Rain, rain go away...

It's foggy this morning. The kind of fog you'd see in a horror flick. The kind of fog that makes it impossible to tell what time it is especially up here where there are only a couple of hours of darkness in every 24 hours. But the rain has stopped for a few minutes which is a nice change. It's been raining hard here for 3 days. Each day it has rained a little harder than the day before. So day after day I have been soaked to the skin in the first half hour on the job and then have worked the next nine and a half while wet. We do have raincoats in the tool crib but they are plastic and so they don't breath which means I would be soaked anyway if I wore one as they make me perspire like a melting ice cube on a hot summer day. Don't get me wrong I do like the rain. Especially when I am sleeping when the rat-a-tat-tat of it hitting my window pushes me into a deeper sleep than I normally enjoy. Last night for instance I enjoyed a deep and peaceful sleep that could have gone on forever. On a construction site rain can be a problem. We do have the option of going home to avoid it and lots of people do. This is especially true if you are working outside rigging or something. You can bet that the iron workers aren't that keen to walk the beams when they are covered with water. And if they aren't working and you are the rigger what do you do then? Ditto for the scaffolders whose job gets infinitely more dangerous and dirty when the scaffolding is wet. But what happens when it rains several days in a row? Having one day off isn't bad as you can get some laundry done and catch up on a little sleep. But by day three you are bored out of your gourd and all you can think about is how small your next cheque will be. So it isn't uncommon for someone to take the first rain day off and then to show up each day after that even though it is still raining and is quite possibly raining even harder! Irony at its best care of mother nature! I was checking the forecast this morning for my home town in Ontario. It is supposed to be in the 30s and extremely humid. That weather would suck to work in as well. In fact as we don't have air conditioning in our house it will suck for sleeping too. But what a nice change for my days off. Good swimming weather. I will probably visit the nice sandy beach that is just a few blocks south of my home. I will probably get out fishing as often as I can because standing chest deep in Cold Creek will cool me down even if I am wearing waders. And I will golf even though nothing about it will cool me down and instead my clothing will be as soaked with sweat then as they will be from rain today. Out the window of the bus the rain falls slow and steady from the heavy, low lying clouds. But tomorrow I fly home and so the rain will not dampen my spirits. The thought of it keeps me warm and dry in spirit at least. And who knows? If it starts to thunder and lightening maybe I will get sent back to camp where getting my laundry done and having a little nap will be set to the soundtrack of the rain hitting my window.

Foremen

You know I started working here at the end of January and since then I have had at least 5 Foremen leading me to believe that is a terrible job to have! When I started here we had Mario and Vinny. I really liked them both and was glad to work for them. But something happened and Vinny was gone so instead we had Greg and Mario. I was good with that too as I liked Greg and felt he was a good Forman. So far so good. Unfortunately there were some politics going on and in the big blame-game of life Mario got to go for that fishing trip he was looking forward to a couple of months early. Enter Bernie. I liked Bernie as he was an experienced Forman who was laid back but professional. He and Greg worked well together so everything was going well when travel schedules got mixed and I ended up working half my shift for Mike and then the rest for Bernie and Greg. Again, all good! I was even getting used to the change. But... Greg got put back on the tools when night shift was halted and Bernie was sent to a new site. So now I have Dale. I like Dale. He is a young Acadian from New Brunswick with a heavy French accent, lots of energy and a big smile. He knows the business well and knows the skills of his crew well enough to use us on jobs that match our skill sets. And he ways says that if we work hard and don't lie to him he will go to war for us if need be. Except with his accent it sounds more like: "I tell you boys, dowwn lie to me an work 'ard an I will fight for you!". Yesterday he proved it. There is another Forman on sight who just returned from vacation. He is keenie-beanie to make an impact and so he has been flying around the site cracking out orders and getting things done. Getting them done maybe a bit too quickly and in areas that aren't his to manage. As our site is wrapping up, for instance, he went the other day mid shift and unplugged all the welding cables from a bank of machines that will be going ack to the rental place. The problem is he did it mid-shift with no warning 3 days before the machines were to be picked up and this effectively knocked our crew out of work until they could re-jig their welding cables and get them re-set to the other bank of machines on the other side of the site. This process took the rest of the day and killed all production for the day. It also left some welders very ticked off! We let that one go and got back to work when yesterday he struck again. As there are no plugs receptacles in the walls of a surge bin we have power packs on the floor that have 20 or so receptacles on their sides and which are about the size of a coffee table. The scaffolders needed the power pack on the surge deck moved so this foreman flew in and started unplugging the extension cords that were using it. I though we had blown a fuse when our equipment stopped so I went over to reset the fuse. When I got to the Power pack he had our plug end in his hand and told me to unplug the rest so we could move it. I argued that this was dangerous as someone could be using a mag drill and unplugging it would kill its power and cause it to drop. "fuck 'Em" he said so the plugs got pulled and the power pack got moved. I should take a moment to point out that this is a major no no. Apart from mag drills if you were in the middle of using a hand drill on metal and pulled the plug it would snap and break your wrist. If a worker had done this they would be fired. Not to mention that it pisses off the people using the power and is plain ignorant! One of our welders started to slowly burn with anger. Finally he tracked this foreman down and screamed at him. He then went and told our foreman Dale. That was when Dale proved he was there for us. He tracked the guy down and a big argument took place. We never saw that guy on our surge deck again. I am so glad to have Dale as a Forman. And because he goes to war for us we would go to war for him. And that is how it should work!

