It is Wednesday, May 6th, 2004, and I'm interviewing my long-time friend and mentor Chuck Swearingen for the Steelworker Project. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Chuck, growing up.

Well, I'm 52 years old. I was born here in Baltimore 1951 in the old Franklin Square Hospital still in the city. Basically I grew up in Dundalk and spent my entire life here in Dundalk . Went to Warewood Elementary and Holabird Junior High School and graduated from Dundalk High School in 1969. Right after that I went to work at Sparrows Point. Was in an ironworker apprenticeship for four years. Graduated from that, became a journeyman ironworker. That was in 1973, and a little bit later on, I guess 1979 I took a welding test, became a journeyman welder down at Sparrows Point. Spent a lot of time in a lot of different departments as a welder. Around 1988 I started getting active in the union, maybe '87, and held my first elected position around that time as the plant's welding coordinator for Local 2610. Went to a grievance committeeman from that and spent nine years as a grievance committeeman and several years as the union partnership coordinator.

Well, what was it like? You are a Sparrows Point Bethlehem Steel family in a way. What was -- talk about your father and --

Well, my father and mother were from West Virginia , came here after World War II because work was here. He worked for a short time at GM. Then he applied and got a job as a member of the Sparrows Point Police force, and I can remember back in the '59 strike that he was down there during the '59 strike as a policeman, because of course all the workers were on strike and all the foremen were locked in and it was 114 days, something like that. I was eight years old at the time, so I do remember some of that, and I remember that each time the union got a raise, my father would get at least 25 cents more than whatever the union workers got. So they always kept the salary guys a step ahead, and then by the time I guess it was early '80s before things really started hurting Sparrows Point, the Sparrows Point Policeman were probably the highest paid police in the state.

What was the relation between the Sparrows Point Police force and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation?

Well, they were a company police force, but they were commissioned by the Governor, so they were the same as the State policeman, but their jurisdiction was the Sparrows Point. So they were a full fledged police force with arresting powers and could issue tickets and everything, but they were paid for by Bethlehem Steel Corporation, so it was kind of like a quasi-public private police force.

So your dad's paycheck was Bethlehem Steel?

Was Bethlehem Steel, yes.

And all the benefits?

And all the benefits and vacations and retirement and all that.

What was it like growing up in Dundalk in the '50s?

It was a pretty good place for a kid. There was a lot of kids. There was always pickup baseball games at the elementary school. There was organized sports at that time, it was mostly baseball. Today it's soccer, but we always played organized baseball in the springtime, and then all summer long there with -- the school had a playground set up so there was stuff for the kids to do during the summer, and as you got older, you got into different things. We would go around to other schools and have volleyball games against the other summer program kids, and it was a volunteer thing mostly. The people who worked it I'm sure got some kind of money for it, but I really wasn't concerned about that in those days.

Was that a pretty stable community?

Oh, yeah. The majority of the people worked at either Sparrows Point Bethlehem Steel, Western Electric or GM. Everybody's parents worked at one of those three places. There was business people around and everything, but you were used to all the kids' fathers working shift work, and it was pretty basic one, two, three, Western Electric, GM and Bethlehem Steel, and those were the providers for Dundalk , and everyone had a pretty good secure family upbringing, the typical 1950, '60s kind of thing. I had three other siblings in the family, so there was four of us, so we made out okay. I was the second oldest, I had an older brother and a younger brother and a younger sister.

When did you start thinking about going to work at the Point? Was it something that your father wanted you to do, or did you just decide on your own? own?

Well, out of high school I worked at Sparrows Point Country Club, which was owned by Bethlehem Steel for the summer cutting grass, two bucks an hour, and at the end of the summer I went to Essex Community College , really didn't know what I wanted to do, and kind of like floundering and not really doing my studies and all that, drifting, and a friend of mine and I decided -- we are talking and said well, why don't we go down to the Point and get a job, basically that's what we planned on doing. So between the semester breaks from Christmas through January we went down, the two of us, and took the battery of tests for just getting a job, and they said hey, you guys did well. Would you be interested in an apprenticeship? We said sure, and we had to come back two days later, take the apprenticeship test. We did well on that, and both of us -- there was only a few apprenticeships opened at the time, and we both chose ironworkers and didn't even know what an ironworker was at that time, and the guy explained it that's just a carpenter that works in steel. So that sounds good to me. I didn't know what I was getting into, but it worked out well.

So what was it like your first day down there? Do you remember?

That was great. When we were interviewed after we passed our tests, the apprenticeship coordinator Ralph Pennington took the two of us into the plant and showed us where we would be working at and basically we drove in. At that time everybody walked, only supervisors had car passes. So our first day we had no clue where we were going, what we were supposed to do. We drove up to the police check point, and the guy waved us in, so I just drove on in the plant, and here I'm driving in -- there's big huge trucks and huge driving around and big heavy pieces of equipment and we were scared to death, and we got lost, so we drove back out, parked on the parking lot and walked in and was able to find our way, and you weren't supposed to be able to do that just drive in like that. They were supposed to stop you, so that was pretty funny really.

Then once you got in, what was your impression?

Well, we were both 18 years old. We walked around our department, which we had a fabricating shop, and we had all these older guys making all these strange comments to young guys and scaring us, but then actually everybody was really nice and helpful.

Like what kind of comments?

One of them put his arm around me and said, "Whoa, I like this big one." So they were just kidding, joking around, and they were very helpful through the whole time of our apprenticeship. They were willing to teach in part their wisdom on how to do jobs. In our apprenticeship, we sat in the classroom part of the time and learned stuff through the books, but these guys would teach you the tricks of the trade and really how to do the job right. So you would take your book learning and apply it to the way -- because these guys weren't apprentices, they just learned on the way up the old fashion way, and you would mix the two together and you would come out with some pretty good results.

