A Good Pig or Ethics of the Market By Ed Parker
See this guy is passing by a farm yard when he sees this pig with a wooden leg. So he asks the farmer, "Hey, how come this pig has a wooden leg? And the farmer says, "Well son, this here pig ain’t no ordinary pig. He saved my daughter from being ran over by the tractor, pulled her out of the way, liked to got ran over himself. Saved my wife when the house caught fire, dragged her to safety through the smoke and flames. Saved me too, that time I had a heart attack, ran all the way into town to get the doctor. Ya see son, this here pig is a kind pig, a noble pig, a brave pig and a hero, smart as a whip too. Just wouldn't be right to eat a pig like that all at once."
I’ve spent a lot of time waiting, waiting for someone, for approval, a counteroffer, a deal, waiting - listening to jokes like, “The Pig with a Wooden Leg.” Union Stewards tell such stories to fill the void, working on you, trying to soften you up. Telling meaningful stories, stories with a message, a moral, taking care to explain why the pig had a wooden leg: who cut it off, who ate it, going on at some length about trust, loyalty. There’s a talent to waiting. It’s all about learning to deal with the tension, the pause before the punch line. You learn to talk of small things, more interesting things: basketball, the “Cats” getting to the Final Four, fishing trips, the best way to make biscuits, leaning away from work and shop politics, though not entirely, never entirely. It’s hard on people who want to get things done, people with things on their mind, other things that desperately need doing.
Engineers hate grievance hearings the most, I think. They struggle with the logic of it, fidgeting impatiently, talking of duty, responsibility, things they should be doing, useful things. The engineer wants to get to the issue, never getting that it’s not about the issue, at least not about the facts, not as he knows them. Managements facts are cold lifeless things, no one cares about management’s facts, not on the shop floor. The shop floor is about opinions and beliefs, history and stories, about personalities: about the Good Pig, it’s why engineers suffer so in grievance hearings.
There’s no shop floor in a mine, not in the traditional sense, still it exists in those times and places where employees come together, in the cages, on the man trains, in the shower rooms, change rooms, break rooms, cool rooms, lunchrooms, places where they shoot the shit. It’ exists in that state of mind reminiscent of high school, has that pathos and drama, everything is personal there, no slight forgotten, or forgiven. Old grudges are kept alive there 'til retirement and death, told and re-told as the real story behind the Good Pig’s wooden leg. The union lives there, in that passing confluence of opinion and attitude, playing to the unseen audience of the membership in grievance hearings, parading the Good Pig - beating the drum. Reputations are made there, elections won and lost. Sometimes the union leadership forgets that, thinking they’re pulling instead of being pushed. They say every employee has the right to grieve, to be heard, it's what unions are all about. The union leadership forgets that at times, forgets who they serve, getting wrapped up in their sense of importance. No one gives a damn about facts.
It is important to remember who you’re speaking to in a grievance hearing, how you’re coming across. Labor Relations people are spoken of on the shop floor, in management meetings, and judged harshly by all. It takes a special person to do this kind of work, listening to problems no one really wants to solve. You have to believe in what you’re doing, that what you’re doing is right, and in industrial justice. You have to keep in mind that industrial justice lives in doing the right thing, following the contract - being fair, being reasonable. Arbitrators look for that.
Pete’s a Union Steward and former Raise Miner turned Battery Motorman. Tall and thin and proudly Hispanic with a great black mustache that covers his lower lip, most of his chin, wears expensive ostrich skin cowboy boots, drives a red pickup truck about ten feet high, keeps a half can of snoose between cheek and gum, spits into an empty Pepsi can. A pretty normal guy, a nice guy, quiet by nature, probably helps his wife around the house. Ah, but in a grievance, he’s a slayer of dragons. He waits, smiling, talking of issues with no importance, waiting for an opening, the smallest crack of an opportunity, and then he is on you with obfuscating innuendo, with tearful wheedling, fiery demands, and indignant, flaring eyes, soulful eyes. It’s the dance of denial and Pete’s the matador, the great seducer of corporate America, defender of the good pig, the humble pig, the terribly wronged and abused pig. That’s what Pete’s doing now, setting me straight about Martha. He knows I don’t like having to do this. He knows I like Martha, not that it matters. The grievance isn’t about right or wrong, not anymore, or even about Martha. It’s about the graceful kill, the sword through the heart as the cape drops to the sand, bowing to the crowd, victorious. We have done this before, I carry the scars.
Martha has cleaned the offices at the mine for the past twenty-six years, a warm, smiling, square looking woman; every one's mom. She comes from an old mining family, related to half the county, the rest she knows, or knows of - everyone knows Martha, everyone loves her. She always manages a sympathetic, interested look when miners, young and old line up to tell her their troubles, and for the cookies, the brownies and tamales she brings to work every Monday. Well OK, if not Monday, then Tuesday, usually Tuesday, Mondays being difficult for her, which is why we’re gathered here today.
