Unemployed in Oakland: BACK TO WORK

About 20 of us bundled into the construction elevator attached seemingly precariously to the side of the building being built. With the wind blowing in through its steel mesh walls, the elevator operator pulled the gate down and we bumpily rode up to the fourth floor. I was back at work.

It was way cold. Half the glass in the windows wasn't in and the low forties temperature had everyone talking. As I climbed up on my scaffold, I heard one of the framers yell at his foreman, "give me a hug, I'm f***ing freezing!" A few of the other lads laughingly egged on the foreman to respond and he quickly disappeared around a corner.

Whenever I left my spot on the scaffold, to get materials, to saunter down the stairwell and across the mud to the porta-potties, I would bunch up my fists to bring the blood back to my finger tips. And on the one or two occasions I bumped or hammered a finger, it hurt like some kind of hell.

But coming back to work, however tenuous the duration may be, is good. It's good to be earning money. It's good to be with familiar faces doing something physical and collective. It's good to talk and hang out with people like myself!

It's been over 6 months. Excluding a month of work in July, I've been out of work nigh on 10 months.

I had a nice chat with a 60-ish carpenter, (a rarity in itself) from the old country. He is about 15 years older than me and went through an old-school apprenticeship. He told me on his first day of work as a "joiner" he was instructed by the older carpenters to build his own tool box. It was suitcase like, opening up into two, with wee draws and dove-tail joints everywhere. Not a screw to be seen. He spoke of being on job sites that had no electricity, no power tools. Everything was done by hand. "How much more interesting was work in those days," I told him. He nodded, "and things were so much slower."

These days things are powerfully fast in construction. Everyone rushes around. Every task is broken down to its simplest routine. Every knee, wrist, elbow and back, is used up in twice the time. Wherever the boss can de-skill a job and increase the pace of work it's done. Gone are the days when a carpenter was an all-round skilled worker. Forgotten for the most part, are the many skills and complexities of carpentry. The union kept wages high, but turned a blind eye to the speed-up and the de-skilling of our trade.

And now, in the depths of this depression where we've experienced a reduction in hours for union carpentry in Northern California of over 35%, the speedup has got us nowhere but out of work. That's one reason for the shorter work week. 30 hours work for 40 hours pay. Even the Carpenters' Union Constitution still calls for a 30-hour work week. It was inscribed back in the old days when life was different and work was more interesting.