So what did an ironworker do?

Well, unlike what a Local 16 guy would do, it was basically new steel. We did some new steel, but most of our work was repair work in the steel mill, considering that the steel mill was a hundred years old and Bethlehem had their own ways of doing things, so their philosophy was build it like it's going to last a hundred years. They got away from that philosophy later on, but that's how we were taught, overbuild things a lot of times, and a lot of our problems was the nature of the steel business it's just hard on any equipment, and then if there's a burnout in one of the furnaces, that liquid steel would just do devastating things to the structural steel and we would have to go in there and rebuild that stuff and repair it, and there was constantly plenty of work to do, there's no doubt about that.

Were you on the rotating shifts?

We worked I would say 75 percent of the time daylight shift, but we did cover the plant 24/7 because the plant worked that way. Some of the major outings type work is where the mill would shut down, that's when we would work the night work and the weekends a lot just to go in and get the mill back up and running and back into production, and there was always a weekend crew down there. Basically they would find busy work for you, but if something broke down there was a crew there. They could afford to do it at that time. Later on things kind of -- you would keep skeleton crews around and you wouldn't work weekends. If something broke down, you would call me at home. Those early days there was always weekend work. So if you missed a day during the week, you could make up a day on the weekend so you didn't really lose any pay.

Was that an incentive for you to take days off in the middle of week?

Well, it could have been, but since I was a young married guy, I didn't miss much time.

When did you get married?

A year after I started. I started in January 1970 and was married February 1971. So if I recall I think my take-home pay at that time was around $120 a week and when you are paying a hundred bucks a week for an apartment and you are paying off a hospital bill for a baby and all that other stuff, wasn't a whole lot of money left over so I didn't miss much time.

How did your wife feel about being “a Bethlehem Steel widow”? You know the ones that talk about their husband is never home on Christmas Day, or did the ironworkers have a little better say on that?

The way -- the fair-haired boys got the holidays, and I wasn't one of the fair-haired boys, so if I worked the holiday, it was either through desperation or it was such a bad job that I got scheduled for it. I never did like playing those games the fair-haired boys played. I won't get into graphic things.

Go ahead, tell us.

That's part of the reason why I started getting involved in the union, I just didn't like the way people were treated and I started speaking up, and then people started encouraging me to become more active and taking a more proactive approach to things. I couldn't keep my mouth shut I guess.

How did your parents feel about having you working down there?

My father was -- he thought it was great. My older brother worked at the shipyard, which was Bethlehem Steel at that time, so we were all three down there, and my younger brother and sister were so much younger, it was like almost two families, and I used to run into my father once in awhile at the gates and all, and it was a nice seeing him, so he and I were always pretty tight anyway, so it was kind of like a natural step, me going to Bethlehem Steel as opposed to GM or Western Electric, it was all part of the family.

Did you just figure you were going to stay there?

Oh, absolutely. In those days you figure you are going to work for a company and get a retirement and that's it, that's what you did. There was a time in the mid '70s when I thought about leaving and going to West Virginia , but there's no work in West Virginia , so I pretty much figured I'm stuck here for the duration, but other than that, that was only like a fleet weak thing, but you stayed with a company, especially with the prospect of getting a 30-year pension, and I was figuring on working there until I was 60, so that would have been a 40-year pension, and every contract things got a little better, a little better and a little better, so pensions were getting better all the time.

When you first started there it was in 1974, experimental negotiating agreement which was designed to eliminate strikes and --

That went on for several contracts actually.

With extra vacation. Did the guys talk to you about the '59 strike at all?

Once in awhile they would talk about it and they would talk about the hard times they had during the '59 strike, but most of the guys I worked with went out and found other work. So it wasn't like -- the guys in the mills had actually run the mills. There is no other jobs that do that. If you are a craftsman, if you are a welder or an ironworker, pipefitter or carpenter, you can find work, so those guys would do their picket line duty, but then they had other jobs and they muddled along. There was very few of them that actually suffered loss of earnings because of that. So I think the little bit I talked to them about that that's what I recall.

At that time there were just the beginnings of the whole issue about the civil rights at the plant. Do you remember any of that in the '70s?

Well, that had pretty much been taken care of by the time I started working there. The biggest thing was the consent decree, which was a Federal Court ruling that basically said the company and the union discriminated against blacks and Hispanics, so there was a little bit of ill feeling because of the monies that was paid out from that, but it was only right, it was true. The locker room I first started changing in had two floors. The guys told me -- it wasn't like that when I was there, but the guys told me the first floor was for blacks only, and the second floor was for whites only, and for up until the late '60s it was that way, and the bathrooms were segregated. The stories that the guys told me, it was pretty well segregated, everything down there, locker rooms and bathrooms and all that, and even the departments, because one of the first blacks in the department I think was -- apprentices was in 1968, and he's a great guy. Him and I are still friends to this day, but it's amazing that they wouldn't let blacks into the apprenticeship programs and into the crafts. So that all changed just shortly before I started working there, so it was pretty well integrated.

Did the guys hang out together on the basis of race or did they kind of mix and match?

I can't say that they hung out separately from each other, especially us in the apprenticeships because just coming out of school desegregation and all, I didn't even think twice about being friends with anybody, because that's how we were in school. I can remember back in high school when they shut Sollers Point High School down, and all those kids came up into Dundalk High School and that's when I first started high school, I had friends -- we mixed pretty well actually. I didn't see a whole lot of problem. Of course when you are kids you look at things a little bit different than adults would, and if you had those prejudices before that -- and that's another thing, my parents were never prejudice and never instilled any kind of thinking like that on us, so it was just natural just to be friends with people.

Tell us then about a typical day as an ironworker down there.