“She’s been a dedicated employee, a hard worker and loyal. A mother with five children, for God’s sake, four, by the way are working here, one being a supervisor, but that’s not her fault. The other three are union members in good standing, two are Stewards.” Pete’s hunched forward across the table, not quite standing, not quite sitting down, like a runner waiting for the gun. “Ramon, her husband, you remember Ramon? Sure you do, Eddy. He can’t work, what with his back. Unloading those timbers by himself, trying to get a little more footage before the end of shift. Doing too much, always doing more than he had to, now he can’t do nothing at all, being all broke down and disabled, totally disabled. When you gonna retire him, give him his disability, Eddy? When you gonna schedule that hearing? Let him have his disability?” His hands are on the table holding it down, his eyes narrowed, squinting. He sighs, overcome by the callousness of it all, of me, especially me. “Now, now you want to fire his wife?” He shakes his head slowly, speaking softly under his breath in Spanish, of saints and blessings, doubtless. Turns his back on the bull, the cape barely moves, silence falls on the arena. He sighs deeply; his eyes full of sorrow. I know what is coming and refuse to accommodate him. I am a tired old bull with too much pain from the barbs in my back. I sigh, waiting for the long, narrow blade behind the cape.
“She could be your mother. You have a mother, don’ya, Eddy? OK, maybe not. You’re a cold piece of work, you know that, Eddy. How do you live with yourself? She’s a twenty-six year employee, Eddy, twenty-six long years, hard years. Employee of the Month, three times. She’s given her best years to the company, doing a good job, day in day out. How many times have you come to work sick, Martha?”
Martha looks surprised, not knowing what to say, glancing down at her hands. Pete clears his throat, picking up his diatribe in mid-sentence.
“Ah, she takes pride in her work, yes pride in her work, however humble. Now she needs the company’s help, a little understanding, a second chance, Eddy?” He has that ‘let’s be reasonable’ look, a slight wrinkling of the forehead, eyebrows squeezed together. I've been told he practices it in the change room mirror, gets a lot of laughs. He has others, outrage, innocence, outrage, being my favorite.
It’s coming. I feel it coming, hell, I can see it coming, starting to feel resentful. I really hate the Joint Union Management Committee, or JUMC. I sat through all the meetings, never raising my hand. I was never fond of horse shit, and the JUMC is horse shit. Not that the idea is wrong, we should work with the unions. We all need our jobs. I just hated the packaging, the hoopla, the Madison Ave lying bullshit. Why can’t we just be straight with them? Tell them we have to make this work, cut costs, improve productivity, whatever it takes to keep the mine open. The price of copper is down. Everyone knows the price of copper, knows the price is down. We live and breathe the price of copper. The JUMC meetings are about the contrivances of consultants, the hand holding, the endless kumbaya, and like glazed donuts; after about the second or third, they just make your teeth hurt.
“We’re all in this together, Eddy, all on the same team. You’ve heard of JUMC, haven’t ya, Eddy? You go to the meetings. We’re partners here, Eddy.” And there it is, the JUMC blade through the heart, he briefly looks ashamed, but only briefly, biting back a half smile. The JUMC crack comes after three hours of reviewing Martha’s attendance file, re-arguing every absence for the last twenty-six years, getting nowhere, not that it matters. We both know there’s going to be a deal and this, this is politics and theatre. Pete’s up for re-election.
I squeeze my eyebrows together, wrinkle my forehead and gently sigh, the sigh of the wronged, the misunderstood, the long suffering, and wait patiently, politely for him to finish. Knowing he’s a showman, knowing there is no need to speak, to rebut. He’s a good guy, only saying what he has to say, except for that JUMC stuff. No, this is theater, the accusing looks, the concerned, sad, watery eyes. I’ve done it before myself, once or twice. Martha will be crying in a moment. I hate that. Then Pete will ask for a caucus. Then we’ll wait. Soon George, the President of the largest Local, the one representing the miners, will take the Mine Manager aside. After a few minutes they’ll wave me and Pete over.
It’s a typical third step grievance meeting, since JUMC, less violent perhaps, less shouting, less name calling. Now each side shows a little more give, more things get settled. Still this talk of togetherness, of cooperation feels awkward. We dance around the Good Pig, throwing little jabs like boxers, each waiting for the other to throw the first low blow. Hell, once we were warriors, now we're just whores, I see it in Pete’s eyes, see it in my own. Too much money is being spent on this JUMC thing. It feels wrong, like a scam, a hustle. Still, it’s for our future, isn't it?