Mullets

I was sitting on the bus today with a few friends and we were discussing tha famous hairstyle known as the 'mullet'. You know, business in the front and a party in the back. It was the hairstyle that defined the 80s and nowadays we just look back and laugh at it. Of course most of us who were laughing have lost our hair totally and would probably be glad to have a mullet now if the trade off was getting to keep the hair! Speaking of mullets I have a story for you. It's a cooking story from back when I was in my early 30s. We had just moved the family to Richmond Hill and I was working on contract as an HR specialist. Julie managed to get a job too and the day she started I was let go! Bummer luck there I can tell you. So I got to be stay at home Dad which actually turned out to be not too bad. Except for one small problem. Apart from bacon and eggs I had no idea how to cook! And when you live on a shoestring budget buying food on sale and cooking it inexpensively is a key to not going bust. I quickly learned to watch the flyers for sales and especially for the ones where meat went for 99 cents a pound. Picnic pork roasts, lousier cuts of beef and several types of fish routinely fell into this category. So I got out my cook books and began to teach myself how to cook cheap meat in order to make it tasty and nutritious. Nowadays I would just go on the net for this type of info but in those days the net was brand new and sites like recipes.com didn't exist yet. So what I used was a very old copy of The Joy of Cooking which had been my Nanna's. I would tell myself that it was just like having her teach me to cook as there were often her handwritten notes in the margins. I have always liked fishing but in those days I had little interest in eating fish. I only knew how to fry them in butter and I wasn't especially fond of fish being cooked that way. But I knew that I could get whitefish and lake trout for the magic 99 cents a pound and that these were fish that other people tended to view as being tasty so I focused on learning new ways to cook fish in order to find one that I could stomach. And that is why I inadvertently read the recipe for how to cook Mullet. I was intrigued by this one having never in all my years as a fanatical fisherman even heard of a mullet! So I stored it in the back of my mind until the day when I was shopping at the Knob Hill Farms store in the frozen fish section and low and behold there were bags of frozen mullet! The bag was clear at the tail end but dark blue at the head end so I couldn't yet identify the mysterious mullet fish! It was the magic 99 cents a pound so I bought a couple for dinner! When I got home I quickly found the recipe in my old cook book and prepared the ingredients for cooking the mullet. Then I opened the package and saw why the head had been concealed. The mullet is another name for what we call a 'sucker'! Yes I am talking about that ugly trash fish that sits on the bottom eating garbage!! I felt immediately that I was more of a sucker than the fish I was about to cook! I did cook the bugger. But it smelled so badly that I threw it out! The family. Happily ate Kraft Dinner that night and like a fish I had been 'schooled'! I have no idea if that fish is the origin of the name for the haircut or not but it certainly could be. Since then I have learned how to cook very well. I know and cook lots of recipes for lots of varieties of fish. But like the haircut I will never have a mullet! Have a great day! :)

Gone from the map...