Well, early on -- and we had to walk everywhere, so you would clock in at the clock house --

At what time?

We would have to -- it's like a fifteen, ten to fifteen-minute walk between trans, so you would try to get in a half hour earlier, walk in and you would walk approximately a mile to the locker room, all kind of weather, and you change your clothes, and in the locker room there was a bulletin board, it would post where your job was at for that day. You might be on the same job for weeks, you might be on different jobs every day. So you would have to check that board to see where your job was at, and then from that point, that bulletin board, you would have to go to your job. Your job might be another mile away on the other side of that plant, and you had to be on that job at starting time, so you had to give yourself plenty of time. Now there were times if it was raining real bad, the company, the department would send a truck. Now the truck would be like a flatbed truck with side rails on it, open, no seats. You would climb up on the back of the truck, and of course the roads weren't too good, and you would be bouncing all over the place back there standing on the back of the truck in the rain, but that was better than walking sometimes, so they weren't real concerned about safety getting you to the job. Now once you got to the job, it was just typically you get your tools out, you find out what you need to do. Usually material was there, sometimes you had to go find the material. You just do your regular fabrication job, and in those days you had time cards. So the foreman would come around, collect cards and he may have one job, he may have ten jobs, so at the end of the day he would come back and hand you the cards. If he liked you, you would be the first crew that he would come back to and give the timecards to. By the time they got to the last crew, it could be five minutes before quitting time. Now you've got a mile to walk back to your locker room, change clothes, wash up, a mile to walk back through the dusty dirty plant clean and punch out. So you could be there kind of late sometimes.

Was that ever an issue for the union at the time?

No, that was kind of an accepted thing.

Miners sometimes went to this portal to portal stuff, you got paid from the time you walked into the mine, went down.

Well, later on as a union representative, one of the first things I did was negotiate a fifteen-minute wash-up time, so the guys were able -- they had fifteen-minutes leeway. If they washed up, they could leave fifteen minutes early technically, so that was something -- one of my concerns later on when I became a union rep.

Well, what got you interested in the union?

Well, let me back up. I was an A rate ironworker, gang leader, I wasn't really satisfied with some of the way things were going in the department I worked with. Basically I was always overlooked for overtime. Every time they would make a rule, I wasn't eligible for the overtime. So the next time I was eligible for the overtime, the rule changed.

For example what rule?

You were an incumbent to the job, so if you were working the job, the job becomes an overtime, I'm working there, I'm incumbent, I should get the overtime. Well, that was the rule last week. The rule this week is oh, no, the fair-haired guy is low on overtime, you've got to catch him up. Wait a minute, I didn't get any overtime, and that's the way it worked, so I just got frustrated with a few things. You are trying to raise a family. Some guys are making thousands of dollars a year more than you. It's not fair, so I transferred out. I became a welder, and as a welder, I got to work all over Sparrows Point. I got to work in all the mechanical departments, all the other crafts. I got to know everybody, got the little bit of knowledge from all these other groups, and the last department I worked in was electric construction as a welder, and I had my own truck with a welding rig on it, so I was kind of free to move around and talk to a lot of people, that's how I became active, and the union guys, I would tell them this is going on in this area and that's going on in that area, was passing around the communications, and guys started encouraging me to become the welding coordinator, which was an elected position, and that was a springboard.

Were there guys at the time in those early years who you looked up to as union officers or active people?

Well, we had a zone committeeman, grievance committeeman, we call them both the same, that was in charge of our group, Jerry Benrecke, and everybody respected him, yes.

Why?

He was a tough guy. He didn't put up with any of the company bull crap. He was very strong willed, very knowledgeable, very smart guy, and he was very effective in getting some things done. I think what happened to Jerry over a period of time he was in that position for fifteen years, which was five terms, he got burned out. In fact, when I ran for grievance committeeman, I ran against him and beat him, but it was just to the point where it burns you out, so he was that --

Did he stay in the mill?

He went back to the mill and worked one year and retired. He had 31 years of service.

Did that hurt your friendship?

I haven't seen him since then, but at the time he wouldn't even speak to me.

One of the things I always noticed about your locals is politics is like a blood sport. I know you were never -- but some of these guys carry grudges for years.

Well, he brought the situation on himself, and it was just that time and the opportunity.

What was it like then becoming the committeeman or the zone man?

I was scared to death. I was eating Tums, but it was a lot of responsibility at first, and it's one thing being on the side like a shop steward, just filing grievances. It's another thing to push it through the system and argue them and come up with a good argument and have to write contentions up and go through all the arbitration, getting it ready. We didn't arbitrate, but we had to get it ready for arbitration and help the staff guy, and it was just like a ton was just put on my shoulders, and I wasn't really comfortable for probably the first year, first year and a half until I started feeling comfortable.

What year did you get elected?

It was 1990 or '91, something like that.

So you were there for 20 years?

Oh, yeah. I had 20 years in the plant before I became a full-time union rep.

Were you a steward before that?

Well, the welding coordinator is basically the same thing, it was just titled different. The welders down there were one department in 1968, they were spread all over the place, but they were given a union rep., kind of trade them off for breaking the department up back then, so it was a created position in '68, and I took it over in '87 or something like that. I don't even remember any more.

So you went a long time, children were growing up while you were down there working?

Yeah. My son was born in '80, so he was basically ten years old when that happened, my daughter was 19, so she was ready to move out of the house, and actually my wife encouraged me to get involved. She thought it would get me out of the mill, little knowing that it was like a 24-hour a day, seven day a week job at the time.

Was that a motivation for people in some cases to run for office?

I think so. I think so. They didn't really have the -- didn't want to do the job fully. They just wanted to be able to get out of the mill, and you could see the way that they handled their grievances and the problems in their department, they didn't -- they would hide more than get involved, and I saw a lot of that.