The union knows there’s going to be a deal. It’s no secret Martha’s the mother-in-law of the supervisor who fired her, the cousin of the Mine Manager, the sister of the Vice President of the local, and a fine pig, a Good Pig. You could lead a parade with such a pig. Everyone wants to help her. Hell, I want to help her. Pete looks forward to the parade, to leading her on a golden chain toward the next elections.
George, the Union President, passes a can of snoose to the Mine Manager, nodding toward the old dear. The Mine Manager takes a pinch, packs his lip, grunts, and passes it back. There is a ritual to this, most of it non-verbal, the offering of the little round can, sometimes tapping the can with a forefinger and pointing. You can either take the can or raise your palm and spread your fingers, to say, 'no thanks'. I wave it away. Vile stuff, snoose, like a course, wet grade of snuff, flavored or wet down with a shot or two of Jack Daniels, or worse, Southern Comfort. We go outside and talk for ten, twenty minutes, about other things, mostly. There isn’t much to say about Martha. It’ll be a non precedent setting, final, final, no shit final, never to be spoken of again, final agreement: a twenty-eight day in-house rehabilitation program with a new attendance record. The paper work is there in a file folder on the table. No one wants to fire her. No one wants her to kill herself either, which she’s doing, drinking like that. It doesn’t work all the time, not for some problems: theft, sabotage, assaulting management, that kind of thing - unacceptable things, adversarial things. Things we’ll always go toe to toe over. Still, most things can be worked out when the Good Pig’s paraded. When the cooler heads, wiser heads, fill their lip and spit into empty Pepsi cans, speaking of other things to the clack of that pig’s damn wooden leg.
There’s a map of the mine on the wall on the mine conference room, just behind Pete. It shows the Draw level, the main drifts, the panels, grizzly raises and draw points, most of which I don’t understand, not being a miner. They must have had a meeting in here earlier about ore production, there’s numbers written all over a flip chart, notes about panels taking weight, something about the Undercut.
The Undercut is where the ore is mined, the muck. I was in an undercut for about a minute once, instantly sweating like a pig, glasses fogged over. All I could see, when I could see at all, was air swirling thick and gray in the light of my hard hat, feeling a heat, a moisture, just short of rain, like taking a steam bath in dirty clothes. I left pretty quickly. The muck goes from the Undercut down raises to the Draw level where Shoe Tappers, Chute Tappers, work in unlit panels, downsizing boulders with long arching blows of eighteen pound hammers, the pieces of rock, the ore. the muck, has to fit between the bars of the grizzly, pieces smaller than, say a basketball. The muck goes through the grizzly, down into another raise dropping sixty feet, to the Pony Set. The Pony Set fills the ore cars on the Haulage level where a DC locomotive drawing six hundred amps from a bare copper wire pulls twenty-two cars at a time to the ore dump at the hoist. Every day fifty thousand tons, tons, of muck are skipped three thousand, nine hundred feet to the surface. Underground is a different world, worth seeing, worth saving.
Across the conference room on the other wall, near George and the Mine Manager, is a picture of the mine, taken from, say ten thousand feet, showing the offices, change rooms, shops, head rigs, ore crusher, and the open pit. A little of the road and the railroad tracks going to plant can be seen. It’s a big picture, maybe four feet across in an old wooden frame, taken some time ago when the pit was small.
Strange how you remember one afternoon, maybe it was the minty smell of Pete’s snooze, smell has strange memories. I can’t for the life of me remember what started me thinking about Martha, or listening to Pete. Somehow it all comes back, so clear, so painfully clear. Changed, of course, as all things are by time and perspective, details forgotten, like a tapestry unraveling, threads frayed, dropping away, lost, still, the impression, the feeling remains. I enjoyed Labor Relations then, thinking I could do some good, and for a while I did.
The pit started when the surface collapsed above the mine. The mine is a block and cave operation and the top of it just caved in, taking some nearby buildings with it. As cave in’s go it was something of a slow sag, unspectacular except for the result. No one was hurt, though the back of the administration building hung precariously a hundred feet above its foundation. It gave a friend of mine who was working back there at the time a bit of a pause. He looked at what once was, and now was no more, and said softly, “What the hell?”
In the pit, the underground sulfide ore turned to oxide. Oxide ore must be leached, creating a new profit center, although a small one. It happened long ago, well before the trailer was blown up.
There’s a glass case under the picture and against the wall, inside are interesting pieces of copper ore, rocks bright as turquoise, pretty, but too soft to be turquoise, not really copper ore either. Martha went to the restroom; Pete’s telling me how to make tamales, starting with killing the pig. He knows I don’t eat meat, knows I’m ignoring him. We all believed a little then, trying to find answers in the middle ground, where we could. Change was slow, but real, better than the old days, better than what was to come.
