“The union was a facilitator of movement, of social mobility, of financial mobility.”
My name is Chris MacLarion, I started at Bethlehem Steel August 26th of 1996.I was hired into the plate mill before it was shut down, and about a year later, they closed down the plate mill for the first shut down that I experienced at Sparrow’s Point. And I worked in the cold sheet mill (the new cold sheet mill) until it shut down last year.
The best way to describe it is there are certain things, certain sounds, certain smells, tastes, that once you’ve experienced them in your life, they never go away. I remember the smell, the sound; I remember vividly everything about it. So if they dropped the crane was going the plate fell of the magnet or off the hooks. When it would hit the ground everything would disappear in this huge cloud of steel dust. For the next three or four minutes until it all settled, you can’t even see the other end of the mill. It was amazing and it was great. I knew I was home. And I remember my first paycheck, I think we got paid Tuesdays. And I went out to my car, it was just a job class two or three, $13.24 maybe. And I remember opening it up, and I closed it, and I’m like holy crap, there’s no way this is right. Because I left the army making around 2 grand a month and that was total. Needless to say, a week in the steel mill with some overtime, you could compete.
Labor laws are different in every state, when I joined, you had to join the union. Later on, it would come to mean a lot to me. In fact, it came to mean a real lot. And when you go in there, and you get to fix something for somebody, you get to make a small difference-get them a day off, get them out of trouble, whether it was by their own design or the company’s design. It’s a great feeling that the working force can actually dictate some of its own conditions. And I became the shop steward. So shop steward was really the lowest elected officer of the union. The shop steward was the representative that will do first step grievances and if an employee had a complaint, manager violated the contract labor agreement, you will facilitate agreements. You’ll represent them if they’re in trouble, you’ll represent them if they’re violated. All those early stages of their complaint process is what that basically means. In 2011 the president of the union resigned. Jeff McCullough became the president and I became by nomination of the executive board, vice president. In 2012 I was on the ill-fated ticket that was destined to captain the sinking ship. So for me that whole evolution of a union really began to grow on me. And I have the luxury of reading contracts. I’ve got a 1947 Bethlehem Steel agreement upstairs right now that I was using for this research paper at school and I get to read their wages and how few holidays they had no real vacation, the agreement was smaller than an index card.
By the time I left ISG it was, I’m sorry, I mean RG steel, several hundred pages of contracts, and you get to see how these agreements have grown over these past 70 years. So to be a part of it, the union was the most amazing thing that could happen to a working person, its not perfect and it can’t help a shutdown, it can’t get you a benefits out of a bankruptcy. That hurts you know, I lost my severance, I lost my vacation, but I feel like I lost so much more than our brothers and sisters that were like in their 50s, they were so close to their retirement. I think for the union, for us, that is a disappointment. Watching your members get washed away like that it sucks. Its horrible. And I think that every working man and woman needs a union just somebody to be there. It’s a cheap insurance policy between you and a rogue manager. There is a million reasons to have a union. The security, the contract, the terms that went with it. I liked all of that. There is a million reasons to have a union. The security, the contract, the terms that went with it, and I liked all of that. The union was a facilitator of movement, of social mobility, of financial mobility, you know. I would absolutely do anything to start it back up. I would work for a lot less, I would give vacation back…you lose everything.