I woke up yesterday and immediately the panic set in! OMG! My cell phone had no service!!! Suddenly I was facing the day with no Internet, no phone and (gasp!) no texting!!! I immediately started thinking two things: firstly how did I forget to pay my bill and secondly how was I going to pay it with no Internet access? Of course it never occurred to me that it was simply a case of lightening having hit the cellphone tower. And after all that was said and done that WAS the actual problem! Ever have one of those domino-type days where it starts in disaster and then heads immediately into another disaster? Because I was worried about my cell service I completely forgot to put on my work boots! Kind of stupid especially when I made it all the way to work before the foreman pointed it out! D'oh!! Eventually I was driven back to camp by a non-plused Kate and was able to retrieve them and get back to work. By then not only had I realized that my service was not the only one down but actually service had been restored. After that the day went well. When I was a kid my Dad used to tell us stories about friends of his who had gone off to be Lumberjacks in their youth. He would tell us about the long days and the giant meals and how when they came back to town they were bigger and tougher than anyone else. I actually always wanted to do that stuff. I guess now I am doing the modern-day equivalent! Except in those days I doubt that the camps had phone service and cells hadn't even been conceived yet! Honestly I have no idea how they managed! When I look at all of the modern conveniences that we have and what a global world we live in I am shocked at how far the world has come during my short life. When I grew up we had rotary phones and each house had only one line! The rotary phones were originally stuck firmly to the wall and couldn't be moved. We were SO impressed when it became possible to pull the phone off the wall and hook it up to a long wire so that we could slip around the corner and get some privacy while talking on the phone! We saw Maxwell Smart on one of the three stations that came in on our black and white TV (2 English channels and one French) using his shoe-phone!!! Wouldn't THAT be cool we thought. And Captain Kirk on Star Trek (it was still a low budget TV show in those days with no movies) using hi 'tricorder' which was effectively a two-way radio!! Now our cell phones put those funny little devices to shame! At least as long as the tower avoids lightening! Phones weren't the only things that have changed drastically in my time. You won't believe it but I remember when they invented the calculator! It was big like an adding machine and cost hundreds of dollars! My Dad has always been very tech-saavy and he bought one! What a brag item it was! Now you can get them for less than a dollar and they are free add-ons to any electronic device from computers to phones! How about MP3 players? When I was a kid we had record players that played 45s! Then they came out with cassette players and finally Sony Walkmen! I was so proud to have one of these giant babies when I went to university! I would wear it jogging and on the downstep of each stride gravity would cause it to slow a little! But that was nothing compared to the 25 batteries it required which were not recharchable but which DID cost a small fortune! And boom boxes used to be called Ghetto Blasters which we're called portable but only if you had 11 other guys to help you carry it! So I guess I shouldn't complain too much when my cell tower is knocked out. It isn't a show-stopper or anything. Really it's just an inconvenience. But the fact that I have a portable tiny little phone that is also a computer and a calculator and so on is so beyond the imaginings of the era I was born into shows how quickly technology has progressed in such a short time. And I haven't even touched on video games yet! :)

Lighter fare (nothing about unions!)

