Grace and Grit (18 page)

“Tell me about it. It’s like herding cats at times. I had this one nest of people, and I had to time them when they went to the restroom and when they went to eat. Sometimes I’d follow them with my stopwatch to make sure they didn’t disappear forever.

“The guys were the least of my problems. My paycheck never changed. And the worst part was the guys on the floor probably made more than I did, and I was their supervisor.”

“So what did you do?”

“After a couple of months, I asked about it and was told, ‘We’re working on it.’ So I kept thinking my next paycheck would be right. About a month later, when it wasn’t, I asked again when my salary increase was going to take effect. I was told the same thing. A couple of weeks later, I went back. You wouldn’t believe what I was told then. I was informed, ‘You’re crazy as hell. We can’t give you that kind of money.’ ”

I’d heard some bizarre things come out of people’s mouths, and I knew how Sharon must have felt when she heard those words. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘That’s right.’ I
was
crazy as hell. Crazy as hell to keep doing what I was doing for the same pay. That’s when I came back to this office.”

“That was the best thing you could have done under the circumstances. You couldn’t have kept working in the tire room the way things were.”

“I know. I was offered a twenty percent raise, but that still meant I was nowhere near the base pay for a manager. And just last month they said, with the ticket being down, I’m on the list to be laid off.”

There wasn’t anything comforting to say about that.

Sharon opened her desk drawer and pulled out a pack of gum. “I really need a cigarette.” She unwrapped a piece of gum and put it into her mouth. “If I’m laid off, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I could see the toll working at Goodyear had taken on her. Sharon was naturally tall and thin, but it looked like she’d lost a lot of weight recently; her khaki pants hung loose around her hips when she stood up.

The door opened and one of the morning supervisors walked in, eating a doughnut. “Morning, girls. What you got for me today?” Flecks of white icing fell on Sharon’s desk as he peered over her shoulder at the list of shift workers.

Sharon rolled her eyes at me and handed him his report offs, a list of absent workers.

“Rick’s laid out again?” he said with his mouth full while he scanned the sheet.

“Yeah. I don’t know how long he’s going to be out, but I got Dave to come in for him. And we have a floater to cover any gaps.”

“Appreciate it. You girls be good now and don’t get into any trouble today.” He winked, closing the door and joining the other supervisors still huddled in conversation.

I
N SUCH
a short period, I didn’t have a chance to get to know Sharon very well, but I sympathized with her. Just the nature of the manufacturing work is hard enough on both men and women, and most people retired with a slew of ailments—back problems, pulmonary issues, heart disease. As one of my young tire builders told me before he quit, “This place is a death trap, and I don’t plan to die here.” Which was worse, a fatal mistake with the curing press or a slow disease from the toxic chemicals? I don’t know. I do know what he couldn’t understand, being so young: Goodyear gave families the ability to make more money than anywhere else. For most people that meant being able to send their children to college, breaking the cycle of disadvantage for the family, and that was worth the risks.

For others, like Sharon, the toll was becoming too great.

O
N
J
ANUARY
1, 1997, back in my regular department, I worked the start-up shift, from 5:00
P.M
. to 7:00
A.M
. I was glad when my shift was over. It’s always a scary proposition to coax a cold machine up and running, especially when the guys are just as reluctant to start producing after a long holiday of lazing around. I wasn’t in great shape myself. I still had a hitch in my giddy-up, as they say, from the recent surgery. I’d come in early to make sure the department was in order, and I could feel my lower back protesting that it wasn’t used to my standing on the concrete floor for so long.

After our morning managers’ meeting, Eddie asked me to step into his office. “I need to see you,” he said.

When I saw the HR manager already seated, I thought,
Oh, my word, this will be some evaluation
. Eddie had sent me a self-evaluation form in the mail while I was at home after my colon surgery. Charles had driven me to the plant to return it, and I hadn’t heard another word about it. I’d seen the other managers being evaluated while I was working in the office and figured Eddie was waiting until the first of the year for mine. Different
managers evaluated us at different times of the year, and these evaluations were sporadic at best. I’d probably had no more than ten in almost twenty years. The few raises I’d gotten were communicated to me on torn slips of paper with the percentage written on them. I hadn’t been evaluated or given a raise since my performance award, an 8 percent raise, in December 1995.

