Gallo Brothers
One of my first experiences in the working-class world of blue-collar America occurred shortly after I reached the age of sixteen. My father, who had worked in the harbor of San Pedro, California on weekends as a Teamsters’ helper for many years, allowed me to assume his relatively high number position on the casual labor board. So very early on summer mornings I would often endure the long fifty miles or so of crowded L.A. freeway traffic to load cargo into trucks as members of the Longshoremen’s union unloaded it off of the ships newly arrived at port.
We used to take home boxes of bananas that were too ripe to truck to the markets, sometimes along with an uninvited little green snake hiding in the bottom and we would pass this throwaway fruit around to our neighbors on the block. The snakes who control large grocery-chain corporations eventually put a stop to this, hiring armed guards to patrol harbor refuse bins.
Similar to what is described in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, they were content to let good food rot in dumpsters rather than allow a little fruit to be passed gratis around the neighborhoods of their captive working-class customers. And thus, a few all-important nickels were prevented from falling out of bulging billion-dollar corporate coffers.
I was unwilling to suffer through the incredible boredom of an American classroom any longer and, due to extreme nearsightedness, I was declared ineligible for the Vietnam War draft. Thus, buy the age of eighteen I was instead, working in a can factory and then, a furniture factory, a marble sink factory and a pizza delivery ‘factory’.
I was fortunate to have a friend whose father was a dispatcher at Gallo Wine Company and, upon my friend convincing him that I was a worthy hand of potential, his father recommended me to Gallo’s truck driving division. This opportunity initially consisted of more truck unloading than driving, but being controlled by the Teamsters union, the wages were almost double what I had been earning based on the power of my own meager resume and so, it didn’t take much convincing for me to sign on.
In a closed union shop such as Gallo Wine Company (actually three different union locals within the same shop), most workers were not employed because they had applied at the door. Rather, they tended to obtain their jobs the old-fashioned way; they had a brother, an uncle, a father or a friend ‘recommend’ them. At first glance, this may seem a little unfair to the collective-bargaining uninitiated, but after all, this was unionized blue-collar America and why should anyone such as myself take issue with what had been in place for generations?
The Gallo workers were a real hodgepodge, melting pot assortment of mostly misfits, consisting of men and a few women of various ethnic, religious, political, moral, not so moral, military veteran, one ex-college professor, one ex-Gallo Wine salesman and a few ex-convict backgrounds. Most of them felt sorry for my obvious youthful inexperience and thus, they patiently took me under their wing and treated me like family, teaching me in language somewhat definitive and considerably colorful (much of which I had already learned in the harbor), the ways of the world, wine and women and the sometime exaggerated exploits pertaining mostly to the latter.
During lunch break, they also introduced me to the essential workingman’s card game known as Tonk. Similar to poker; the main difference is that it makes for an ideal half-hour lunch break habit, because one can lose three times as much money in about half the time as it generally takes when playing seven card stud.
The founders of the company, Ernest and Julio Gallo, were renowned for their ability to control the California and extended American wine market, being among the first wine growers to understand the larger concept of possessing not only vineyards, equipment and the general associated skills of wine producing, but also, box companies, bottle companies, truck body making companies and of course, distribution warehouses large enough to earn a percentage off of hundreds of smaller subsidiary labels.
To their credit, they fashioned an innovative corporate structure of accountability, placing responsibility for being profitable on each individual warehouse operation as a company unto itself. It was rumored (probably true) that any localized warehouse operation within the greater Gallo system that didn’t remain in the black would be shut down and the workers laid off; a sound corporate policy which today in a ‘dot com’ era of go into debt now and hopefully profit way down the road mentality, is unwisely, not often imitated.
Gallo Wine Company (at least this particular warehouse operation) was less famously known, except among certain beleaguered union members, as being among the most tightfisted of all employers. The company repeatedly refusing to budge quite literally, one nickel in wages or benefits, unless strongly coerced by the not always entirely legal power of union persuasion.
An example of the parsimonious nature of the Gallo theory of enterprise was uncovered the day we delivery drivers got together and decided to not pick up any more used boxes unless the company agreed to pay us the ten cents per box that other delivery drivers were were now receiving, instead of the nickel per box Gallo continued to insist on paying us. The company used these boxes to ship out single bottles that were due their customers because of previous ‘dry breakage’.
That is, breakage not obvious when initially delivered, often faked by various liquor store and bar owners or deliberately buried by warehouse personnel in the load. Of course, as a matter of time-honored custom, drivers are invariably blamed for this damage.