After a few intense days where I needed to vent my spleen on the topic of unionism today is going to be lighter fare. In fact I have spent the last few days percolating my thoughts on a far different topic. Today I am going to talk about the latest highly addictive thing to hit the worksite... Spitz! (aka: the humble sunflower seed) Years ago when my wife and I were on a very long drive we bought a bag of sunflower seeds to eat on the drive. I remeber a few things about that drive rather vividly. First thing was that once I started eating the buggers I simply couldn't stop! As I was driving I would grab a handful and jam them in my mouth like a chipmunk in a peanut patch and then would slowly crack them one at a time with my teeth spitting the shells out the window as I went. My wife was hooked as well so I can imagine the puzzlement on the driver of the car behind us us a steady stream of confetti-like debris blasted out each window mile after mile. The other thing that I remember was that the excessive amount of salt on the buggers burned a couple of neat little holes in the tip of my tongue!! So after we finished that drive we decided that our days of chewing Spitz was over! Fast forward a decade or two to our current worksite. I had noticed of the guys on the crew seems to always look like he had a month of plaque on his teeth thick enough that you could scrape it off with a spoon! He usually had puffy cheeks and spat a lot too. But until I worked beside him one day I never clued in to what was going on. Then my eyes were opened! It was Spitz! There have been lots of times in my life where something has occurred to me in a flash that has really opened my eyes to something I hadn't previously recognized. I think they call these moments 'serendipity' which is a five-dollar word meaning 'Holy shit!!!'. This is precisely what happened when I realized Jay's seed-secret! I immediately noticed that about half the crew had them on the go during the day. I also started noticing the little piles of sunflower seeds all over the ground throughout the entire construction site! My eyes had been opened and there was no going back! One day working with some Ironworkers I was offered a handful of Spitz and driven by curiosity (or possibly because I had just quit smoking and needed a distraction) I took them. The salt was yummy and they were dill pickle flavour which is a personal favorite. Mmmmmnnnn they were so good. Next thing I knew I was wandering around the site like a crack head looking for his next hit. "Hey man, you got any seeds?" Unknown to me there is an etiquette to getting Spitz out of the bag. When you are handed the bag you open your hand and pour out a few. NEVER put your hand in another mans bag! Of course I learned this the hard way. One day I got some Spitz from a guy and when I handed them back he said 'Keep them' meaning the bag. It was mostly empty so I thought 'how nice of him'. A month later I was working with the same guy and he offered me some more Spitz. As I opened the bag which was a zip lock one he said in a heavy French accent: " Don put your fuckin hand in the bag! One guy did that one time an I said fuckit and jus give 'im da bag!' he clearly didn't recall that I was the guy as the story was meant to illustrate to me how refined he was. So as I poured myself a handful while looking at the build up of seed residue on his teeth I played innocent and said "How terrible! Some people really are ignorant!!" I was working with another welder in the surge bin. He is a guy that I have a lot of respect for. I recall one day in the safety meeting him making the firm point to the group: "whoever is horking on the bin walls fuckin' stop it! I have to fit those walls and I find it disgusting!" So you can imagine my shock a week later when I noticed him working in the bin with a mouthful of spitz firing the seeds from his mouth in every direction. I chuckled to myself about this as it is an example of human nature that people don't know how to automatically categorize and reflect on new things and apply existing rules of etiquette to them right off the hop. But the same could be said of people who take and send texts while talking to you. But that is editorial fodder for another day. I have to go. Have a great day! :)

My final thoughts on the union...

I should start this entry off by saying I am in no way criticizing my union or any union for that matter. I do have some unique qualifications in the area of unionism but in this spot I am merely trying to finish what I started which is a brief glimpse of where Unions come from, where they are, and where they are going. I think that there are cycles in the life of a union that may be compared in some ways with the cycles of marriage. The early days when it is formed and just starting out are very passionate and driven by idealism. They set the initial stage for how things are basically going to go. Then comes the less passionate but more comfortable days when small modifications are routinely made and things basically run as they should. Finally there comes a stage like after that time in a marriage when both parties stop working and they have to start cutting back in order to face their new reality. Unfortunately in the unions the members don't often Realize the implication which is that this stage will eventually end in death. I recall with unions like the autoworkers or the BC teachers the the employer side of the employer side of the equation eventually figure out how to weaken the unions. It is a slow process involving but divide and conquer tactics in conjunction with smallish claw backs with each new agreement signed. The union, which ever one you want to consider, reaches that happy middle section of the life cycle which I identified above and so the members get a little less interested in the implications of political manoevering and more interested in the status quo. They get too comfortable in the big fat center of their comfort zone. So these little changes I mentioned go through virtually unnoticed. The Union leaders want to keep the members who elect them happy and so the status quo it is. That is until it is too late. It is my feeling that the Oli Sands Producers and the other managers of the capital side have already started this process and are making great headway. They have CLAC which is a weak alternative to the union but which seems to cover the work of just about any trade. They are selling Ironworker work to Boilermakers and vice versa in order to divide us. They have agreements in place up here that are significantly diluted versions of the original, and the have a more global workforce which they draw from across Canada. They are winning and we are barely surviving although. It many people seem to realize it. So what can be done? Somehow the various unions need to get together and plot a strategy together that doesn't include competing for work. It possibly means amalgamating a few unions together for strength and to combat the divisiveness. It requires unions across Canada to unite more so that people from other provinces share the work a little more easily. And most of all it requires all the unions to make it easier to absorb CLAC people and in so doing reunite the working people and weaken the grip which the producers have on the process. It sounds simple but I know it isn't. It IS a simplified view. But if this process doesn't begin soon then in 10 years the Unions will only be shells of their former selves cut back to nothing and CLAC will be the main provider of labor for the oil patch. When that happens the producers who actually run the CLACers will carve them back too and the skilled trades of the middle class will be driven back down to their lower class origins. That is the last of my union rant. Tomorrow I will go back to the good stuff. Have a great day! :)

