My Day As A Union-Busting Warehouseman

This is another in an occasional series that recalls some of my early jobs. Up to this point in my young life, my shortest stretch of employment was the three weeks I spent working for a Burger King. Today’s story is about a job that lasted far shorter – just one day. It wasn’t intended to be a single-day gig, but that was how it turned out. And probably for the best.

By the spring of 1980, I was halfway to a college degree.  My major was economics.  Which probably helped me to appreciate all the more keenly the state if my checkbook and  how badly I needed a summer job following the ending of classes.

In prior installments, I described my 3-week stint in the fast food business, some time working at my city’s public library and a couple of summers working for a large funeral home.  After two years away at school, my savings had dwindled to a state of depletion and I was more in need of something that paid better than the minimum wage. And something good for more hours than the 25-30 I could count on at the mortuary.  Then I got a call from my father.

At that time, Dad was a self-employed management consultant. One of his specialties was to work with local companies in responding to employees’ attempts to get a union.  He told me that he had a job for me if I needed one. His client was a locally-owned industrial supply warehouse. He told me that I could get a job there, but there was one condition: I absolutely had to start by a certain date.  This was because that was the deadline for a new employee to be eligible to vote in the scheduled union election.

Well, I needed a job, and the pay was good.  But I understood that I was expected to be a sort-of ringer, a guaranteed “No” vote.  Being older and wiser now, I would say “I appreciate the offer, but I’ll pass” if such a proposition came my way. But I was inexperienced in life and needed a paycheck.

It was a struggle to make the required start date because it was the morning after my last exam at school. As I recall, I took that last exam on a Thursday afternoon. Then I had to pack up all of my stuff. And I had just bought a car, which I had to pick up. I got home from school very early one Friday morning, unpacked my car, and then drove straight to the supply company to start work.

This was a large industrial wholesale supply company.  They handled plumbing, electrical, industrial and automotive lines, and also a line of major appliances.  I had no idea what the job was going to involve, but knew that I was finally entering into “the real world” with this job. 

I remember starting upstairs in the office. This was a fairly familiar environment to me, and I started by filling out some papers.  The owner told me that after this first day, they would have to think about where to assign me and that process might take a week or two.

Then, I was taken out to the warehouse.  There was a service counter up front, with rows of catalogs for looking up items for customer orders.  Behind that was a large  open warehouse with row upon row of steel shelves, some of which probably stretched 3 stories high.  This was the first time I had plopped myself into a genuine blue collar job, and I was like a deer in the headlights.

I was introduced to maybe 20 people whose names I would never remember, with several of them remarking on how unusual it was for someone’s first day to be on a Friday.  Others recognized my last name as being the same as the guy who was making the company’s pitch against the union.  I might have been more bothered by that had I not been such an innocent.

The only task I remember from that day was being given a shop vac and cleaning the dust and dirt from some second floor shelving used for catalogs and small items.  Then it was quitting time and I went home.

I enjoyed the following week off, then started calling the boss about when I should come back.  By the end of the second week, we connected and he told me that they could use me for the summer at a small downtown auto parts wholesaler they owned. 

I did not go back to work at the big warehouse that summer, and I did not vote in the union election.  Later, my father told me that he had talked it over with the owners, and everyone concluded that maybe it wouldn’t be so good for me to play the role I was originally cast to play.  I’m glad they thought so, because they were surely right.

The job I ended up in was interesting, and I will write more about it some time.  It turned out to be a great introduction to the blue collar life because it was a small place run by kindly old-timers who were great to work with and who taught me a lot.

In case you are wondering, the union election took place on schedule, but the union lost the vote without any of my involvement. I guess Dad was pretty good at his job.  And nobody was happier than me, who got to avoid getting into a conflict between my father and a bunch of guys who would have been my co-workers.  In later years I have wondered who had cooked up the idea for this job in the first place, and who suggested that perhaps it wasn’t a good idea. Others might have probed this at the time, but I chose to leave it alone and move on.

One of the most common questions in life from those in our inner circles is “So, how was your day?” That job was the only one I ever had where the entire employment experience could be summed up in answering that question.