Keep in mind these people have been mining, getting muck for generations. Copper mining is a way of life in eastern Arizona and everyone knows everyone, knows who can get the muck and who can't. It doesn’t stop the fighting, the bickering between management and union; nothing does, except weddings and funerals. Even then, one side leaves early, herding their wives, husbands, children toward the door, looking back over their shoulder. The other side stays late, gets drunk and fights among themselves. Both sides speak, or at least nod, when they see each other in town, having been raised to be polite. That’s part of the culture too, politeness, courtesy, honor. And like I said, most of them are related, in-laws, cousins, three times removed, you have to remember who you’re talking to, who they talk to, keeping in mind that what goes around, comes around. And there’s always that distance, that separation, management and union, salaried and hourly. Things have to be done a certain way, and done slowly.
The plant and mine are two different worlds, something like Rome and Constantinople before the fall. Feelings of alienation are stronger at the plant and there’s more separation and none of the grudging respect that comes from working underground. The ties are stronger underground. A sense of, well, not togetherness, not quite, still there is respect for a man's work underground. Underground everyone feels the feels the heat, the wet, the rough grayness of the stone, the dark. Off the main drift, off the man train, you live inside the light of your hard hat. Yellow-white as you leave the cage, it’s a tired piss yellow by the end of the shift. It doesn’t matter who you are, underground you live inside your own light.
It starts in the cages of the hoist. The orderly crowding into the cages, eighty men in mud and sweat stiffened diggers, ten deep, eight across. It’s intimate in a cage, you can feel a belt buckle pressing against your backside, a respirator pushing into your belly. You need the cooperation and consent of the man next to you to scratch your nose, no one scratches their ass. The Cager gives the bell rope a tug and the hoist drops down the shaft, slowing quickly, making you bend your knees. Then a quick up and down as the Cager signals the hoist to line up the doors. This is when it’s trying being in Labor Relations, knowing who has trouble coming to work, and why. You never ask who’s running the hoist. You don’t want to know, taking refuge in the knowledge that most are senior people and steady: one’s running for Union President. You hope it’s him, thinking he won’t screw with seventy-nine voters just to get to you.
The plant is just below the town, looking down, the mill is to the right, a tin building a quarter mile long. In the middle is the flash furnace, and the seven story high smelter with its six hundred foot stacks, behind it is the refinery, further back is the rod plant. They’re all hot, the plant’s all about heat. At twenty-one hundred degrees copper flows like water, sensitive to sudden changes in temperature, sensitive and intolerant. A little moisture in the cold dope used to cool the cauldrons of molten copper acts like an ice cube thrown into a deep fat fryer. Suddenly there is a couple tons of molten copper flying through the crane aisle. The burn marks five stories up in the smelter crane aisle bear witness to this volatility, as do the windows in the overhead cranes pock marked with copper splatter. Making copper is an art of transitions, melding heat and copper concentrate together - timing is everything.
Outside it can be a hundred and ten, inside the smelter it’s twenty degrees hotter, and that’s before the monsoon. The monsoon comes in late July, early August; its mugginess brings an edginess to people and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Tempers flare and people do strange things, filing strange grievances, harassment grievances: ‘my supervisor watches me’ grievances. Grievances alleging sexual harassment, of little clay penises left on lunch boxes, not to be mistaken for say, short, fat, gray snakes. No, it’s got to be little, gray, clay penises. Says, she knows a penis when she sees one. There are fewer people at the plant, but they file more grievances. Grieving gives them something to do, sitting in the cool rooms waiting to go back to work. It’s hot and you need those cool rooms and something to do as you wait.
Senior people take their vacations in the summer, maybe going back to Michigan or camping out in the White Mountains with the kids. Sensible people avoid the plant during monsoon season, increasing the concentration of the senseless and irritable, and adding to the problem. The monsoons come up sudden and violent, thunder and lightning crackling, snapping, rain so heavy it’s hard to breathe, sometimes it hails. Then, for about a half hour, the air is cool and fresh and everyone wants to just breathe. There is no such feeling after a grievance hearing where the emotional mugginess lingers well into the ride home.
Martha’s grievance hearing sticks in my mind for some reason, I don’t know why. It wasn’t always that good. A strike was narrowly averted not too many years before, shortly after a double wide trailer was blown up, some say to underscore the seriousness of their position - someone’s position. The unions said they had nothing to do with it. Though they said it was a miracle only a trailer was destroyed, given the company’s heavy handed attitude toward their employees. Employees who come to work sick, too poor to afford health care, now that the company sold the hospital. Not to mention the ones being turned out of their homes. Homes they’ve lived in since they were children, since their parents were children. Now the company wants to sell their homes, their town, turn it into some kind of resort. Sell it to the snowbirds from Chicago so they can watch the sunrise as it tints the smelter’s smokestacks with rose; see the moonlight on the tailings. Damn all snowbirds and their fat assed RV’s and trailers.