Because there was also some problems in the late '80s, '90s over financial problems, double billing, billing the local?

Well, I had kind of a trial by fire around '92 or '93 when we had some problems with people double dipping and triple dipping. In one instance, the officers at the union hall had all came to a head during contract negotiations in '93, and our president was removed and many of the zone committeemen, and I became secretary of the grievance committee because there was no one else, and Bernie Brenscaggs became chairman of the grievance committee. As chairman, he had to go to Pittsburgh , and we went up to the 11th hour, actually went past the 11th hour in contract negotiations, and it was my responsibility to get the local ready for a possible strike, and it got really complicated. I was dealing with Baltimore County Police, because we had to set up for picket lines, and they were going to set up a police post down there in case we got out of hand. I had to go out and negotiate an agreement with the company to allow people who crossed the picket lines for an orderly shutdown of the furnaces, and you can't just shut them down cold, because we do want jobs back after the strike is over with, and during that night of the strike I was in constant contact with Bernie Brenscaggs in Pittsburgh , and between him calling me and telling me the progress of the negotiations in Pittsburgh , and then I would call down at the Point and was talking to one of the guys in labor relations, who in turn talked to the general manager, that transfer of communication allowed us to keep our blast furnace running, and we did settle the contract before we went on strike; therefore, everybody went back to work the next day as opposed to Burns Harbor whose furnaces were shut down and it took two weeks to bring them back up, and you had Burns Harbor , all those guys on the street for two weeks at Burns Harbor, where Sparrows Point stayed working, and not too many people know that happened, so I was able to keep the plant working. I'm proud of that.

Well, good. So then you continued as an active member of the union in the '90s?

Well, my first reelection I was unopposed, so that was a slam dunk, it was kind of boring actually. You always need some opposition to keep you on your toes. The second I was -- that was my second term. My third term when I was opposed and I won reelection to the third term, and then towards the end of my third term I was appointed as union partnership coordinator, which was a full-time position in the plant, and spent two years doing that before I went back into the gang, which was my first love. I just like doing that.

Well, tell us then about the partnership, because I know it's a controversial -- always was a controversial issue down there.

Everybody thought immediately that you were a company suck ass because you were a partnership. That's not what partnership meant. We got a lot of good things out of the partnership. The safety program down there was a direct result of the partnership program, and that was a huge success. There used to be two, three, four people a year killed down there, and it went to two, three years with one death. Now that's pretty significant in a
24 steel mill where it's inherently just a bad place, and people didn't realize the level of participation that they were doing was partnership. The other side was it was the company was constantly trying to tell us we've got to reduce numbers, we've got to reduce numbers, we've got to reduce costs, and then every time we would point the finger back at them, oh, no, we can't afford to take these people out. So there was constant battles there all the time, but the bottom line was the whole industry was reorganizing, and we had some people that just -- they thought it was still the '60s and '70s and just bottomless pockets for the company, and we saw what the results were at Bethlehem , they finally went out of business.

Well, how did the partnership come about?

It was a dream of Lynn Williams, who was international president at the time, and actually the partnership goes back to World War I if you want to look at the history of things, and it was a cooperation with the unions and the government and the company for the war effort. After World War I, they failed -- I think the railroads were the only ones that kept it going at that time. Go through the Depression, which everything went poof, and then the unions really started getting active in the middle '30s and late '30s. World War II brought it to another head, you want to help the war effort, we'll participate. The companies did participate with the unions. Lewis was the only one that went out on strike with the coalminers back then, proved a point though, and after World War II the companies got their cocky attitude back again, and there was pretty strong battles for the steelworkers in the late '40s. Taft-Hartley came in in '48, which kind of hurt the union effort a little bit, but then when the AFL-CIO emerged, again you could see the unions were really strong and they were really powerful. The '59 strike really proved it, and basically after '59, whenever the steelworkers asked for it, the companies was giving them, and there was at that time the steelworkers at all the steel companies negotiated together, and then it was the early the '70s or '80s, I forget, when U.S. Steel said no, we're going out on our own. So then the steelworkers started this pattern-based bargaining. They would target one steel company, make that the pattern for the rest of the steel industry, and most of the time it was U.S. Steel that they targeted, and they didn't want -- the steelworkers did not want the employees to be an economic factor against each different steel company. You could do different things locally, but then in the national contract they wanted them almost identical, so the steel companies had to do their own economic things and it wouldn't involve the workers, which is a good idea.

Bethlehem Steel had the history of being one of the most anti-unions of the steel companies, one of the most difficult to organize. Were the relationships better by the time you got hired?

No, it was pretty tough. In those days I was just coming out of the '60s, so I had long hair, hippie-type guy, and there was some discrimination there, but nothing like any of the blacks would have faced there in their working history, so that was trivial in that respect, but you could see the way they treated you as an apprentice. They would grade you every quarter, and part of the grade was appearance. Now what does that have to do with your ability to do a job? But that was part of the grade, and I always got a bad grade on appearance. But I was always -- my grades were always in the '70s, they kept me passing.

But the company was tough and the union officers were tough?

Well, the union officers were tough, but the language, as you go back and look at the language in the contracts, and some of it is border plate, it's been the same forever, but the union didn't have a whole lot to fight with there, and if you look and study the history of the steelworkers, they had to fight tooth and nail and arbitrate everything, and really the definition of the contract came through the arbitrations, and to understand the contract you've got to read the arbitration decisions. And when I said there was a lot of the zone committeeman that didn't do their job, they didn't do that, they didn't understand the reasons behind why we could get away with some of the things we could get away with or fight the company the way we could fight them. If you read the arbitration decisions and you threw them back into the labor relations faces, you could prevail with them, but just to use the basic language in the contract didn't always work, so you had to understand why. And that's some of the things in there why were they written the way they were. An example, in a grievance procedure it says that the foreman will fill out the complaint. Why would you want the foreman to fill out your grievance? Because people were illiterate and the shop stewards could speak, but they couldn't write. So the foremen were mostly literate people, so they would write the grievances, and I can remember being in a first procedure with a shop steward and a foreman, he's writing the grievance out and he is writing it down, and I'm saying no, that's not what I want you to say would have to specifically dictate the words to him because the way the words read they can win the case. Now how many times did that happen over the years?