Rather than give in to our reasonable demand to be remunerated the same as other similar drivers, the company decided instead to use new boxes, which reportedly cost them thirty-two cents each compared to the ten cents it would otherwise have cost if they had been fair and reasonable toward us. Such ‘us against them’ mentality it would appear, is the habitual general mindset between company and worker in a typical strong unionized work environment.
It is true that there is a great deal wrong with American unions, organizations that are famous for graft and corruption. But it is also true that there is a great deal more wrong with greedy American business owners, historically largely, individuals totally unsympathetic to the lot of the average worker.
The callous nefarious record of pre-unionized American steel, coal and meat-packing conglomerates is enough to convince, after so much profuse vomiting, even the most biased conservative modern Republican that Adam Smith was as wrong about his conclusion of business left to ‘free’ market devices policing and ultimately purging its own, as Frederick Engels was about workers voluntarily uniting unselfishly toward the common good. There is an unwieldy double-edged sword between company management and industrial serf that is often dangerous for one’s health to swing in either direction, both sides being entirely self-centered and blinded to the reality of the other’s needs by the overt greed of their respective agendas.
My own grandfather, a shoe-cutter in pre-unionized industrial America, worked six eleven-hour days with no breaks except one-half hour for lunch, no time-and-one-half, no benefits, and no holiday or sick pay. Wages paid to him were so inadequate that he was forced to sell vacuum cleaners on the side in the evenings and on weekends in order to survive. And still, he often went to bed hungry in order to afford an orange or pear for his two children.
He was ultimately rewarded for his many years of faithful service in the industry by becoming severely buried in the overwhelming debt of hospitalization costs when his young son became very ill. A financial burden that took him a great many years to be out from under. And unlike the modern majority of us would likely do, he stubbornly worked extra hours for years and eventually paid every penny he owed.
Sadly, my grandfather’s experience was quite typical for his era rather than unique and illustrates just how despicable and callous industrial ownership can be in the absence of union pressure. And, as bad as the experience of the average worker of his generation may have been, a great many American employees only a couple of generations earlier endured much worse working conditions and poverty.
In my own lifetime, I witnessed drivers for the non-unionized Coors Beer Company earning higher wages than any of their union counterparts in California; this was only the case to prevent the Teamster’s Union from organizing their drivers. In the Coors home state of Colorado, employees performing the same exact city delivery jobs were paid little more than half of what union beer and wine drivers in California earned, even though the product was made in Colorado and thus, cost the company considerably less because it didn’t have to be trucked over mountains for hundreds of miles. Colorado at that time was a “right to work” state and thus, unions there could only achieve minimal power.
Workers who vainly imagine the companies employing them to be generous or pay even adequately of their own volition are truly fooling themselves. And, economists and politicians who hide under a false banner of theoretical voluntary corporate compliance resulting from the natural pressures of a so-called “free” market, are in the light of historical reality, plainly liars. There are of course, a few beneficent mainly smaller companies, but these are very much the exception and not the general rule of corporate avarice thumb.
Most companies who may appear even overly generous in the absence of a union would soon shift back toward the sweatshops of my grandfather’s era described above. That is, if there were no pressure from unions and employee-protection laws in America to keep wages and overall working conditions, at least somewhat bearable.
Besides CEO and shareholder greed, some of the problem with larger corporations tends to be what is referred to as “middle-management”; the more middle managers a company acquires as it grows, the more and more decisions are made for personal performance gain at the overall eventual expense of both company and employees alike. This same scenario of course, multiplies toward the unbelievably absurd in the case of large quasi-government and civil service organizations.
Having been a truck driver for ten years, I became restless to experience other trades and towns and places and thus, over the next fifteen years I traveled considerably throughout the Western half of the United States. I belonged to several construction and other unions and, due to my inability to remain content engaged in one profession for very long, eventually ended up working for well over one hundred companies involved in a great many blue-collar trades.
Through it all, my consistent experience has been that workers who are unionized are usually treated better, generally earn more, almost always work under safer conditions and for the most part, are over-all more content. People today who do not consider work safety an important priority have probably neither worked in high-rise construction, nor studied much about American labor’s recent past.
In the case of various construction trades I have been involved with, union crews experience much safer working conditions than their non-union counterparts, they earn more and projects constructed by union labor are stronger, more reliable and adhere much more closely to required state and federal regulations. Both in Lake Tahoe, Nevada and the “right-to-work” state of Colorado, I witnessed deliberate slip-shod construction to shave a few economic corners on non-union projects.
