Blue Collar
Chapter Five: V&J Tool & Die
Jim took over the V&J Commercial Tool & Die after his dad died. He really hadn’t wanted to but that is what a good son does in metro Detroit. He carries on the blue-collar tradition.
They had worked together since he got out of high school, “Just two blue collar guys side-by-side,” his dad always said while Jim stood beside him mouthing the words.
Yet, Jim felt the same kind of pride his father had felt. It had felt good, then. It still felt good now to be blue collar and proud of it.
“Not that you could ever get my son to think that way,” Jim muttered to himself walking into the shop.
He found Mary Beth at the reception desk right where she has been for the past 35 years. She was only 16 when Jim’s father hired her and made her part of the family. Even though it seemed like every other business was firing receptionists and going to automated voice systems, Jim wouldn’t even consider that.
“You might as well cut off my left nut as get rid of Mary Beth,” he told Thomas and Michael during what was going to become an incredibly drunken night at Jon Jon’s, Warren’s first and most famous topless bar.
“She’s family. She knows the place better than anyone and besides. She’s family.”
“So you said,” Thomas said, laughing as he drags on another cigarette. “So you said.”
Mary Beth and Jim exchanged their good mornings, and he went through the messages. Thank heavens there are more of these, he thought thumbing through the pink slips Mary Beth left in his box.
Compliments.
What a relief, it was to see messages from happy customers, increasing their orders.
Jim had instituted Six Sigma manufacturing principles that helped identify problems in the shop before they became issues for customers.
And business was up. Thank God for that, Jim would have thought if he was one of the believers he had met on the other side of Michigan.
But he wasn’t.
There were years that V&J got nothing but nothing. Those were years when Jim and Carolyn were almost driven to pray. It was known as the Great Recession everywhere but Detroit.
There it was the Detroit Depression.
As far as Virg was concerned it was the unions that wrecked V&J and Jim didn’t think he was wrong by much.
“Nobody on your side of the table believes in compromise,” Jim would say during bargaining sessions with the union rep for the small local that worked at V&J, sounding just like his dad.
“Don’t you realize this is a global society?” Jim said, “I can send all of this work to China or Mexico and just say the hell with you.”
“You can’t do that,” said the union rep.
He and Jim might have gone to high school together, but right now they were planets apart. “You’ll wreck the community. You’ll wreck the state. You owe workers more than that.”
“And if I don’t see it your way, what then?”
“We walk.”
“And I close.”
“Who won’t compromise now?”
In the end they worked it out. Jim gave much more than he wanted. Mr. UAW felt the same way.
The difference between negotiations at V&J and the United Auto Workers union and what went on with the Big Three — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — was the fact that everyone knew everyone.
“We all hung out in the same bars. Our wives all shopped at the same stores. Our kids all went to school together,” Virg would say in his Lazy Boy by the window. “We got along because we knew we had to get along.”
“And you know what? Sometimes they were right.”
Neither Virg nor Jim ever moved much of their work overseas.
“Why would I want to send even a dime to those people in Japan?” Virg would say. “I spent too many years waking up in the war with one of those bastards trying to kill me.”
Besides, Virg was too controlling. He couldn’t stand not to be looking over someone’s shoulder. Even the TV repairman back in the days when tubes brought the world into homes all over the world, got used to Virg’s breath on his neck.
“And he couldn’t do that when the tool makers are in Vietnam, or China, or Japan,” Jim said to Michael with a laugh and a drag on the cigarette that he thinks Carolyn doesn’t know he is smoking. “I don’t know anybody who could see that far.”
“Those unions wrecked this city as I am concerned,” as another country was heard from in the United Nations of Regal Lanes.
It was time for Michael to have his say.
Always a card-carrying member of the Teamsters Union, but never happy with the union bosses, Michael was like a Catholic who was never happy with the Pope in the Vatican.
As a matter of fact, Michael was that, too.
“I paid dues and put money in the plate because I had too. Couldn’t work if I didn’t, and the Teamsters wouldn’t have stayed in power if they didn’t force us to pay up,” said Michael. “Won’t be able to go to heaven without the Church.”