Well, did you see a change then over time as new workers got hired and became active in the union?

I can say that with my generation that came in we had a different attitude towards management, where -- I can say this. We had a specific coffee break time. If the foreman would come on the job, and I have seen this happen and it wasn't coffee break time, the guys would throw their coffee and sandwiches away. This was the early '70s, and with our generation he came in and if we were delayed because of the mill operating and we couldn't work and the foreman showed up on the job, he would start yelling at us, we would start yelling back, "What do you want us to do?" We can't do anything, so we're going to drink our coffee now, do our coffee break now. When we can work, we can work, leave me alone. The old guys wouldn't do that. They were scared to death. So we kind of blew them off and we got a bad wrap.

When you worked there and started working there, were there people who had been there before the union?

Oh, yeah. I worked with guys that never joined the union.

Really?

But they got all the benefits, still had to file grievances for them and all that and they got -- the only thing they couldn't do is vote.

And why didn't they join?

They didn't want to pay the dues, but I think it was up until around 1954 you had the choice to join or not join the union. After '54, somewhere around that time it changed, and I don't really know why, what ruling came down.

Obviously the union just negotiated the change.

Well, it is in the contract that you have to be a member of the union to be an employee, so if you are found not standing -- what is the term?

Member in good standing.

Member in good standing, then you could actually be fired.

Did the old guys have stories about the nonunion days; do you remember?

The guys would talk about -- I'm trying to think. Some of the guys worked there in the '30s and '40s, but most of them came out of the war and started working there, and there was already a union there. Some of the old timers, they just talk about most -- when we did iron work, 99 percent of what we did was fabricating and welding. They came out of the school where you still drilled rivets. We learned how to drive rivets in our apprenticeship, but I probably had maybe five jobs in my career where we had to drive rivets. Those guys, they couldn't hear, their hands were all busted up. If they used any pneumatic tools, their hands would swell up because the capillaries in their hands were that messed up, and it was tough work, especially if you are inside of something and you've got a guy driving a rivet gun on the other side, and there's no hearing protection or anything like that. So those guys' bodies were pretty well beat up.

Let's go back then to the partnership. What was it like working as the partnership coordinator for the union?

It was kind of like a balancing act because I tried to keep the union reps., the grievance committeemen and all informed of what's going on in the company, the iron mill, what was going on in the industry, because Bethlehem was going down and down and down more and more, and we're talking bankruptcy and getting worse off as we go along. I'm trying to keep these guys informed of what's going on. A lot of them just had blinders on and didn't believe me. Now on the other side, the company is just constantly beating on us to change, change, change, but they don't want to change, so you are trying to play a balancing act, you are trying to tell the guys the reality of what's happening on the union side, and they think you are talking in favor of the company when you are just trying to tell them what's really happening, and then when you get to the company you've got to fight them tooth and nail because they constantly -- the company constantly tried to use me to influence the union guys, which was not my job. And any time any member of the front office management would want me to do something, I would say I would have to clear this through the staff rep. first, I'm not doing anything without authorization, and I would call my staff rep., Frank Rossi, and he and I would talk, and we might modify things, we might just flat out say no, but I wasn't having the company use me as their go-between with the union. I was a union guy, bottom line, even though some people didn't read it that way.

Well, what caused you to get out?

Group politics. A group came in at the union hall, and they were more concerned with being reelected the day after the election than they were with servicing the people, and I just got fed up, I couldn't stand it anymore, it's not what I was about, and they just made life hell for me, so I got out, I went back to the mill, I became a working coordinator and spent the last year and a half back in the mill before they offered the buyout.

Well, a working coordinator was a new position that came out of the partnership.

Came out in the '93 contract.

What was the working coordinator? Why was that controversial?

The company wanted to eliminate workers, and I was part of this discussion as a zone committeeman. They wanted us to cross train, take on more work, one guy does three jobs, and the counter argument to that was well, why do we have all these supervisors, front line supervisors that we really don't need. The guys, if you are a craftsman, you've got to do your job. All you need is someone to get you material to work with and point you in the direction that this is the job you've got to do, so it was a successful argument. We got the working coordinator position. It started off with crew chiefs, which really never took off, and it evolved into the working coordinator, and basically the alley guys took over the front line supervision jobs. Now, I had the first working coordinator agreement in the plant. Now, me and the superintendent had a disagreement when we presented this to the first group of guys. We had a disagreement right in front of them. He said they can discipline people, and I said they can't. So we took it outside, got the staff rep. involved and the staff rep. overruled me. Basically what it came down to was they could issue reactionary discipline in terms of if you refused a job. Well, this is all I have for you, either this or go home, as long as it's not unsafe. If they wanted to pull a safety thing, that was legitimate. But other than that and any kind of other discipline would have to be done by management. So you could send the guy home for the balance of the turn for refusing to work, and you could dock a guy if he comes in late or goes home early, but basically with the card reader system they were doing that to themselves anyway.

But that was a relatively late development, the card reader system, because it was --

Well, the card reader system came in -- I'm trying to remember -- in the late '80s -- I'm trying to remember when they came in.

