Another interesting figure who entered Worthington's heirarchy at Harrison, NJ was an engineer named Walter (possible spelling difference). Walter was a German engineer who had developed a radically different propulsion system for U Boats. It did not use the (then) conventional means of diesel engines, DC generators and motors and large battery banks. Walter was apparently quite a designer of turbomachinery. He came up with a drive system using some combination of substances not unlike today's liquid fueled rocket motors. This resulted in a contained combustion process, the result of which was run thru a turbo expander to drive the U boat- whether on the surface or submerged. I believe a prototype U boat was built, but it was late into WWII, and a combination of that plus the problems in handling and containing the substances used to run that propulsion system resulted in it never being further developed.
Walter apparently survived WWII handily, made it to the USA, and wound up as a corporate officer of Worthington in Harrison, NJ.
As for unions, I was on the management side of the house. I started as a kid in a union machine shop, and even in HS, was signed up into the International Association of Machinists. They waived a lot of the fees and dues, since I was a kid, but I did carry a book and got my dues stamps. The shop was run by German immigrants, and was a kind of paternal environment, and everyone worked well and steadily. In college, I worked in the old Rheingold Brewery, and had to join Brewery Workers Local 6. This was part of the Teamsters. Again, the union local was anxious to have young engineering students working in the breweries, as they saw the handwriting on the wall. Budweiser was systematically killing off the regional breweries, and the smaller and very old regional breweries were vanishing. The union local and the brewery were kind of paternal, maybe the old world work ethic, or something like it. The union local officials wanted to see young engineers learn on the floors of the breweries in the hopes they might do something to keep the local breweries going. It did not happen, through no fault of either the unions or the local breweries. Bud was just too big a juggernaut.
I saw the worst and best of unions in nearly 50 years in work and in my chosen profession. In the last 24 years of steady employment, I worked at one single powerplant for the most part. I was a senior mechanical engineer. I was on the management side of things. Initially, when I first started with the NY Power Authority in 1981, I was a construction superintendent on small hydroelectric projects. We always used union crafts on the jobs. Generally good, if you and the contractors knew who to get from the union halls. In the powerplant, the Power Authority crafts were all in the IBEW. Initially, as a public authority, we were an autonomous corporation, publically owned. We made our money from the generation and transmission of electric power. How we spent our money and survived or sunk was our headache- no involvement of the state monies or taxpayers. In those days, the upper echelons of management at the Power Authority had come up from the engine rooms and powerplant floors in many cases. Many were ex US Navy or ex US Merchant Marine. They tended to think in those ways, in terms of "taking care of the crew". We were very well treated, and everyone on both sides of the aisle, was happy. Then, things started to change. The politicians got hold of the NY Power Authority. To them, despite what the corporate charter and laws required (no invasion of Authority finances to bail out the state), they disregarded all of it and began to milk the Power Authority like a cash cow. They also had the balls to say our people- engineers included- were overpaid. We were at the higher end of industry averages about then. Things started to slip as the politicians put their own people in as VP's, and the first people to take it in the ass were the first line and middle management people. We started seeing our benefits eroded and salaries either got lower cost of living adjustments or were frozen. At the same time, corporate kept adding VP's and other "window dressing" types. They also hired management consultants like the rest of us change socks. these consultants took the Authority for a 13 million dollar sleigh ride on something called "Focus" to improve productivity and morale. We called it "F--k- Us" and did everything we could at the sessions to create utter mayhem and near riots.
In first line and middle management, we all knew that if the union crafts got a good contract, there would be a trickle-down effect for us. So, we stood shoulder to shoulder with the union crafts on a lot of things. It was a matter of survival. Meanwhile, corporate and their management consultants would throw us a bone. We called it a "boner". If they proposed an apparent salary increase, it was tied to some impossible goals, and was carved out of any salary upon which our pensions or the next year's raise might be based. It looked good for the first few seconds, but if you read into it, you did not have to be too bright to see it was a back door screwing.
As for me, I decided I had a good job, a boss and crew that I loved, and we could live handily on what I was earning. With a daughter with a disability, the benefits, even clipped, were amazing. I looked around outside the fence and knew we had it good. Meanwhile, corporate kept clipping and eroding. We decided to unionize on two different occasions. We had the votes amongst the engineers and supervision to do it on both occasions, better than 2/3. On both occasions, politics and back room arm-twisting were used to kill the unionizing. On the second occasion, we were within about 48 hours of a final hearing, and there seemed no way corporate could derail our unionizing efforts. They had tried, sic'd the corporate labor lawyers on the matter, tried to get injunctions, and hired outside legal guns and things were seemingly unstoppable. That is when some of the corporate brass called the governor's office. The NY governor has a hired gun of a labor negotiator. His policy is: "Take this contract or there will be massive layoffs". This may have some basis in fact in public sector agencies which are supported by the public coffers, and where things are very lean. In the case of a public authority, there was supposed to be autonomy. Instead, the Power Authority was told by the governor's office that they would have to let this hired gun handle contract negotiations with the IBEW and other unions. Contract talks dragged on for years. The corporate brass called the governor's office when it became apparent they could not stop the engineering and supervision from unionizing (Operating Engineers, a different union). At about 10 PM on a Friday night, the phone calls went out: the final hearing and officially unionizing of the engineering and supervision is off. Can't happen." No explanation given. This was strategically timed to happen on a Friday evening when our attorneys and organizers could not get to the judge handling the hearings. It was done by the hired gun from the governor's office and was the worst kind of arm twisting imaginable: the hired gun reminded the union officials who were organizing us of the fact that their union already had large numbers of members working in other NY State agencies and that even more members worked on public sector construction projects. If they wanted to see the larger numbers of their members getting good contracts and wanted to see state construction jobs still going union, they had to drop any ideas of unionizing us.