“What about the benefits you got? Healthcare? Vacations? The work rules, all the shit Dave G. and the boys at UAW were always beating me up for,” said Jim. “Didn’t that make you feel a little better?”
“You’re still stuck in 1972,” Michael said turning red. Jim could tell Mark’s index finger is about ready to poke him in the chest, which meant Jim was putting four fingers and a thumb together for a comeback.
“We lost all that shit,” said Michael. “Healthcare, pensions, everything gone. But you think the fat asses at Teamsters HQ are hurting? Not much. They even fucked over their own people,” he concluded slamming a fist on the bar rattling everyone’s cage.
“Language, gentleman, language,” said Pat, 85 years old if she was a day and looking more like 90 but she never missed a day behind the bar. Neither did her husband, who coincidently was named Patrick.
“The unions had to give,” said Patrick who was a dues paying member of the Detroit Police Officers Union until the day he turned in his shield, which was about two days before he got grand juried on charges of police brutality.
“They had to give, Michael. The fuckin’ Chinese and Mexicans are eatin’ our lunch. You want all the jobs should go over to those places. Christ even the fuckin’ Vietnamese are stealing our work.”
Michael had to admit that it was not 1972 anymore, but damn it. Why shouldn’t it be again? The world worked in those days.
***
Jim was continuing the debate in his mind — and Michael wasn’t doing nearly as well — when he got back to the shop.
He only put his mind at ease when Richard walked into the office following a polite tap at his open door.
Now here’s what those idiots in Washington did to our younger generation, Jim couldn’t help thinking as he rose to shake Richard’s hand, admiring the Marine Corps tattoo on his arm.
Three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, he comes home and gets nothing, absolutely nothing. No job. No home. No nothing. Just crap.
Jim did have trouble with escaping the 1972 thing. He realized that nostalgia is usually nothing but wistful thinking.
But Jim was among the first to also realize the Baby Boomer generation was retiring and dying faster than their children were coming to work in the factories.
Nobody wanted to work in manufacturing. Jim’s friends didn’t want their kids to work in the plants.Hey. Jim’s dad didn’t want him in the plants either.
That made sense for a while. Jobs were going overseas. Work was going to Mexico. The unions were beating up guys like Jim and guys like Jim were selling out.
Jim didn’t sell. He thought about it. He didn’t sell.
Now, he had a new problem. The work was coming back.
V&J was running two shifts a day, six days a week, something Virg prayed he would see before his dying day.
The work started coming back in 2011. Jim felt like everyone who worked in the auto supply chain on Mound and Van Dyke roads were clawing their way back from the recession, kind of like crabs will do when they are stuck in a box. They climb on top of one another, one after another and finally someone sees the light of day, even though one of the crabs always tried to pull the others down so he could get on top first.
Contracts that had gone to China, Japan, India, and Mexico were now coming his way.
“Reshoring, is what they are calling it,” Jim explained to the United Nations table at Regal Lanes. “China’s not such a great deal anymore. When you add it all up it makes more sense to get the work done here.”
Jim realized that no good deed goes unpunished, and he knows enough business history to realize it’s the unintended consequences that could be a killer.
“Reshoring is good,” he said. “But now I have new problems. Do I hire more workers? Is it time to buy that new piece of equipment? Or do I just work everyone that much harder figuring the good times are going to end again?”
Is this cyclical or systemic? That’s a discussion Jim left for the economists and his friends at the Michigan Manufacturers Association.
What Jim knew for sure was the work was coming back and he needed more people. More CNC machinists, more people who know how to make things with their hands, people who got the same kick that he did and his dad did out of just making something work.
“And if they can show up on time, give me a full eight or nine hours, and do it again the next day, I’ll be a happy man,” he said to Carolyn after pulling what would have been a double shift with overtime if Jim was union, which he was not and never would be as far as he was concerned.
He had almost given up the dream of hiring a new crew until people like Richard started knocking on his door. Military people. People he could relate to. They knew how to work. They knew that the mission came first and everything else was second. There was a trust that Jim felt with them, a two-way street of loyalty he never felt from the UAW band of brothers on the other side of the table.
“Military people are just different,” Jim said to Mary Beth while he was checking messages. “They know how to work. They come into work.”
