My new job working as a scab for the corporate predators and scammers of a big Omaha-based industrial roofing company.
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Ok, so it might be a little unfair to lump everyone in a company that hired me off the street with no job history (that I was going to mention) and no ID, into the same category as the master manipulator George Heaton and that lying SOB Fred Berdine. (Oh… I’ll get back to Fred later by the way). After all, they did give me the job. And that got me enough money to keep my shitty little basement room in midtown Omaha, and keep feeding myself.
With this job, I was back to working the kind of hard labor that burns up the calories real fast. Especially up on an industrial rooftop in the cold. I had to eat up the last of my supplies just to make it to payday. Fortunately, I’d discovered an even cheaper way to deliver those much needed calories to my hard working young body, than the usual SOS fair. Potatoes were cheaper and more filling than bread, and the local Safeway had a thing called “Boil a Bag” that provided me with a variety of meat and gravy-like toppings for only twenty nine cents per meal.
Needless to say, I certainly was relieved to have a job at all at this point. Winter was here in midtown Omaha and it was getting cold. Now… being cold was something the Minnesotan in me would have never worried (and certainly never complained) about, but being cold AND hungry really REALLY sucked. After paying rent and the several days of my (perhaps a bit unwise) street punk feeding program, what was left of the two hundred bucks I’d gotten from Fred was down to practically nothing by the time I showed up on the job site.
As I mentioned earlier, I was hired by this big industrial roofing company as a scab. Of course I didn’t know this and even though I’d just recently had an experience with union-related job difficulties, I doubt I even knew what a scab was. Either way, the first job site I worked on for this company had nothing to do with the union difficulties for which I was hired. On this job, we put a new roof on a big office building. (I was told that it was for Control Data, but I can find no record of this online)
We finished the roof in about two weeks. It was a new building and we were using the latest materials of the time. A PVC membrane is rolled out over layers of decking material and insulation. All seams (including those around vents and pipes protruding from the surface) are sealed with either heat or a solvent, depending on the specific material being used. We were using a membrane called Sika Sarnafil that is sealed with solvent.
After everything is sealed, the flat areas of the roof are covered with a layer of rocks to hold it all in place. As an unskilled laborer, my primary job was to carry the rolls of membrane and spread the layer of rocks. It’s grueling work as the rolls of membrane weigh well over a hundred pounds each and the rocks are shoveled from huge, motorized wheelbarrows and raked until evenly distributed over the surface of the entire roof.
I think I got my boss’s attention though. He often stopped me from those jobs and started showing me the more difficult, more skilled work of cutting and sealing the material. For this and other reasons (I will mention later) I now think that, although originally hired as a scab, I was also being considered as a more permanent worker.
Once this job was finished however, I was sent down to Topeka with the rest of the scabs. That story, I will get to very soon but first… I will tell the one about cashing my paycheck.
Remember… I had no ID and no money. But after two weeks of hard labor, I had a paycheck for over four hundred dollars. Although a scab, I was being paid $5.25 an hour. Well over the minimum wage. I can’t remember who it was that told me where to go to do this, but I ended up walking all the way to the old Mexican part of south Omaha where, I was told I could cash it without an ID.
That was quite a journey. And a story I will get to when this again will have to be…
To be continued…