We were disgusted. It was dirty dealings, and proved people on either side of the matter are corrupt or corruptable. As for me, I did well with the union crafts in the powerplant. The crafts had no trust nor regard for the engineers in corporate. Their union made a case for having me become a Certified Welding Inspector, and also used to insist that I be the engineer handling certain jobs where their lives and safety were directly involved. I was in a good place, and while corporate could freeze my salary and clip my benefits, I was still working. I had enough benefits to take care of my family. I had a job I loved doing. I was allowed to practice engineering as a Professional Engineer with a private practice, even encouraged to do so as anything I might do in private practice would increase my versatility for the Company. I was realistic enough to know when I had it good. There was no point bitching about what we could not change, and corporate and the political whores were one of those immovable and obnoxious things we had to work around. The result was our powerplant became a tight crew, and we tried to do as much as we could without calling upon corporate. As I told my boss, as well as any number of other people: "My loyalty to the NY Power Authority begins and ends at the project fence". The world had changed, and paternalism, or the old guard of top echelon brass who had come up from the engine rooms and powerplant floors was gone for good. The new breed seemed to be uniformly people with business degrees who came out with the appropriate BS about looking after the people, but we never trusted nor had any use for them. We did our level best to have the best powerplant, and each year, corporate raised the bar as far as what salaries and variable pay would be tied to. When I retired, we had to hit a reliability target of something like 99.95%, and we were surpassing it. We had targets for safety, environmental, generation, missed starts (if a generating or pump turbine failed to start), and for all sorts of things. We were always surpassing the targets, so corporate would find a way to avoid giving the engineers and supervision any increase in pay and raise the bars for the next year or change the rules of the game altogether. We had an annual evaluation- an elaborate and convoluted thing. No matter how good a job I did, and no matter what kind of glowing comments my boss put on my evaluation, I always got a "meets expectations"- a "middle of the road" thing about like getting a "C" in a course in school. As my boss explained it, if he gave me the equivalent of an "A" or "B", he had to give some other poor bastard a "D" or an "F" to balance the bell curve which corporate had decreed must be used. After awhile when it became apparent that nearly everyone in management at the powerplants was getting a "meets expectations" grade, corporate sent up a couple of gestapos to pass the word: "If you do not start handing out bad reviews, we will remove you and grade your people instead..." Then, the goons came around from corporate for one of those evening meetings off site with the upper management. What came of it was that if they handed anyone a "meets expectations" rating- a basic "C", they would have to fill out a written justification for it. In short, corporate was going out of their way to screw over the engineers and supervision. We worked hard, and our results spoke for our work. We took a fierce pride in our plant and looked out for our crews, and they looked out for us. Corporate feathered their own nest, and VP's earning 200 G's a year seemed to grow steadily. We used to joke that we were the only power producing organization with more VP's than linemen. It was that sort of thing that had engineers and supervisors signing cards with the union organizers. In the time since I left, the younger engineers who were really sharp stuck around long enough to get their Professional Engineers Licenses and then bailed out. Not there long enough to get heavily into the pension system or 401K plan. We lost some of the brightest and best. Some of those guys found work in other companies, some going for the smaller firms where they did not have a top heavy corporate structure to deal with. My boss is counting months to retirement, and is telling me that I got out at the end of the good times. I have lunch sometimes with people who are still working at the plant, and they keep me abreast of things. The new mechanical engineer is a fine fellow. He sits with the mechanics each morning at the crew briefing as I did, and he is learning the plant. He says the mechanics will sometimes pull out envelopes or folders of sketches I made for them over morning coffee, and tells me that the crew still speaks well of me. He also says he knows he has a big pair of boots to fill, but I tell him the crew will have his back and he will do fine and will grow into the job. When management and the crew sit together in the mornings and work as one, the working environment becomes a great place to be, and an energy unlike anything that might be found in an office job is felt. This young fellow has told me he is experiencing this, and really enjoys coming to work. Sometimes, there are aspects of a job that go beyond the paycheck or the benefits and transcend the fundamental differences between union and salaried people. At the same time, we never lost sight of the fact that the only reason we had things good on our side of the house was because of the unions. It may be perceived as a lopsided picture, but that was how it worked for us.