The HR manager got right to the point. I was being terminated.

“We’re experiencing severe cutbacks, and plans are in the works at corporate to phase out the entire Gadsden operation,” he explained in the solemn voice of a well-rehearsed funeral director.

Before I could digest his words, Eddie chimed in, “Your performance has been poor this year. One of the lowest of everybody’s.”

My shock was replaced by a sense of guarded alarm. “How can you say that when I’ve never been evaluated?”

“We have your other evaluation that another manager did,” Eddie replied.

“You mean the year I was given an award? That was my best year.”

“No, I’m talking about Jeff’s audits.”

Great. The audits Jeff had lied about when he evaluated me. “You know my record’s not that bad. You’ve seen my guys wear their gear, and you know my machines are always running.”

“I don’t know. I only know what I see written on these audits.”

I could feel my adrenaline rising, and I wanted to argue and fight back. I had been out of the loop for a while now, being excluded from managers’ meetings and not receiving some important memos. I clenched my toes inside my hard boots and repeated, “My record’s not that bad and never has been.” I tried to tell Eddie that not only were the audits wrong but that Jeff had started his nonsense again, and wanted me to go get a drink with him after work. Though I couldn’t help but wonder if something was pathologically wrong with Jeff, I didn’t dwell on his inappropriate remarks, knowing how precarious my position was at the moment.

“I trust Jeff is doing his job the way he’s supposed to. As far as your job, we would have told you in November when we notified everyone else, but you were on sick leave,” Eddie said, ready, it seemed, with an immediate response to any objection I might pose.

“Why not tell me in December when I was back for a week?”

“I didn’t want to ruin your holidays.”

I started to ask another question, but Eddie waved his hand across his throat in a gesture to cut me off, so I stopped.

“We’ll talk in a minute,” he said.

When the HR manager left, Eddie said, “Don’t worry, Lilly, I don’t have anyone to replace you. You’re not going anywhere.”

That’s just the way it was. You were told one thing, and another happened.

Eddie sent me to meet with the “outplacement counselor” right after that meeting anyway. During our conversation I was exhausted, and not much the counselor said sank in. I was hoping I could take Eddie’s word that I wasn’t being let go, so I wasn’t very open to dusting off my résumé and meeting her again at her office in Anniston to start another job search. Exasperated by my lack of interest in her help, she blurted out, “Why in heaven’s name do you want to work for a company that treats you like this?”

It seemed pretty clear to me. Regardless of what the audits said, I
was
good at my job; I enjoyed it. Times were challenging, and it wouldn’t be easy to find another well-paying job. Did she really think that at this juncture in my life there was something else out there besides being a greeter at Wal-Mart that would be an option? In the end, no matter where you go, you’re shoveling the same scattlepoop from the barn, so after all the good and the bad I’d experienced, I certainly wasn’t going to give up now. That would have been insane. I wasn’t a quitter.

“You be here on the first and fifteenth of each month, and you’ll see why I stay. I need to keep building my retirement.” I was sixty years old. Goodyear was my career.

The following months I was on a constant roller-coaster ride, wondering if Goodyear would deliver on its plan to lay me off, but I stayed where I was. Another supervisor had a heart attack, and I split his shift, in addition to my own shift, with another manager. No more mention was made to me of my being terminated, and when I brought it up, I was told the same thing: There wasn’t anybody to replace me, and there was no more mention of the plant closing. I worked more overtime that year, 1997, than in all my years there.