I must have heard it fifty times. Who knows who blew up the trailer, could have been anyone? The federal people gave up and left, saying anyone could have done it. After that no one cared much about who did it. Someone did it, and truthfully, anyone could have done it. A mine uses a lot of explosives, round white beads in long sausage like tubes, just needs a blasting cap. Anyone can make a bomb underground and most have, at one time or another. It’s a mining tool and commonly used. Even Shoe Tappers will use bombs to clear a jammed raise. Wrap some powder around the end of a long stick, fix a blasting cap. Tie two, maybe three sticks together end to end, if you need to get way up there, being careful not to get killed sticking your head up a raise like that. Muck can come unstuck all by itself, and there you are, dead as hell, your old lady rich, talking to some strange man, say Blondie, somebody like that or worse than that. Blondie is ok, wouldn’t do that, not to a friend. Still, men watch their wives around Blondie, he has a way with women. Anyway, powder is not that difficult to steal, people are in and out of the powder magazine all the time. The trailer was scattered across a few acres of desert and the point made.
The business was changing and the company had to change with it. That’s what was said though no one believed it. The hospital changed becoming too complicated and expensive to be ran by a mining company. And the town, the company built it back in the fifties. A nice little industrial kind of town, with schools and parks with baseball diamonds, a movie theater, stores and a bar. A place for people to live between shifts. A town with tree lined streets, Myrtles and such, lawns of Bermuda grass, all full of pollen. Those flat roofed, cinder block houses rented for forty or fifty dollars a month and kept twenty-five people busy fixing broken windows, replacing cooler pads, hauling away junked cars. Or it did until paternalism up and died. Now the company wants out of the town business, putting the houses up for sale, gradually evicting those who don't want to buy. Most stay, becoming home owners, up to their ears in debt from buying refrigerators and pickup trucks with huge tires. No one can afford a strike, but no one is pleased and more than a few are pissed off – no one cares about facts.
Anyway, the company decided to do something different, have a meeting, bring in some consultants, try to ease the tension. The price of copper was down to a few cents a pound less than it cost to make it, underscoring that it was costing too much to make it. Everyone knew we were losing money, and everyone knew a strike would kill the mine. Truthfully, some didn’t care if the mine closed or not, those with outside skills, electricians, welders, some of the mechanics. Most did though, most of the mine mechanics are big hammer mechanics, give it another tap, then hit it hard mechanics, skills not readily transferable. Most people wanted the mine to continue running, which was the whole idea behind the meetings. So the question was raised, what could we do differently to stay in business, open up those lines of communication? You know, sort of talk things over? In short, the company was in trouble, needing to cut costs and increase production and therefore, open to suggestion. Things had to change, everyone knew it, but change is always troubling. Everyone was tense, worried about their future.
At the meeting, the unions, there were seven, listened to what the company had to say, looking sympathetic and deeply moved, asking if they were still on the clock. Bringing all the union presidents and their elected entourage together at one time was gutsy. They didn’t care much for each other, liking management even less. So there we were, the unions on one side of the room, management on the other, and nothing getting done. That’s where the consultants first worked their magic, there in that divided room, convincing everyone that we needed to do this again. And strangely, everyone agreed, the Unions talking about easy money, laughing. Hey, why not?
In the beginning, the meetings weren’t so bad, we met in a little auditorium near where the Biosphere was being built. The auditorium overlooked a little valley with a Spanish style ranch house, its red tile roof showing behind some trees. It was snowing and the view, well it was worth seeing. Some one had decided holding the meetings offsite would make the unions feel more comfortable, and it did. The consultants looked pleased, having been paid in advance, offered a bonus in the unlikely event they could generate interest in more meetings. Paid some ludicrous sum, or so I heard it said, doubtless to a numbered account in an offshore bank.
Everyone was cynical at first. We speculated about the consultants, about whether or not their meeting supplies, flip charts, those big paper markers, were included in the tab, especially the tall bar stools. The consultant sat on these tall stools, one foot hooked on a rung, the other foot toe down, buttocks barely touching the seat. Ready to sprint for the flip chart, should someone have anything worthwhile to say. There was a lot of comment about the stools during the breaks, it helped break the ice. Not much was said in the meetings. Oh, there were speeches, that sort of thing, but little was said, all real progress took place during the breaks. During the meetings, if someone said something about the time, as in, “Is it time for a break?” The consultants would write down,’ time’ saying something encouraging, smiling, a trick familiar to dog trainers. The food was alright: donuts, rolls, fruit, sandwiches, that kind of thing, once we had pizza.