Late development in the life of Sparrows Point, it was notorious --

Well, they eliminated time cards in '83, '82 or '83, so there was no time cards any more, and then it just went way the other way. Nobody knew where anyone was at at any time. I know a couple of guys that built some houses on company time, but then the card readers came in and that was supposed to be for security reasons, and then eventually it evolved into a timekeeping system. So I would say that as late as 2000 it was a timekeeping system.

How was it going back in the gang?

I loved it. It was where I belonged I guess. You get burned out doing union stuff. The guys just -- they become unreasonable for some of their demands. Life down there wasn't that bad. They were making really good money without really having to kill themselves, and all they did was bitch, at least that's the way I saw it after awhile. There was some guys that you are constantly getting out of trouble, and then there's some guys that you never hear from, and when they do get in trouble, you bust your ass to help them out because you know something is not right.

Do you think that part of the problems in representation was due to the tension created around the Bethlehem Steel decline?

Well, to tell you the truth, I can remember as an apprentice an austerity program. Bethlehem had been crying poor mouth for the whole time I was down there. Later on I found out that in the late '80s Bethlehem almost went bankrupt then, but they kept it pretty well quiet. Because of my job as a partnership coordinator, I found out some things that was going on. I was privy to information that was confidential, but I didn't realize it was that bad. Then it was just when they rebuilt L furnace, the BLF, and they spent money for the new coal mill, it was like they just blew all their cash, and that was really what did it. Then we got into a little bit of an economic downturn with steel, and without a cash flow Bethlehem could not survive that economic downturn, and that's what did it, they just spent too much cash that one year '99 and couldn't survive, couldn't come out of it.

Well, did they have to spend that because they had not invested before that in new technology?

They did a mini reline L furnace in '92 or 4, somewhere back in the early '90s when they were supposed to do a full reline, so they had to do those reline or build a new blast furnace, which was unfeasible. They did not have to do all the work they did at the BOF, found that out later. The coal mill, they needed that, but it's -- again, they scrimped here and spent too much there, they didn't get certain things in the mill. I don't think to this day is still running exactly the way they wanted it to, but they just spent too much money at one time. I'm not sure what was going on at Burns Harbor at the time, which was the other big plant, but they just -- their cash flow just went, and they probably did not have to spend all that money, but they did. Sparrows Point was always the stepchild of Burns Harbor , but then Burns Harbor became a dated mill and they needed more maintenance money and more maintenance money and more maintenance money, and it just became a downward spiral. We knew a lot of this stuff through the partnership. Like I said, I was involved in a lot of things that I just couldn't tell, it was confidential. The staff rep., the presidents knew about it and we weren't really supposed to tell certain financial dealings. One president got in trouble for that one time, and that was part of the partnership, we did know things that was going on financially with the company that we really weren't supposed to be divulging to the public.

What made you then start thinking about leaving?

Stress, just plain old stress. I really liked doing that job. I was doing training over there, which was enjoyable. Since I was involved intimately with writing the working coordinator document, we did a week-long session of all new working coordinators, and I had a part of that explaining all the disciplinary things and making sure that those guys did their jobs from a union perspective, because what happens is they -- anybody gets in those kind of positions and they start thinking like a foreman or they start thinking like a white hat, and I prevailed with those guys to think like a union man.

What got you then going?

Well, like I said the new group came in at the one union hall, it became more and more obvious to everybody in the plant that we should go to one local instead of five locals, that people don't look at what's good for the membership sometime. They only want to see what's good for themselves and they like their positions at the union hall and they didn't want to give those up, so when I started talking about one local, they didn't like what I was saying, and they just started bringing a lot of pressure on me, and I was fed up with it.

And at that time it coincided with the sale and bankruptcy?

That was all going on. We tried to do some innovative things with the membership to try to come up with ideas where we could possibly save money, and every step of the way -- and I was told to do things through the international because I never did anything on my own. The international would direct me, either the district director or the staff rep.

And the district director at that time was from Bethlehem Steel, Dave Wilson and --

No, that was Billy Thompson.

Billy Thompson, and this was after --

But it would come through him to [Frank] Rossi to do this or do that, or Tom Conway, who was basically more our district director than Thompson was. He had more hands-on than Thompson did, but when I would go out and implement it, I would get all this backlash politics from one local in particular, and they would just cut my nuts out, and when I would try to explain to them I'm not doing this on my own, and there were numerous projects like that, they didn't want to hear it, and then things would fall on their face and everything just got worse and worse, and I think they just expected things to stay hunky-dory and the same. The bottom line was guys were still getting plenty of overtime, they were getting plenty of ass time, so they are making money and they are saying what's this company, there's nothing wrong with this company, look at all the money they are throwing away, look at us working all this overtime and there's really not that much work out here, and the company -- and they were right because the company wanted to bring contractors in. So to appease the hourly guys, they would just give them 60 hours a week on their regular jobs just so they could bring contractors in. It was stupid on both sides, and I always argued why is the contracting committee agreeing to this? We should agree to do the work, not to free overtime. We are hurting ourselves in the long run, and that's exactly what happened. We want to work because the work is going to be there. That's what our jobs are, not just to make money. It all kind of backfired, so I was on the verge of retiring, put in for my pension, and a couple of guys from the gang came into my office and said, "What, are you fucking nuts? Come down back to work with us and get away from these assholes." So I thought about it and said yeah, they are right, so when I did that, I got called over to the main office, this is a little known story, I got called over to the main office and the president of Sparrows Point -- I can't even think of his name now.

Dwayne Dunham?

No, guy after Dwayne.

Willard Smith?

Can't even think of his name, that's terrible. Anyway, he offered me a white hat. I said “no, I don't think so, that's not what I'm here for.” I went back out in the gang, and fortunately got a really good project and spent the last year down there working on that project, building a compressor station, really good project.

But then the buyouts came around.