Breakers part two

It has always been the case that the world is a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. When the guilds emerged with strength in Europe and in England the power had shifted to some degree towards the little guys standing together to form the guilds and what not. But fast forward a few hundred years to the point where people were emigrating en masse to the New World and the balance shifted back to the haves. I have always found it interesting that the more money and hence power that a person has the less work that they are likely to do themselves and the more they want to protect their capital and right to do less. Capital is the key. If you have capital and invest it successfully in capital equipment (the thing that actually make money) then one is likely (time permitting) to get someone else to run that business or product while the owner of the capital starts other capital projects to make even more money. Tack on 50 years or a generation of family and the 'owner' is usually removed from the process at least in the hands on level. There are exceptions. It the fact is the 'hunger' that drove that first generation of capital often doesn't exist for the following generations and so you get what my Dad used to call the 'rags to riches to rags in 3 generations' syndrome. But I am getting a little off topic... In the new world there were millions of people who arrived with nothing in their pockets but their hands. Those people who did have capital were the rich and those who did the work were the poor. There was a middle class (doctors, merchants and the like) but for the most parts the pendulum had swung back to the haves versus the have nots. Railways and building were built and erected with terrible working conditions, inhumane hours and horrific death tolls. We had seen this before hadn't we? People with everything to gain and everything to lose. The perfect time for a revolution in the labour market. It also is an example of that ongoing struggle between those with the capital and those that the capitalists hired to actually do the work. The unfair power balance led to unfair work conditions for the workers and as a result motivated a change at the grassroots (in this case the workers). This was the genesis of the union movement in North America. The fight to get 'a fair day's pay for a fair day's work'. The key to its success was getting all the workforce, or most of it, organized to work together. If labour stood together they outnumbered the capitalists by so much that they could stand at the table as equals and work out a fair deal. The success of this negotiating moved the union labourers up from lower to middle class. It arranged fair hours and fair benefits for its members. It educated them, watched out for their safety, and took care of them when they were injured. But all this costs money and money comes out of the 'capital gains' of the corporation and so the companies that were big enough thought to themselves "how can we scrape some of this back?". The solution was to divide and conquer. This idea is where CLAC comes from. Cheaper labour by flying people in from outpost and out of province locations a lot of which had a lower cost of living. Pay all of their flights always so that they can go home to these far off places with their whole paycheck in their pocket. Etc. now you have created a labor pool that is hard for the unions to organize. This is called division. And with this division in place the corporations can slowly pull the unions apart piece by piece. If a strike happens they are back stopped and backfilled by CLAC. That extends the strike and leads to union guys going CLAC in order to not lose their homes. Presto chango and the union is gutted. I'll have to finish up tomorrow with some ideas on what things might be done to shore things up. That said I am not an expert so these are my own observations. I also admit that my look at history here is pretty brief and uses a huge amount out. But it helps set the table for understanding why things are happening and why my suggestions may work. Have a great day. :)

Breaking the breakers...

