"Night Shift – 270 Factory Stories,” by David
Macaray, 2015
This entertaining book can be read in chunks,
which makes it easy reading. It contains
scrambled anecdotes from almost 30 years of working at a union paper mill in San Remo, California,
from 1972 until the late 1990s. The
stories reflect on the odd people and conflicts found in blue-collar factories. Some of them center on Macaray's experiences as a union shop steward and union president. They paint a picture of the cultural life of
workers during that time and the attitudes of management and the white collars – the ‘suits’ and
‘shirts’ – to all this. Anyone reading
it who worked in factories will be hit with the familiarity. It also tracks how factory life changed from
the wide-open 1970s, when workers were far more free to be themselves, to the constricted
corporate control exercised in the 1990s, as corporate management gained power.
Macaray calls the present situation
‘industrial fascism’ to indicate the change.
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| Break Time Stories |
Macaray has a good sense of humor and structures some
of these incidents around some surprising joke or comment involving a co-worker. Bad relationships, drug and alcohol use,
sexism, the importance of food, inter-union conflicts, odd ideas floating
through the plant, the freedom to say whatever you want, personality quirks,
misplaced anger, physical fights between employees, the problems of actually
going on strike, hard work, long hours, accidents, obnoxious managers and union
members – the whole human mess. As
Trotsky once remarked, nothing human is foreign to Marxists and this book is
proof.
Macaray started as a steward and ended up being union
president for a time. He details some of his personal mistakes based on his
opinionated personality. He also makes some
very astute but small points about what it takes to actually do those jobs
well. He is evidently versed in
socialism but was really a liberal Democrat, and seems to have brought a kind of
realist progressivism to his job. His
union, the ‘WCPA’, (which seems to be a non-existent moniker, perhaps really
the ‘Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers Union’)
was more progressive and democratic than most. It came out of a west coast
split in the 1960s from a more conservative paper-workers union. Macaray had some opinions about union work. His comment about contract
negotiations? They were a ‘study in deprivation,’
where the union gets less than it wants or needs. He notes that federal mediators have no other
interest except ending a strike. Regarding the dreaded OSHA, unlike their supposed role of making factories safer, instead tells
workers they will just have to protect themselves. He points
out that strikes, even in an industry like paper, do not actually work well unless
many other things are in play.
During Macaray’s working days there were 700 factory
workers and 300 white collars in the paper plant, making diapers, toilet paper,
feminine hygiene products, paper towels and tissue, 24 hours a day, running 3
shifts. The white collars are at times
pictured as arrogant and clueless towards the plant workers. He pictures essentially a large human
community in which the union plays a key role in handling the most trivial issues
to the most complex. The company - an
unnamed ‘Fortune 500” entity - is not always hostile or insensitive, but
Macaray points out that at contract time they were never afraid to threaten a
shut-down due to the ostensible ‘cost’ of the mill. He emphasizes that, barring a few lumpen
criminals, the workers there were proud of their skills and hard work, and
always tried to do their best in trying circumstances – especially when the archaic
or high-speed machinery broke down. They were well-paid and had good union benefits, which is why so few quit.
I’ll retail one story: Some young white engineers were sitting in
the lunch-room, drinking Cokes on a Saturday.
3 young Latino janitors sat down at a table across from the
engineers. The janitors bought tuna
sandwiches from the vending machines (the kitchen was closed that day) and put hot sauce on the tunafish. The look on the engineers faces said it
all: “If you can’t even eat a fucking
tuna sandwich without desecrating it, you have no business in this country.”
And another: A
veteran of the Korean war was kept on by the company because of his service,
even though he was an alcoholic. He wore
the 2nd thickest glasses in the factory. However he was late or missing once a
week. The union couldn’t do anything
about this, nor did they want to.
Ultimately new managers fired him and he ended up selling t-shirts at
festivals or buying TVs and raffling them off in bars. He died after being beaten in a bar fight at
the age of 60.
Macaray makes blue-collar workers ‘visible’ and human
– no small feat in this time of bourgeois consumerism, not proletarian laborism. According to him, the San Remo plant is still there and this
community continues to this day, unlike so many others.
Many similar themes also pop up in the fiction book ‘Factory Days,’ announced below.
Books on similar topics reviewed below: “Reviving the Strike,” “Class Against Class,” “Save Our Unions,” “Embedded With Organized Labor,” “Chavs”, “Class Action" and “Southern Insurgency.” Use blog search box, upper left.
And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
October 1, 2016
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