15 July 2003

Solidarity

It's the Ides of July, halfway through this month and a long ways to someplace else. I turned on the radio, up late and getting Vicki Barker of the World Service in mid-broadcast. Nobody was murdered in Iraq last night, at least no one of consequence. But she told me this morning that the troops were just informed that their tours-of-duty were extended in Iraq to "indefinite" due to the deteriorating security situation. I find it plausible, even if I can't determine if it is true. Floating around out in the Gulf we were used to being informed that we weren't going home when we thought we were. Uncertainty came to be a part of deployment. It had a certain corrosive effect on morale, and the Navy went to great pains to ensure that the gray boats came home on schedule, even if it meant no port visits at all. In effect that meant that the kids were sealed up in the steel hulls for six months, traveling all over and not seeing a damned thing.

It is a lot different than walking or riding around in body armor, seeing everything in hyper motion and ultra-sense, waiting to be bushwacked by a rocket propelled grenade. I think you can see more in a month, or a moment, than you would ever need. It is a lot different that moving forward in a formation with all your lethal attention focused forward. Making the troops nervous is part of what this is about, and I hope we can show some motion on the Saddam front shortly and close that chapter of the adventure. Tough week in Baghdad with the anniversaries of the old regime going by in a murmur and the new ones not established yet. If we just hang together things will probably be OK.

Anyhow, my heart goes out to the Third Infantry Division this morning. There is a discussion of a major labor action against the Tyson's Food megalith in Wisconsin. Tyson's got huge down South where there was no organized labor and the company could do what it wanted to the chickens and the workers. The action in Jefferson, Wisconsin, is more ominous. It is a penetration of the Northern world where labor was strong. The company is taking on a local union at a sausage-and-pepperoni plant that is arguably the strategic heart of the Cheese State. Tyson's is worth twenty-three billion a year, so I think we know where this one is going to go. It is just a question of whether the union decides to commit mass suicide, hanging together in solidarity and everyone losing their jobs together.

It is gorgeous outside. There is a full moon hanging there in the lightening sky over Route Fifty. There will be moisture coming this week, so much of it coming off the Gulf and racing up with the jet stream across the Midwest. It is putting the Friday Night Skate in some doubt. That event is to be the pay-off for the spills and chills of the past two months. It is a mass skate that begins in front of the White House on the closed-off part of Pennsylvania Avenue and winds around the major monuments of the capital Mall. The prognosis for the weather was a major topic of interest at our skating lesson last night. The humidity is unusually low on this graduation night near the Potomac. We completed an intensive six week course of instruction in the art of roller-blading. Our instructor is a gifted man of indeterminate age named L.B. He is lanky and elegant in his blue crash helmet and positively religious in his fervor about skating. He cut quite a swathe in the world of roller-skating restaurants, delivering trays to the tables on wheels. But excepting the nostalgia market, most of the big careers in that line of work had moved offshore, to Japan.

So L.B.went back to what he does best, which is teach. He is a two-season man, our L.B. He teaches clading around here in the summer and skiing out in Colorado in the winter. I know people who have tired to make that work, and the money is pretty good in the heart of both seasons, but the lean months of transitional weather can be tough. But L.B. seems to be doing all right. He subcontracts with a Skating concern that is sponsored by one of the skate makers. In this case, the venerable Rollerblade corporation. I don't know if the economic downturn has affected the business. But increasingly the face of local capitalism looks a lot like L.B., who is a basic entrepreneur with no safety net. He is doing what he wants, though I don't know what the business plan is for when the knees are gone. That is why unions were good and necessary to protect the workers. But I can't imagine where they fit in this economy. There is no Tyson's Foods in rollerskating, though I would keep a low profile if I were in the business.