The pizza came after a group from the mill was introduced, saying they worked together as a team. Worse, the team was mixed, different trades from different unions working together. Now this was remarkable, and it was remarked upon, causing some red faces and lowered eyebrows. A murmur raced through the room, swelling to an ominous grumble. Someone shouted that the contracts were being violated. Other people shouted, “not so”, and “go fuck yourself” or words to that effect, actually, that may have been me. The consultants hastily called for a break, then, they called for pizza. Over pizza, tempers cooled and the subject changed.
Management thought the teamwork idea seemed promising, and it was discussed at length behind closed door with the consultants. They decided to approach the teamwork idea cautiously, the way a hunter stalks a deer, weight on the back leg, treading slowly, circling. The unions were suspicious of teamwork, alert and wary of assaults on their turf, their rice bowl. Saying, no damn team was doing their work, and productivity was not their concern, that kind of thing. The spark died and the consultants were told to back off and try something else, oneness, something like that. So they did, being sensitive to suggestion and quick to change. No one really knew where this was going, not in the beginning. Some said it was planned from the git go, but I was there and I know no one could have planned it.
More meetings were scheduled, bigger, grander, cautiously optimistic meetings, all about living in the future, being clear they didn’t expect much change now. We met in one of the local hotels, over a hundred of us, union and management. At first no one took it seriously, until we found the meetings were twelve hour long meetings, and each session, three, four days long, with five, six sessions planned over the next few months. Before we knew it we’d became professional meeting goers, passing notes, stretching out the breaks. The consultants called it ‘inventing our future.’ They said they were going to change our culture and we needed a Charter, a Vision: a ‘Who We Be, Wanna Be,’ in the future, sort of thing. No one knew what to say. Not knowing what to say, and time being money, a few executes started tossing suggestions into this awe struck vacuum, quickly followed by their closest sycophants. These shills began raising their hands jiggling in their seats, wanting to speak, needing to, like they were about to piss their pants. When called upon, they bleated out words and phrases that sounded coached, contrived, unnatural. The consultants turned facilitators, ran to their flip charts to write it all down, sometimes writing down things that not been said, sometimes before they were said. Suggestions about ground breaking departures, radical changes, couched in broken sentences and confused words, perfectly good words used poorly.
This was the new technology, how we were going to change our culture, save our jobs, words used incorrectly, and badly over used. Words like: technology, accountable, integrity, stand, everything being a stand. It led to phrases like: “What is giving being in the present reality?” “Managing the existence of conversation with and inside of integrity.” “Handling breakdowns from a future given approach.” And, “Unmingling a commingled reality,” my personal favorite. There were many more, most of them I can’t remember, repression, I suppose. I found myself alphabetizing them, cross referencing them, just to keep from going completely stupid. The idea of using language in such a manner as to disconnect biases and prejudices from issues was intellectually interesting when it wasn’t insulting.
I remember staring at the flip charts taped to the ballroom walls, awed to be part of such insanity, trying to make sense of our Charter, and Mission Statement, our Vision of the future, unable to take it seriously. It was, well, surreal. Yes, surreal. Reading it brought no sense of clarity, no sense of completeness, I just couldn’t get it. Maybe, it was the phrasing, the way everything was carefully worded in the present tense, “We are. . . . We be. . . stated positively, as if it were true. All about: union/management partnership, team based organization, employee involvement, and breakthrough results. None of which the Union would have sat still for, had it been said in plain English. There were one or two, “We wills, for some reason. All of it ending with, “This is our stand.” Written like that, few took it seriously, thinking it no more than say, a thinly disguised ploy to get us to think about things differently, which of course it was.
Shortly after it was printed in the company paper, Don lost his election. All the union presidents lost their elections. People thought they were crazy, not having been properly greased for such an intrusion. Pete slipped through this firestorm, though I don’t know how. This was a year or more before Martha’s grievance.
After the laughing and crying died down, things turned ominous, our decision makers actually went for it, the Charter and Mission and Vision thing. Another consulting group was found in California, radical and militant, friends of the first, I suspect, a spin off of a defunct seventies self-help group, the one with the long meetings, marathon meeting, break-less meetings. The one that wouldn’t let their attendee’s use the restroom. Said it forces you to prioritize, builds commitment, character. Some of my friends went to those meeting back then, back in the seventies, went willingly for some reason, coming back full of insight and awkward sounding words, sounding hysterically pleased with the experience. Gradually admitting it was expensive, and difficult, finally that they had been stripped emotionally naked and exposed to the chicken yard mercy of all the other sick bastards present. Told that they were not taking responsibility for themselves that they would have to go to more meetings, many more meetings to make any progress, offered a discount if they brought a friend. I'm pretty sure this was the same bunch.