I am not an expert on unions. I have been a member in a few though. I was in the Ontario Labourers Union branch 183 where I trained and worked in watermain and sewer. I was a teacher in BC and was a member of the BCTF. I am sure in some office jobs that I had I was with CUPE too. Add to that a couple of grad school courses in industrial/organizational psychology and that's it. It's really not a lot but it helps me when I am forming opinions on what's going on in the producers versus workers war that is constantly waging. But if you read on today know that I am not an expert and am only really and armchair quarterback about these things. After writing yesterday's blog I spent a lot of time thinking about the labour situation and trying to get a mental grip on it. The 'battle' over dollars produced has been going on since medieval times. In those days the 'Lords' were granted a large piece of land to manage in exchange for giving their support to the King of the day. The Lord had beneath him the soil and the soil produced the products which were exchanged for money or 'capital'. Obviously the Lord wasn't terribly keen to work the soil himself and so he had peasants working for him (2 classes being surfs and free men). The surfs worked in hopes of winning their freedom and the freemen worked in hopes of improving their lives and having a little more food. But the Lords tended to be very rich and the peasants tended to be very poor. The very thing that tied them together was the self same capital that held them apart. To move forward very quickly through time the Crusades happened and that triggered the start of the Renaissance which is when 'guilds' or 'unions' gained power. You see during the medieval period (the dark ages) nobody left their little plot of land and so science and Economics and everything that moves an economies and countries forward were at a standstill. The Crusades were religious wars with the Muslim people over control of Jerusalem and because the war was declared by the King (Richard the Lion Heart I believe) the Lords had to follow or lose their lands. The Lords brought their peasant 'army' and the whole lot of them trooped off to Jerusalem for their little pissing contest. All good so far, right? Forget that was for a minute and focus on what else happened as a result of this little trek across Europe. All of a sudden the Europeans and in particular the English became exposed to new goods and thinking. They tasted thing like pepper for the first time. They wore silk clothing for the first time. And more importantly they were exposed to new and progressive forms of science. You see the Muslims and other peoples of the world hadn't been sitting around in isolated feifdoms but rather had been advancing things like medicine, astronomy, cartography (mapping) and many other things where their northern enemies hadn't. I can imagine that an awful lot of the English from the Lords on down had themselves a bunch of 'Holy shit!' moments. Fast forward to the end of this war and everybody is heading back to their homes in England and Europe. And everything is the same. Except that now everything is different. Having tasted the fruit of knowledge the working class wanted no part of the way things had been before (woman's lib came as a result of the same experience that occurred when woman took over from men in the factories and workplaces during WW2 and were the expected to go back into their kitchens after the men returned). The peasants now had knowledge of how much better things could be. They had both everything to gain and everything to lose. The perfect recipe for a revolution! The revolution that occurred was a cultural revolution. Merchants started traveling abroad to bring back the highly sought after spices and silks. With them they picked up artisans to craft the raw goods into finished goods and an artisan class began to grow. The artisans formed 'guilds' to protect the craft skills which were developing. A middle class began to form where there had been none and it was peopled with merchants and tradespeople who could operate independently of the Lords and the Monarchy. Things were a'changin! I am going to stop for now. But tomorrow I want to fast forward us to more modern times. We'll see where we go from there. Have a good day! :)

Unions united...

Yesterday I received permission to take an extra 3 days off at the end of the month in order to be sworn into the Ironworkers' union. I am really excited about it for a variety of reasons. I appreciate the union and what it does for me and for the ongoing protection it offers. Besides, there are at least four other guys that I started here with who will also be sworn in at the same time so it is very likely that we will go out and paint the town red immediately afterwards! As my union is in Edmonton where my niece and nephews live they will likely be there for the fun as well. So all good! I have a friend named Sean who I know from our informal morning jocularity in the brass alley. He works for JD Driver and is a member of CLAC and not of the union. So we were chatting away about the differences in the two organizations (our local and the 'association' called CLAK). Sean lives not too far from me in Ontario just north of Belleville. He is a good and friendly guy. So I was asking Sean about CLAC as I am a curious person. My opinion is that CLAK was set up in order to break the unions. My guess is that there is a lot of Imperial Oil, Syncrude and Suncore money secretly went into setting up their organization. Additionally CLAC stands for 'Christian Labour Association of Canada' and it is my firm opinion(feel free to disagree) that any business using 'Christian'in it's name is using the concept of 'Jesus' to steal from people. Besides, why would they mix religion and business anyway? What if you are a Muslim or a Jew? Completely rediculous if you ask me but whatever. Sean told me the main reasons why he is with CLAC and not with a union. The main reason is that he was unemployed and they got him the job. Fair enough. The second reason is that they pay for his flights to and from work. Again fair. I know how crucial that aspect is to someone from out of the province. Another reason for his choice is that he took schooling to become a millwright but it is tough to get into the Millwright union when you don't know anyone so coming here as a laborer through CLAC allowed him to meet some millwrights who called their hall and now the next job will be as a millwright apprentice. This is all good for Sean and I respect him but there are some important things that he said in general which anyone in the field ought to pay attention to. As an older apprentice I have lived to see big business crush some unions in various ways. From GM spending several years moving from an all-in-one manufacturing system where they personally made all of the components of the car and were therefore completely dependent on the union to mostly JIT (just in time) systems where their production of components were made by the Linamars and Magnas of the world. This was important because those companies are Not union and so their employees have nowhere near the same amount of collective power making them easier to 'manage'. GMa final move was to close the Oshawa plant for a few years gutting most of the oldeer unionized workers and scaring the rest into submission. My worry is that the oil companies are trying the same thing here in Alberta. First they offload a lot of work onto non union workers in this case CLAC. Slowly they build the membership using people from out of province who they lure with free flights. The start with only recruiting only basic labourers but slowly move into skilled trades. When they have enough of the market covered with the out of towners they start cutting back on what they pay the union. A strike happens. It lasts a long time because with CLAC in place the work is getting done. Union guys get hard up for cash and start sneaking out and taking CLAC jobs and the presto chango the union collapses. That is really simplified but that is how it happens. I am glad to be joining the Ironworkers. I will work hard to ensure that the above scenario never occurs. And I will happily enjoy a good life with my union brothers and sisters. :)