Well, it was -- I sat down with my wife and overtime -- it was February of 2002 and overtime was breaking loose and she never really wanted me to work overtime. We always considered overtime as free money that we would stick away in the bank or do something with, but we never counted on overtime as an income and I never really worked a whole lot. Well, then this came around and I said look, here's the facts, whatever happens, Bethlehem -- I think at the time was the Brazilians still wanted to buy us and Bethlehem was definitely out of the running. [Steve]Miller had taken over as CEO, and basically he was trying to sell us to somebody, and I said I'm going to work every single bit of overtime they offer me, don't expect to see me, and I said but all that money we're going to bank, we're going to pay our credit cards off, we're going to do everything, because we don't know if they are going to shut this place down, if they are going to sell it. If they are going to sell, who they are going to keep. If they are going to keep it, are they going to buy us out, whatever it is, we're going to work it and we will be set up. So as it turned out, we were pretty well set up when they offered the buyout. So the only thing I'm absolutely positively worried to death about right now is healthcare. Healthcare is the biggest issue going.

Let's talk a little bit then about life after Bethlehem Steel. What was it like the first day of the rest of your life?

Geez, I have always been busy, I have always been doing things, either if I'm working at the Point, working at home, I have been involved in the community. I'm here at the college with the Labor Studies Advisory Board, Southeast High School, Sollers Point Technical High School they call it now, I'm on their advisory board. I have been a member of Steelworkers Credit Union, member of the first credit union for ten years, always been involved in stuff, going to school. I went to school here forever, but I got two certificates and two AA degrees here. Was involved with the district teaching steward classes all at Hagerstown and Salisbury numerous times. I have always been busy, so going home and sitting there and collecting unemployment was driving me nuts, and I could have sat there and collected unemployment for six months or whatever, but it's just not the way. So after six weeks, I put an application in to Home Depot, and to my surprise they hired me. My son made fun of me. I spent 33 years at Sparrows Point and 33 days at Home Depot, but I didn't want to work that damn hard, so I went online and put an application in to Sears and got a job there.

What was so hard about working at Home Depot?

I worked in the millwork department. They gave me two days of training, which was basically some safety stuff and the company philosophy bullshit, and they put me on the floor, and I know doors and I know this, but I didn't know was how to get in the computer system and order these things and put the dimensions in there and all that, and nobody showed me, and every time somebody began to show me, it got so busy I never got through the whole cycle. So it was like every time I started doing it, the guy is looking over my shoulder, he is pushing all the keys, and you don't learn anything that way. What really ticked me off was after three weeks, the fourth week they start putting me on days by myself, days meaning Saturday and Sunday when the store opens, when it is busy as all get out and I'm there by myself. And what kind of ticked me off, too, I was there one evening, just me and the manager, the manager is in a meeting, and this is the way they work at Home Depot, you are not allowed to point. If someone is asking where the electrical department is, you've got to walk them down and show them. Then on the way out, you've got 900 people asking you what this is and that is. By the time you get back to your department you've got five people standing at the counter waiting to be serviced, the phone is ringing, people wanting to call you and ask you what size windows you have in stock, and if the PA is saying millwork, line so and so and I'm busy trying to take -- the way I figured it you take care of the people in front of you. The people that are calling can wait. Well, the manager comes out, and he starts chewing me out because the store manager says he is tired of hearing the PA system announcing millwork. I said fine, all these people can stand here, I'm answering the phone. I know how to play the game, I've been in the union too long. So it's just crazy, and trying to talk to some people -- I wasn't there long enough to really start talking about organizing the place or anything, but boy, they needed it. They really needed it. People were afraid to do some things. There was some good people in the department. They should have been promoted a long time ago and they have been overlooked, so it was not a fair system I saw for the month I was there, and I would have been getting myself in trouble there anyway.

All right. So then you went around to East Point to Sears?

Well, Sears offered me -- it was basically a laid back commission job selling appliances, and they promised me basically I could make the same wages, which I was, and benefits after my probationary period. Well, when my probationary period was up and they called corporate to put me in for technically it's called full-time position, even though I was already working full time, corporate said no, they weren't going to make any more people -- they didn't want to pay benefits. A lot of companies don't want to do that any longer. It's pretty expensive, medical benefits. So I told them at that time I was only there for benefits, I really didn't care about working. The other part of it was I really enjoyed selling the appliances when people were there, but probably 60 percent of the time I was just standing there doing nothing, and since you are working commission, they can't tell you to do a lot of stuff because they aren't paying you to do anything, and once in awhile I would volunteer to do something just to stop the boredom, but if the manager come up and told me to start cleaning something up, screw you, you are not paying me to do that. You are paying me to sell refrigerators.

And dishwashers.

And dishwashers.

I'm a proud owner of a Chuck Swearingen-sold Sears dishwasher.

But I was pretty good. I was the top salesman for weeks and weeks in a row for the maintenance agreements, which they push because they make big money off of that, and we made ten percent off of it. So the maintenance agreements were one of the big things because that's like a cash account to them, and I was always top salesman. For being a new guy, that's not too bad.

Did you find a lot of the people you knew from the Point?

It was like probably one or two in ten that came in the store I knew, and there was a guy -- they had us divided between refrigeration and washers and dryers and everything else, we could cross sell, but there was a guy there that was there since the store opened 12 years or something, and he always prided himself with all the people he knew because he's a Dundalk bar fly, and when I started to know more people than him, he started getting jealous. But it got to the point I started looking for other work, and I really wanted to get back into maintenance because that's where my heart is at, and the jobs I'm looking at for maintenance all require some type of refrigeration. They want you to be a refrigeration mechanic, even if you just know the principles of refrigeration. So I went back over to the East Point Baltimore County -- I forget what they are called now, but anyway, it was money that was from the Federal Government for TRA for displaced steelworkers to retrain, so I thought I had blown my chance. I went back over there and they said oh, no, you can do this and that. So I applied to Tess College, went over there and got accepted, and I'm in school right now. This is my fourth week for refrigeration and repair, heat and refrigeration, air conditioning, it's nine-month full time, and right now I'm fighting with unemployment to find out if they are going to pay me unemployment because I voluntarily quit Sears, but basically because I wasn't getting benefits, which I absolutely need and to be retrained so I could find a job that I could do with my other qualifications.