Richard and the others didn’t know manufacturing. Jim fixed that. He opened a new company, a company that did nothing but train these guys to work in the plants.
All he did was teach them and give them a chance to prove themselves.
“Just like boot camp, right Richard?”
Richard looked up at him with his dark eyes set back under bushy eye brows and smiled through his new thick, curly beard saying in almost a whisper, “Yes sir.”
Richard did three months in Jim’s new school, another year on the floor in an apprenticeship program, and now he was supervising second shift.
I love it when a plan comes together, Jim thinks to himself, leaning back in his chair.
“New order in Jim,” said Alan V&J’s top salesman, the only one who survived the lean years. “And we need it out Friday.”
Well, that’s why they call us managers Jim said to himself as he finished off another day at his second home.
“Jim, Carolyn on two,” Mary Beth said on the intercom.
“Hey. What’s...
“Harold’s dead.”
“Damn”
Harold Thomasson had never been a close friend. But Harold was always there. Harold was like the graffiti on the walls of Warren HIgh. You never knew how it got there, but it was just always there.
“I knew he was sick,” Jim said.
“Cancer,” Carolyn said. “Monica has been posting updates on Facebook. I should have gone to the hospital to see him. Last night they put him in hospice. He died this morning.”
“He’s number nine.”
“Don’t be funny.”
“I’m not being funny. I am being morbid. Can’t you tell the difference? He is the ninth person we knew in high school to die. Actually it’s twelve if you could Larry, David and Tom; the guys who were killed in that car crash when we were in junior high.”
“Oh, right,” said Carolyn. “I never really knew them. Didn’t they steal the car?”
“Borrowed it, from auto shop. Broke right into the high school garage, got the keys of the wall and drove away.”
“I heard Larry’s head got cut off on the rear view mirror.”
“Nice. You can be morbid, too.”
Jim and Carolyn were finding out that there comes a time in every Baby Boomer’s life when he or she can see the finish line. The more friends and family who die, the brighter and closer it becomes.
“You can either decide to race to the finish,” Jim said to Thomas. “Or you can cut across the infield, cruise to the finish line, and save the fourth turn.”
“I know what you can do with me when I die,” said Thomas.
“I can hardly wait for this,” Michael said as he rubbed his eyes with the heel of the hand holding a burning cigarette. “What can we do with you, when you die?”
“Take my ashes, magnetize them and put ‘em in an Etch-A-Sketch,” Thomas said coming right off his stool to get his face as close as possible to Michael for the punch line.
“Did you hear that Jim, I said, ‘Put ‘em in an Etch-A-Sketch,’” Thomas said as he laughed himself breathless, wiping the tears out of his eyes.
This isn’t the first time Thomas has thought about death. There wasn’t a day that went by when he doesn’t seriously think about ending it all. He drove by a tall building and wondered what it would be like to take a jump.
He saw rope in a hardware store and imagined turning it into the noose that ended his life.
Once he shopped for a gun he could use. Figuring he would only need two bullets — one for him and one for his mom — Thomas tried to find something he could afford and then laughed about it the next day.
It wasn’t the idea of buying a gun to end his life that made Thomas laugh. He found it ridiculous to be worried about affordability.
What the fuck difference would it make? Who’s Bank of America going to call?
The only thing that slowed him down was the idea of a waiting period, a background check and taking gun safety classes.
Funny. A gun safety class before I buy a gun that I would use to kill me and my mother. Fucking funny.
Thomas couldn’t have gotten a rifle or a shotgun. No waiting for those. He could buy the rifle, some ammo, throw it all in the shopping cart, take it to the middle of the mall and start blasting away.
Thomas decided to go with the rope.
Blue Collar is a history novel in progress. New chapters will be added as quickly as possible. To start at the beginning, please click here. --Rod
Sometimes Things Break is the first novella in the St. Isidore Collection series. It tells the story of a teenage girl who is kidnapped by one of her teachers, her parents are killed and their home is burned to the ground.
What if it’s all her idea? Will she be able to control the sex-crazed high school teacher? Is he the perfect alibi or the perfect serial killer and predator?