Coming back...

Maybe it's the beautiful sunny weather or maybe it was time spent joyously in my garden but I sure had a hard time coming back this turnaround! I spent most of the time home actually sleeping! I had morning naps, mid morning naps, just-before-lunch naps, after lunch naps and naps for any reason that I could think of! After months of being deep down tired I finally just rested. So maybe that is why I dreaded coming back. The hardest part of coming back is not what you would expect. It's not getting up at 4am to catch and early train to Toronto or the train switch there for Hamilton. It's not th expensive taxi ride from the GO terminal to the little mountain airport they have there. It's not the flight or the stop over in Saskatoon either. What really sucks about coming back here is the bus ride from the Albian Airstrip back to Wapasu camp. That's when it really hits you that you are back. It's the realization that you haven't even hit 'Monday' in the 14 day long week of work that you are about to start. Yes. The bus ride is when your mind really starts asking you 'what the fuck am I doing here?' It does get better though. It gets better when the goddess of routine catches you in her arms and starts making you comfortable. When you have your clothes put away in their familiar spot. It makes sense when you step out of your room and finally know whether this time you turn right and not left in order to hit the laundry or the dining hall. It makes sense when you see you friends from work and you start feeling comfortable again. Finally, it makes sense when you get to work and when you have your tools in your hands. When you start doing all of those things that work is to you it all makes sense. It is supposed to reach 28+ degrees today and yet there may be thunder showers. At the moment it is hot and the dust is starting to climb into the still air as our little convoy of busses has just left the camp. It is hard to dress for these types of days as we are required to wear long sleeves so we will likely be hot as a fox in a forest fire. Add to that the potential rain so we may end up wet and cold. Then there is the question of 'jeans or coveralls?'. As a rule if I am doing more Ironworker stuff (rigging, climbing, hoisting, bolting) I wear jeans. It if I am a welder today (grinding, welding, etc) I likely opt for the coveralls. The good news is that as the job winds down and people move on more than there is a wider range of work that they will ask we apprentices to do. We now have 1000+ hours in the field and have picked up enough useful skills that we can do that. So today how I dressed was a guess (jeans) but how I dress tomorrow will be the result of what I do today. Have a great day! :)

A different world

I am always surprised at how different my life and the way in which I experience the world is so different when I am at home. I like being an Ironworker as it is a good job that provides a good income. But when I am up at Kearl Lake I am a different person. I spent a good deal of this time back home sleeping! I have just been so deep down tired that I needed it. But this trip the temperature was just right and the bed just comfy enough that I spend a lot of my down time laying down. That's not to say that I didn't get anything done at home either as I actually got quite a bit finished. I golfed twice with my Dad (I'm still not very good). I worked in the backyard with Julie gardening and I did a few hours more weeding the garden over at Ritch's place where we are splitting the space. I went on several long drives with Julie. Yes, it was a good visit and I got lots done especially in the sleeping department.