Well, let's talk health insurance. Do you have health insurance now?

Part of the buyout for a 30-year employee was 12 months of COBRA, and anyone less than 30 years was six months of COBRA. My 12 months end next month. At that point in time I can pick up COBRA on my own, and for my wife and me it's something like $760 a month, somewhere in that neighborhood. So what I'm trying to do right now is under the TRA, and I'm not sure of all the details of this yet, but I qualify for the health tax, whatever that's called, where they pay 65 percent. Otherwise, you have to be 55 years old and collect the PBGC pension. I'm 52 collecting the PBGC pension, so my age doesn't make it, but because I'm a full-time student being retrained, I'm waiting for confirmation whether or not I can get that. What may hurt me is because I couldn't stand sitting on my ass and I went out and got another job. That may disqualify me. I haven't found that out yet.

It's a reward for the work ethic.

Well, it's the way I was brought up. You always stay busy, you always work, and you don't want to be collecting something.

Now, does your pension -- was it cut when the PBGC took over, or was it part of the buyout that PBGC already had?

Well, my pension should have been around $2,200 a month with my years of service and the salary I was making. PBGC, when I applied for it, they automatically cut it. Where the other guys who were collecting it prior to had to pay money back, mine was already cut, so I didn't have to pay any money back, and the option we took was -- because there was like ten different options you could take, and I don't remember all of them, but basically the one I took was take a slightly reduced pension, because I think my full benefit was $1,256. We took a reduced one that I'm going to die first so my wife gets the higher pension for the five-year certain, whatever it's called, and if she dies first, then my pension goes back up to the full $1,256.

And you basically took a 50 percent cut?

More than that. My bottom line, I'm getting $1,070 a month from $2,200. So when we go back to the beginning of the interview I was expecting 30 years of service. Actually we were talking about within the next couple of years anyway leaving, retiring and moving to West Virginia where it's cheap to live. We still have that dream, but things have changed now. Thirty years of service with the company, you lose your pension like that, and I feel fortunate that I do have some pension. Enron people have none, they blew all theirs, so without healthcare -- we would be fine with a thousand dollars a month, do some part-time work, I would be fine. But healthcare is the killer. If we don't do something in this country with healthcare -- it's unbelievable that an industrialized country like us has a system that we have. It's just incredible.

Well, I think that you are probably a great example of the Bethlehem Steel. If you had to do it over again, would you?

Yeah, it was a good experience. It was probably a really bad place to work. I was exposed to umpteen different kinds of chemicals and carcinogens and who knows what the future will bring with my health with that, but I met some great guys, had some great experiences, and we were a pretty tight family down there, made lifetime friends. I learned tons of skills that apply to anything at home or anywhere else. We had to become basically a jack of all trades down there, and if I had changed things I would have thought more of the future, would have gotten into my 401K earlier, put more money away, but you can't see those kind of things.

Did you have any interest in your children working down there?

No. Well, my daughter would -- I guess she could have probably fit into an office environment, but my son, that was a concern and I did not want him working down there. But when I was working down there with my father, that was a different kind of situation, but he didn't work in the mill like I did. He worked on the gate posts and patrolling and he didn't really get into the stuff that I saw. I wouldn't want to put somebody in those kind of conditions. It's just too nasty, and things got markedly improved over the years as we worked down there, but you still worked in all sections of the plant where the steel is painted with red lead and you are burning and welding on this stuff and the asbestos dust is laying all up in the ceilings, and it's just a hazardous place.

But it was a great place.

What can you say? I can remember working night turn on the blast furnace free line, and we had these things called doughnuts where the stoves were at, and they -- we would mix up a powder with water that was red lead and we would -- after we took the doughnut out, it was an expansion joint, we would pack it, paint it with the red lead paste and pack it with fibers with asbestos. The stuff was real nice and soft to sleep on, so you make yourself a little doughnut with this asbestos rope, and then you get up and dust yourself off and the stuff would be flying. Didn't even think about it, and then a year later you find out all this bad stuff about asbestos and then it took years and years. I have been tested three or four times now, haven't seen anything, but it takes like 30 years for it to show up.

Do you still see guys from the Point?

Yeah. In fact, there over at Tess College there's probably half a dozen or more right now taking various types of training over there, most of them are in the refrigeration, but other ones are in medical skills, and some of them are in electronics and computer stuff that they teach over there. So that's a pretty busy school over there. I don't know how many all together have gone through the school, but -- well, right now I think the first group of guys that are going to be graduating next month, the first ones because most of them are nine to twelve-month courses. They have seen quite a few of us over there, and a lot of them -- I run around and see them in a bar once in awhile, see the guys, see them in bars or at East Point , or like I said when I worked at Sears -- well, first of all, the people coming in, but then when it got around that I was working there, people would come in just to buy stuff from me, so that was nice.

Will you ever go back to the Point?

No. No, my old superintendent came in Sears one evening and told me that there might be a position available for me working for a contractor as a planner since there was talk of contractors taking over the maintenance work, and I just kind of like gritted my teeth and I don't want to go back down there. The trouble is it would be good money, it would be really good money, and I'm thinking oh, I could stand it for another two or three years and make some nice money and sock it away and get the hell out of here, but I really don't want to go back down that place. It never did pan out anyway, so I never really had to be pushed to that decision, but it was nice that he was thinking of me anyway.