The four of us that remained of the ten who started the course had a certain solidarity. We made all the classes and showed progress under his tutelage, and we are now deemed competent to roll out into traffic, trip face-first over uneven concrete and fall down on hills. Which we did al of last night. I bought a used pair of skates out of the back of L.B.'s car. Now I am an independent actor, committed to this wild and unlikely sport. I like it because it helps me forget there is no cartilage left in my right knee, an with a vigorous walk swells like a balloon. I miss the speed and motion that went along with running, the certain knowledge that on the speed of your own legs you could be miles away. I didn't like the way my world closed down when the knees went, and this looked like a splendid way to get my mobility back, whizzing around the streets like I was one of the Bay Area Bombers from the Roller Derby.

We were nearing the end of the lesson. One of our little band of skaters was having her issues with the hill just beyond the placid flat blacktop of the parking lot where we were perfecting our drag stops and pirouette turns. My pal Slats and Marc were doing OK. They could drag their brakes and actually come to a stop going downhill. I carved little turns and came down the hill like I was skiing. Linda fell a couple times and didn't feel well. I sympathized with her and L.B. was solicitous, perhaps thinking of lawsuits and liabilities. So there was a little somber note as the evening shadows lengthened. Slats and I ducked into the Ski Chalet store adjacent to the practice lot and bought pads to go along with our new skates. Marc didn't. had to promise his wife that he wouldn't do this anymore. Too risky, she considered.

So fully equipped, we scattered to our respective homes. I had time to grab a quick dip in the cool blue pool at The Chatham. I walked down with a drink and a towel in my flip flops. Katrina, the cute lifeguard from the Czech Republic, was socializing with some loud men at one of the ground-floor garden apartments. I could hear them laughing and cursing jovially as I did my breaststrokes. At the appointed minute Katrina reappeared, ready to lock the place down again. I took my eviction in good humor. I heard one of the loud voices mention the state of Michigan, where I am from and where I am going back someday.

I stopped on the way back up to the back door. Two men remained from the crowd that had been on the patio when I came down. They were big guys, strong guys, and after I announced I was from Michigan they clasped my hand with beefy grips. They were drunk, or rather, one was feeling good and the other was feeling a little morose. Greg was the pensive one, a senior lobbyist from the United Steel Workers. I asked where he was from and he said he had organized in Flint, the gritty little town seventy miles north of Detroit. Both cities had gone in the crapper, he growled, and I agreed. I supported his contention and announced that I was an alumnus of the United Auto Workers, Local 215. That got me in, my credential of solidarity. He asked me what union I was with now, and I told him I was in the Navy, a very large closed shop.

I didn't tell him that I had to join the UAW because I got a job at the plant ahead of hundreds of other summer workers because my Dad was in senior management at the Company. It was an example of management and labor working together to get what they both wanted. As far as Greg was concerned, I was a good Union man, though, and we waxed sentimental about the way things were in Michigan, when the Unions held the upper hand in negotiations, and Management went along with it until Detroit made lousy cars and Americans began to buy Japanese. Greg was pragmatic about things. He had been in a dispute where Buick wanted to build a new plant to be more productive and they wanted to build it at low-cost without the Steelworkers. The Auto Workers announced to management that they were going to walk if their union brethren did not get the job, and did. The company phlegmatically built the plant in Mexico without the Steelworkers and the Autoworkers were now flat on their ass.

Greg told me in the darkness that you gotta compromise. In the building trades you always work yourself out of a job anyway. You gotta be flexible in your goals and ready to move on. It pained him that the unions had committed sucide, and the departure of the jobs killed the tax base and killed the town and now instead of two miles of Buick plant there was exactly zip-squat in Flint. He would have cut a deal with Management, he said. I smiled and wondered how the Tyson Food Empire would do against the United Steelworkers, head to head.

I nodded in agreement before I moved on. My swimsuit had dried and I felt a chill from the evening air, unusually here. Greg shook my hand once more in a beefy grip. "You gotta think strategically" he concluded, taking a sip of red wine and looking out in the middle distance. "Sometimes that solidarity crap will kill you."