30 thoughts on “My Day As A Union-Busting Warehouseman”

  2. The backstory on this job has to be interesting. It’s likely a very good thing you didn’t go back.

    I think the shortest job I’ve had (so far) is painting shadows of geese for a hunting club. It was a few days of several hours after school.

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    • I have never thought about what might be involved with painting goose shadows. I would imagine it would be easier than painting the geese themselves. And I presume that the goose shadow painting would be for a sign? Trying to paint actual goose shadows would be tough if the geese were alive and moving around. 🙂

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  3. Kind of an interesting story. You seemed to have related it kind of lightly, possibly because Indiana is such a “right to work” state (in places like Wisconsin, we refer to that as anti-employee, scab state). I can tell you that whoever decided that was going to be a one day job for you was probably thinking the correct way and did you a favor (or might have even been ‘warned’), otherwise, your Dad might have been able to pick you up at the hospital emergency room after the first few days.

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    • Remember that it was 1980, on the eve of Reagan being elected. Our biggest employer had been International Harvester, and we had watched Harvester (as we called it) struggle all through the 70s. Other big employers like GE had also gotten rid of a lot of people. Lots of people watched these layoffs at big unionized companies and thought that unions had overplayed their hands, which resulted in a lot of people out of work who were hard to rehire. These things are cyclical and this was early in the cycle of workers choosing to avoid the dues, because they knew they would not be making Harvester or GE money. FWIW, the funeral home where I worked had beaten back an organizing attempt. And yes, I would have been a sitting duck if some disgruntled organizer had attacked me in the parking lot.

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  5. I had a father who had connections and a great deal of influence. I had a younger brother who struggled in mainstream jobs but was an artist whose claim to fame was selling a painting in the big annual art festival. Decades later I learned my Dad had a coworker purchase that painting. And then I began to wonder how much he manipulated my early job opportunities behind the scenes. I wish he were around now to ask him!

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    • My father and I occupied an odd space. My parents were divorced and I did not live with him, so I lacked that day-to-day kind of relationship. Also, he had plenty of local contacts and influence, but he was also fiercely independent, and sort of saw that as his job to make his kids that way too. I got steered towards jobs a couple of times, and also given suggestions I did not take. I guess the fierce independence took hold in me too. And yes, I would love to have a few hours to ask about some of those things from long ago. I was too pig-headed to ask about too many things when I had the chance.

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  7. That was an interesting story JP. It is smart you didn’t stay and get entangled in the company’s quest for union avoidance. As you may recall, I worked for a labor attorney for management the last 25 years. My boss had two “labor persuaders” that he used for years whenever a union drive at a client’s plant was imminent. Back when we still had a lot of freighter clients, my boss actually held a seafarers card as a deckhand that enabled him to go onto the boats and see what trouble was being stirred up. But, like you having a name that was recognizable, it was the same for him – some savvy seamen may recognize him or his name. While I didn’t enjoy ERISA law (very boring in my opinion), union drives and employment law issues were something I enjoyed working on.

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    • I agree that labor issues are interesting for all kinds of reasons. Also, there seems to be a cycle that swings back and forth on whether labor or management has the upper hand. In my experience, both sides are capable of plenty of shenanigans when they can get by with them.

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  8. Great story, and one which reminds me of work in similar times where in retrospect there was probably a lot more that could have been thought about around the various “why” scenarios related to various jobs.

    Ah, youth.

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  9. Interesting story – I’d be a bit miffed with my dad if he’d set me up in that kind of situation! I’m glad nothing came out of it other than a good story. I’m curious, though, whether your opinion of labor unions differed from your father’s as you got older?

    My father worked as a building manager, which at times including supervising maintenance or security staff. He was staunchly anti-union, though a very fair boss. He prided himself on being demanding, yet fair and understanding to employees who were good workers. On a few occasions his employees had considered unionizing, and he was proud of the fact that they never did, largely because they appreciated him as a supervisor.

    However, as I entered adulthood, I developed a much more pro-union attitude than did my dad, even though I’m not in a union myself. I can’t point to any specific event that changed my mind; my opinions just evolved gradually (and I guess the world has too, so our situations regarding these things aren’t the same as they were decades ago).