The next round of meetings was like that, kind of a cross between an AAA meeting and an encounter group. No one ever told a miner that they couldn’t go to the restroom to pee, not twice. They'd pee on your foot. This round was all about taking responsibility which sounds good until you realized the vehicle being used to accomplish it was public self immolation. A spilling of the guts in front of bosses, subordinates, and co-workers, egged on by sadists, who didn’t have to work there day after day. One poor woman volunteered that she had been raped as a child. She was told to take responsibility for it. It was one of the few meetings I missed, which was good, because I would have handled it badly. The Company kept it quiet, settling the suit out of court.
No one had to go to the meetings, but everyone went, all thirty five hundred employees, three and four hundred at a time. The hourly employees were paid overtime, us management types got to keep our jobs. The meetings were voluntary, as in, no one had to work there, but it paid the bills and kept the kids fed. Perhaps it was the evangelical third degree approach that angered me, or possibly the fact that it was degrading, and just plain insulting. When called on in those meetings, I’d stand up, politely decline, and sit back down. I was a representative of management, the people who hired these jokers. So maybe I deserved it. How could I stand up and say this is all a fraud? Besides there was the off chance it would work. The company was spending millions on this madness, saying our future depended upon it. Cognitive dissidence, yes, there was that, and several other related ethical, moral and philosophic maladies - loyalty took a beating.
The financial books were opened early in the next negotiations with the unions. Even the newly elected union leadership could see that it looked bleak, that something had to be done to save our jobs, our way of life, though there was rumored to be two sets of books. Truthfully, the mine was marginal and we needed to borrow money, a lot of money, a couple of hundred million dollars, difficult, given the company’s junk bond credit rating. It was important to woo Wall Street into upgrading our credit rating, which was the real reason behind JUMC, though I didn’t realize it at the time, and damned if it didn’t work. Cost and production figures were squeezed and fine tuned until we saw progress. Anything that looked like progress was applauded. The self serving nature of our progress reports was obvious, but not so obvious as to render it incapable of being ignored, anything can be ignored if it’s for a good cause.
With the JUMC and the new culture technology working, things took off. Attitudes were changing, gradually, but changing, as people bought into the idea that all this malarkey was working. It was becoming easier to work with the unions. Everyone was infused with, or at least tinged with being in responsibility, being in integrity, and so forth. Cost savings were shared and high performance teams introduced. More teams were in training to be high performance teams using this new technology, many in areas where it made no sense at all, not that it mattered. It was novel, interesting, and people wanted to believe, needed to believe. Productivity went up, costs went down. And as luck would have it, the price of copper soared. Suddenly we were making money, lots of money, millions and millions in profits. We were a money making machine. We made the Wall Street Journal and the trade magazines for our innovative JUMC approach, our fifteen year labor agreement, our culture of change technology. There were tours by the bus load, people coming from all over the world to gaze and wonder. Companies wanted our people technology, our how the hell did we pull it off technology, our secrets. Our credit rating improved and we got our loans.
I avoided talking about JUMC in grievances, and as for our new technology - it was tempting, I mean, I wanted to; I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The phrasing bothered me and the logic hurt my head. Still, I heard a lot about unmingling our co-mingled past and futures, from people like Pete, and hated it, though I tried to make it work, knowing it was all hype.
“Why you acting like this, Eddy, firing people? We’re partners, ain’t we Eddy?” Pete started saying things like that after the second or third JUMC meeting, about the same time we had Martha's grievance. He said it in a joking manner at first, gradually becoming serious, waiting for my answer. I was out of step and hearing about it from both the unions and significant members of management. I’d used the idea of taking responsibility in disciplinary hearings long before it was popular and meant it. It was an old idea with some actual merit. Maybe I was guilty of parading the JUMC, the Good Pig, although I didn’t ask anyone to confess their sins in front of a few hundred fellow employees. We needed to work together.
And damned if we didn’t start reading parts of our company manifesto in public, declaring that our unionized employees added value and afforded the company a major competitive edge, which wasn’t true, but Wall Street liked it and the unions liked it. Everyone forgot that adding a competitive edge was never the Unions job. Unions are there to keep management from acting like little gods and ass holes. A few management types spoke up truthfully, receiving poor performance reviews and getting passed over for promotions for their honesty. Some badly twisted mind, or minds, it was doubtless a team effort, put together a happiness squad of former union officials, calling them Organizational Development (OD). These inquisitors searched out the few who bothered to tell the truth, calling them nonbelievers, and road blocks, ratting them out to top management. No one liked them, but that didn't matter either. We were a team based organization, and everyone had to be part of a team. OD attended all the team meetings where everyone spoke of how well we were doing, how well we were working together. And some small part of it was true, indeed a good deal of it was true, or could have been true, if things had been different. Most people wanted it to be true, or many did, and others, management by and large, struggled to gag it down. Still, there was a vague, but growing suspicion on the shop floor that something was just not right.