That meant, of course, that I didn’t have time to enjoy Charles’s retirement. He’d dreaded retiring, and when Fort McClellan offered to extend his position for two years as they prepared to close the base, he jumped at it. When he did retire, he threw himself into helping Phillip, who’d experienced his own ups and downs in the real estate industry, with some good years and some bad enough that I’d save the ketchup and mustard packets from fast-food restaurants for him. Now he was managing several apartment buildings, houses, and a historic bed-and-breakfast in Anniston.

Charles and Phillip hadn’t been very close over the years, and Charles looked at the opportunity to help Phillip manage his properties and run a small company he bought that manufactured taxicab lights as a way to build a better relationship. But as financial pressures bore down on Phillip, he became difficult to work with, his mood swings growing more unpredictable. Charles stuck it out, though, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t thrilled when he had to go knocking on apartment doors to collect rent or evict someone. That’s not what I’d envisioned for his retirement, but I was still so consumed with hanging on at Goodyear, despite the doctor’s concerns, that I wasn’t focused on Charles.

B
Y THE
time the temperature had soared into a typical pattern of high nineties with little rain in sight that summer, my patience had begun to wear thin. Sometimes it was the small things that
got under my skin most. In the tire room, everyone on my crew had been awarded a silver NASCAR racing jacket emblazoned with Goodyear’s winged-foot logo for keeping the waste in the department to a minimum. Goodyear provided special tires for many of the race cars—the plant in Akron had its own speedway for testing them. With NASCAR so close by and all the guys such big racecar fans, the jackets were a big deal. Turns out the jacket ordered for me happened to be an extra-large. It might as well have been an overcoat. The guys couldn’t quit laughing when I tried it on. I wore it once or twice and didn’t say a word, but the slights added up, each as surprising as the unexpected shock from a paper cut. I gave the jacket to Charles. It was even too big for him.

I wouldn’t say anything about something like the lovely jacket, but I did ask Eddie about his e-mails addressed to “Boys.”

“Don’t you realize you have something besides a boy on your team?”

“Lilly, we have work to do, and discussing this is a waste of my time, your time, and the company’s time.”

“Well, that’s not how I see it. Did you ever think it’s unfair that you’re singling me out like this because I’m the only woman?”

The next time he sent a memo, he wrote, “Boys and lady.”

Only a few days after that he cornered me alone in a small conference room and said, “Lilly, your production numbers are down again. You’re not getting the job done.”

I didn’t see a shred of paperwork or one printout with figures to prove what he was saying. “Show me the production numbers and give me two weeks; I’ll correct the problem,” I said. He held a folder and a clipboard in his hand but didn’t look at either.

“The problem is, two other area mangers are telling me they’re pulling your weight.”

“That’s simply not true. Show me the production report and give me time to fix it, and you know I will.”

“I can’t do that.”

I was tempted to grab his folder and see what he had in there. “Well, I can’t fix a problem if I don’t know what the problem is.”

He sat down, his voice lowering as he placed the folder on the table. “You’re just like me. You just keep coming back for more. You can’t help it, can you?”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I just had a similar meeting with the plant manager. He was telling me the same thing. That I wasn’t performing. And there I was acting like you. Couldn’t let it go like some young fool.”

Eddie had criticized me recently on the floor for omitting something that in fact I hadn’t omitted. The next morning he caught me heading out the gate to the parking lot and whispered, “I have to fuss at you when I jump on the other managers, or else I’ll have hell to pay.” It was the closest thing to an apology I’d heard yet.

“I kept badgering Henry that I wanted to see the numbers. I think at one point he thought I was going to come across the desk at him. I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

I knew that in his own way Eddie was between a rock and a hard place. No one was immune to the plant’s politics. Someone wanted me out. Telling me my production was down was his way of pleasing upper management and holding on to his own job. “Did he show them to you?”

He winced. “He didn’t have to. The numbers don’t make a bit of difference.”

“How can you stand being lied to?”

“What are you going to do about it? We might be cut from the same cloth, but I know when to shut up. Mouthing back won’t get you anywhere. You’ve never learned when to back down.”

“Why are you doing this? You know it’s not fair.”

“You’re always ready for a fight. You can’t let anything go, can you?”