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    • My father was very anti-union. However, he also believed in treating employees fairly. His method in his business was to come in, listen to the employees and get his client to put together a package that would resolve most of the gripes, which he could then pitch as something better than the union could get them, considering the dues.

      As I have gotten older, I am more in favor of unions than I used to be. The exception is public employee unions, which I see as little more than a bribe offered by politicians but paid for by everyone.

      I have never belonged to a union, but could have when looking for a trucking job.

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      • Your father had a similar management style to my dad – those are the best kinds of bosses, and develop a lot of loyalty among the folks who work for them.

        I will respectfully disagree about public-employee unions. I’m a public sector worker (though in a non-union state) and I’d appreciate having an entity like a union advocate for me and my colleagues. I’m amazed at how many elected officials have utter contempt for the people who work for them, and it often surfaces in employee policies. This is being magnified by current politics, but held true even beforehand. Public unions can serve a very important function.

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  11. Eric, I’ve had an entire career in college educated white collar work, but have been pretty much poorly treated both financially and in benefits and work environment because there really wasn’t any unions or unionization efforts. A lot of “selling features” that Union busters use during union drives is that you should be able to negotiate your own personal compensation with your employer, and shouldn’t be relying on organizations that border on socialism. That’s a good way for employers to control their workers and never compensate their employees.

    In places like the Midwest, with huge employment compression, it’s almost impossible to get compensated without a union, if three or four people are willing to step into a job, for even less money, at any given moment. Since the Arab oil embargo, most employment has barely kept up with inflation, and minimum wage certainly has not. I did research on a study a while back that said that the C-suite employees over the last twenty years of so, have had their compensation increase from somewhere around 200% of their average employee, to over 1,300% in just the last few years. If you have a manufacturing work force, they want part of that pie.

    I’m college educated and white collar, and in the Midwest, you get what they’ll give you. You have some minor ability to negotiate, but not much. J.P. Says that he could have gotten a union job in trucking if he wanted it, but he fails to mention that even in a non-union trucking job, the trucking business is so highly unionized, that they set the pace for compensation. I’m sure no one was paying him half of what a union trucker was making for similar work. The one complaint I have with old style unions, is the inability to have a performance component so you can exit non-performing employees. I’ve heard years of stories of old style unions in Milwaukee were people can basically game the system to practically do nothing, and they’re so difficult to fire, that they’re just left on the job. That stuff has got to go!

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    • Actually, there are almost no union trucking companies left. Yellow Freight went bankrupt and many of their employees claimed that for the last several years they were poorly compensated. UPS may be the only big union trucking company left.

      I have spent time on the inside of the US Postal Service, and the problem you mention at the end is alive and well there.

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      • I stand corrected, a quick check shows over the last twenty years, a reversal of unionization of trucking and transport. Hard to believe when back about forty years ago, it was a given.

        The post office is almost uncontrollable. We pay more for service than we ever have, but in my area, we’ve only had an assigned delivery person for about two out of the last six years, and there are years my whole neighborhood gets no mail delivery sometimes twice to three times a week, because the other carriers don’t want to pick up the overtime to do the route. Complain, and they shrug. I can’t understand why they claim they can’t get qualified and competent people to take what used to be “golden” jobs. Over the last six years I’ve lived here, they’ve even had multiple cases of arresting actual post office employees at the local post office stealing the mail! The American Century has been over since 1990!

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      • The lack of union trucking companies today surprised me too. And don’t get me started on the postal service. There are certainly some good people there. But then there are those who wanted me to load and unload trucks. Where I came from, having non-union contractors doing union jobs would have resulted in the union guys walking off the job. But in the Postal Service, I guess it’s OK if it gets them out of working.

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  12. Your description of young and innocent had me thinking you were going to be “taken out back” by your fellow employees once they realized why you were there, effectively ending the experience. I’m glad to read about a different reason for the short term. The only comparison I can make is with a low-end job I accepted with our local school district after my career in IT. The job lasted less than a week, because I learned in the group session w/ HR my paycheck wouldn’t even cover the cost of the associated health insurance. First time I would’ve had to pay my employer instead of the other way around. No thanks.

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