By then our stock was up to eight dollars and change, a big improvement over the four dollars a share back when the trailer was blown up. Ah, but it came at a cost. Our managers’ eyes were beginning to twitch, always glancing behind to see if anyone was watching them, listening to them when they talked on the phone. They were being worked to death, threatened and bullied to do more. Middle management drones like me received little one-on-one’s, ending with winks and hints to shut up and go along. It came out on the ride home, making car pooling an exercise in primal scream therapy, alternating with cursing in a monotone. I began to suffer more and more from cognitive dissidence, and depression, repeating myself, staring blankly in meetings, behavior that didn’t stand out or call attention to itself having sadly to have become the norm.
It wasn’t long after Martha’s grievance hearing that the JUMC dream was sold for over three times the asking price of our stock, bought by a bunch of silly Aussie bastards from down under. The CEO said it was just too good of a deal to turn down. Said it was in the best interest of the stockholders, something like that, like he had just stumbled across the idea. He and the rest of management, top management, were rich now, very, very rich, millionaires. Trouble was no one wanted to bust ass anymore. It all paid the same to a Shoe Tapper with nothing to believe in, no one to believe in. The Good Pig was cooked; JUMC coming undone like a Ponzi scheme after the principals are arrested. The union was angry, the shop floor was angry, everyone feeling betrayed and used. Long before the dream was sold, people were tired of the buzz words, the hoopla, the well intended charade, now, they were angry. The future had been badly overdone, over sold.
The union officials who had supported working with the company were voted out of office. People who promised they would never agree to anything were nominated and voted into office, carried in on a tide of spite and anger, people proven to be too stupid to be influenced by threats or reason. And, as they say, everything changed, Pete wasn’t a Union Steward any more, Martha retired early, the Mine Manager was sent into exile. Now grievance hearings were hostile before a word was said, no deals, no agreements. The price of copper that had kept us going now was going south. You could hear the sucking flush as the Good Pig swirled round and round, sinking into legend, into martyrdom.
The new company, BHP, wanted us to live up to our promises, being slow to realize that our promises had been made in the passion of courtship, passion which had cooled with the dawn. Let the buyer beware, and so forth. They didn’t though; soon the new owners were angry and developing a taste for pork. Back at the home office, 'down under,' the new company’s stockholders were pissed off; stock prices were falling, heads rolling. It wasn’t long before the new company needed to economize, deciding to downsize, starting with us. When the early out packages were announced, I grabbed mine and walked out of the meeting to pack and be on my way by the end of shift. Truthfully I felt bad about it, running off like a coward, but I had had enough. I just couldn’t stand being there anymore, finding it hard to think, very hard. It’s strange suddenly coming face to face with limitations you didn’t know you had. Not long after I left, the plant closed; the mine flooded, and it was over.
All that’s left now is a mountain of white sand. Over the years, three quarters of a billion tons of muck had been skipped to the surface from that mine, each ton producing just twelve pounds of copper. The rest is this pile of sand behind the mill, or where the mill was before they tore it down. The sand is white, sterile, lifeless; finer than beach sand. I can’t say what chemicals might remain behind there, traces of arsenic, I suppose, not enough to get upset about. The mine was located on the backside of Mt Lemon, a forty-five mile drive from Tucson, Arizona, now it’s gone. The town the company built for the workers back in the fifties is still there, though the hospital closed. The plant below the town: the mill, refinery, smelter, railroad, maintenance buildings are gone, even the smokestacks are gone. And the thirty-five hundred people who had worked there, most of them are gone as well. All because some greedy bastards killed the Good Pig, killed it and ate it all at once.
We all swim in a sea of self-interest, some swimming further out than others. The corporate world knows this, being born of institutionalized greed, greed that reaches down to the shop floor, and the faintest whiff of opportunity. When opportunity fails for lack of substance and profits fall short of expectations, all promises are off, the best of intentions quickly forgotten. There is nothing colder than a negative earnings statement in a quarterly report. In our JUMC meetings we had talked of stakeholders, one of our buzzwords. One such stakeholder was the livelihood of our employees, their families, our way of life. In reality there is no stakeholder, except the stockholder, the amorphous stockholder who lives in abstract numbers and doesn’t give a damn about Good Pigs. When people become numbers, abstract symbols in someone’s program, honesty, integrity, and ethics become inspiring, yet deceitfully self-serving buzz words. No good intention, no promise will stand in the face of economic reality when the quarterly report makes bacon of all Good Pigs.
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