On a condominium development in the Denver suburb of Aurora, I eventually elected to walk away from what I perceived were intolerably unsafe conditions (the only time I ever quit a construction job without a better one to take it’s place). Two workers were buried alive while working alone in a ditch that was not shored six moths apart — -two completely unnecessary deaths resulting from the exact same gross violations of safety regulations on the same non-unionized construction site.
There may well be no viable economic system that will in the long run, eliminate the ongoing historical battle between the rich and the poor, the have and the have-nots, nor it’s modern American incarnation of collective bargaining power verses corporation stinginess. On the contrary, it is unfortunately necessary to point out the obvious problem, as many individuals today seem to blindly believe the Adam Smith unbridled capitalistic pipe-dream absurdity of economic markets freely regulating themselves toward the common good. As any astute student of world history soon realizes, both heaven and hell are likely to pass away long before such a naive fairy tale ever becomes a reality in the real world of economic gain, greed and avarice.
Those familiar with only mainstream sanitized American versions of the turbulent and often contradictory historical record of the United States, tend to erroneously conclude that we enjoy a comparatively (to some but not all modern nations) superior economic lifestyle because of our constitutional form of government and military prowess. Far from what modern lassie-faire puppet-economists of the ultra-rich would have us believe, the overwhelming historical truth is that some (but not nearly all) modern day working-class Americans experience a certain measure of liberty and economic comfort almost entirely because of worker strikes and other similar resistance by the poor and more often, destitute American laborers of previous generations.
Spread over more than 200 years of savage economic oppression by the wealthy elite, often violent worker reaction has carrot by hard-earned carrot, forced former unbridled capitalists to concede (to prevent outright revolution and preserve the established order that keeps the wealthy soulless, obese and self-satisfied. Such ‘workers rights’ as a minimum wage, eight-hour workday, forty-hour workweek, retirement, medical and vacation benefits, work safety regulations, equal opportunity employment and more have only been achieved by many years of union cohersion.
Everything that inexperienced well-fed youth of today now assume to be the workplace norm was secured over a great many bloody years of bitter struggle against wealthy company owners and landowners. The unbridled greed of the capitalist elite was protected by presidents, congressmen, judges and federal and state troops, while factory workers, farmers and other working-class laborers, bent on achieving an adequate enough wage to at least halfway feed, clothe and house themselves and their families, clawed their way out of the American economic slave sewer by whatever means available.
Undoubtedly the only real answer to the ongoing historical dilemma of possession verses desire is to change the hearts of individual business owners and workers alike, in the hope that both will come to treat each other with a little more dignity, care and respect. As long as people on our planet buy and sell, there is likely to be the ongoing and continual struggle between those who own and those who produce for and to a greater or lesser degree, are enslaved by the wealthy.
This is a perpetual battle continuing on within our modern theoretically ‘advanced’ civilization, leading to the discouraging and anxiety-inducing modern reality of theft, murder, war and rumor of war and on to the resultant heart failure and all manner of physical, emotional and psychological disease, terrorism, anarchy and eventual decline of once thriving nations. As a wise man once said, there truly is nothing new under the sun.
Today at the turn of the 21st Century, reminiscent of an earlier “Gilded Age” era, we are in danger of being controlled far too much by the malfeasant materialism of corporation lobby puppets of congressional graft and far too little, by the will and consent of the governed. Such a bribe-oriented political climate invariably leads to a padding of the pockets of those who already have more than enough, at the greater expense of those who for the most part, had little to begin with.
There is a certain dignity and brotherhood felt among people who work hard with their hands and a self-respect that cannot be purchased with silver and gold. I feel sorry for some of the youth of the 21st Century who consider it beneath their dignity to perform manual labor. Since the advent of the world wide web, life will likely never be the same.
Out of several hundred some well-meaning and ethical people I have worked side-by-side with in the modern world of blue-collar America, there has been no overall finer group of individuals I have had the good fortune to be associated with than my brothers and sisters of Gallo Wine Company. There are probably not many American preachers or conservative Christians who would believe this to be true, but then again, the self-righteous who pretend to be better than the rest of us, invariably support those who screw the common and poor people who Jesus claims to love. And we really do not care to hear and most assuredly, do not believe any of them, either.
Contact author: www.FreedomTracks.com
