on the ramp, and they have a union. They’re not dressed like we are, either. They wear dungarees and things. We don’t wear that crap. We wear a uniform, we wear a suit. We’re the elite of the fleet. (Laughs.)

 

POSTSCRIPT:
“Every one of the fellas on my shift own their own home. All our wives are good friends. We go around each other’s homes occasionally. My wife is in the process of organizing the other wives into a stock buying club.

 

The tank I work at is six-foot deep, eight-foot square. In it is pulp, made of ground wood, ground glass, fiberglass, a mixture of chemicals and water. It comes up through a copper screen felter as a form, shaped like the luggage you buy in the store.

In forty seconds you have to take the wet felt out of the felter, put the blanket on—a rubber sheeting—to draw out the excess moisture, wait two, three seconds, take the blanket off, pick the wet felt up, balance it on your shoulder—there is no way of holding it without it tearing all to pieces, it is wet and will collapse—reach over, get the hose, spray the inside of this copper screen to keep it from plugging, turn around, walk to the hot dry die behind you, take the hot piece off with your opposite hand, set it on the floor—this wet thing is still balanced on my shoulder—put the wet piece on the dry die, push this button that lets the dry press down, inspect the piece we just took off, the hot piece, stack it, and count it—when you get a stack of ten, you push it over and start another stack of ten—then go back and put our blanket on the wet piece coming up from the tank . . . and start all over. Forty seconds. We also have to weigh every third piece in that time. It has to be within so many grams. We are constantly standing and moving. If you talk during working, you get a reprimand, because it is easy to make a reject if you’re talking.

A thirty-inch luggage weighs up to fifteen pounds wet. The hot piece weighs between three to four pounds. The big luggage you’ll maybe process only four hundred. On the smaller luggage, you’ll run maybe 800, sometimes 850 a day. All day long is the same thing over and over. That’s about ten steps every forty seconds about 800 times a day.

We work eight straight hours, with two ten-minute breaks and one twenty-minute break for lunch. If you want to use the washroom, you have to do that in that time. By the time you leave your tank, you go to the washroom, freshen up a bit, go into the recreation room, it makes it very difficult to finish a small lunch and be back in the tank in twenty minutes. So you don’t really have too much time for conversation. Many of our women take a half a sandwich or some of them don’t even take anything. I’m a big eater. I carry a lunch box, fruit, a half a sandwich, a little cup of cottage cheese or salad. I find it very difficult to complete my lunch in the length of time.

You cannot at any time leave the tank. The pieces in the die will burn while you’re gone. If you’re real, real, real sick and in urgent need, you do shut it off. You turn on the trouble light and wait for the tool man to come and take your place. But they’ll take you to a nurse and check it out.

The job I’m doing is easier than the punch presses I used to run. It’s still not as fast as the punch press, where you’re putting out anywhere to five hundred pieces an hour. Whereas here you can have a couple of seconds to rest in. I mean
seconds
. (Laughs.) You have about two seconds to wait while the blanket is on the felt drawing the moisture out. You can stand and relax those two seconds—three seconds at most. You wish you didn’t have to work in a factory. When it’s all you know what to do, that’s what you do.

I guess my scars are pretty well healed by now, because I’ve been off on medical leave for two, three months. Ordinarily I usually have two, three burn spots. It’s real hot, and if it touches you for a second, it’ll burn your arm. Most of the girls carry scars all the time.

We’ve had two or three serious accidents in the last year and a half. One happened about two weeks ago to a woman on the hydraulic lift. The cast-iron extension deteriorated with age and cracked and the die dropped. It broke her whole hand. She lost two fingers and had plastic surgery to cover the burn. The dry die runs anywhere from 385 degrees to 425.

We have wooden platforms where we can walk on. Some of the tanks have no-skid strips to keep you from slipping, ’cause the floor gets wet. The hose we wash the felter with will sometimes have leaks and will spray back on you. Sometimes the tanks will overflow. You can slip and fall. And slipping on oil. The hydraulic presses leak every once in a while. We’ve had a number of accidents. I currently have a workman’s comp suit going. I came up under an electric switch box with my elbow and injured the bone and muscle where it fastens together. I couldn’t use it.

I have arthritis in the joints of some of my fingers. Your hands handling hot pieces perspire and you end up with rheumatism or arthritis in your fingers. Naturally in your shoulder, balancing that wet piece. You’ve got the heat, you’ve got the moisture because there’s steam coming out. You have the possibility of being burnt with steam when the hot die hits that wet felt. You’re just engulfed in a cloud of steam every forty seconds.

It’s very noisy. If the tool man comes to talk to you, the noise is great enough you have to almost shout to make yourself heard. There’s the hissing of the steam, there’s the compressed air, a lot of pressure—it’s gotta lift that fifteen pounds and break it loose from that copper screen. I’ve lost a certain percentage of my hearing already. I can’t hear the phone in the yard. The family can.

In the summertime, the temperature ranges anywhere from 100 to 150 degrees at our work station. I’ve taken thermometers and checked it out. You’ve got three open presses behind you. There’s nothing between you and that heat but an asbestos sheet. They’ve recently put in air conditioning in the recreation room. There’s been quite a little discussion between the union and the company on this. They carry the air conditioning too low for the people on the presses. Our temperature will be up to 140, and to go into an air-conditioned recreation room that might be set at 72—’cause the office force is happy and content with it—people on the presses almost faint when they go back. We really suffer.

I’m chairman of the grievance committee.
⁴⁵
We have quite a few grievances. Sometimes we don’t have the support we should have from our people. Sometimes the company is obstinate. For the most part, many of our grievances are won.

Where most people get off at three, I get off at two ’. I have an hour to investigate grievances, to work on them, to write them up, to just in general check working conditions. I’m also the editor of the union paper. I do all my own work. I cut stencils, I write the articles, copy the pictures. I’m not a very good freehand artist (laughs), so I copy them. I usually do that in the union office before I go home and make supper. It takes about five hours to do a paper. Two nights.

(Laughs.) I daydream while I’m working. Your mind gets so it automatically picks out the flaws. I plan my paper and what I’m going to have for supper and what we’re gonna do for the weekend. My husband and I have a sixteen-foot boat. We spend a lot of weekends and evenings on the river. And I try to figure out how I’m gonna feed twenty, twenty-five people for dinner on Saturday. And how to solve a grievance . . .

They can’t keep the men on the tanks. We’ve never been able to keep a man over a week. They say it’s too monotonous. I think women adjust to monotony better than men do. Because their minds are used to doing two things at once, where a man usually can do one thing at a time. A woman is used to listening to a child tell her something while she’s doing something else. She might be making a cake while the child is asking her a question. She can answer that child and continue to put that cake together. It’s the same way on the tanks. You get to be automatic in what you’re doing and your mind is doing something else.