The Shop Steward Laughed at His Paper Badge — Then the Trustee's Letter in His Lunchbox Named the Local
"My badge now, paper man." Bo Kettering says it loud enough for the whole break room, then drops the paper badge into his coffee cup so everyone can watch it soak.
Hollis Guidry has thirty years on this dock, a right shoulder that won't roll back, and one option left: the refrigerated doors or his pension early. Terrell Nix has been a casual hand for two weeks. He also has a metal lunchbox at his elbow that nobody at that table has bothered to look at.
Bo owns the dispatch board, and he wants everyone to know it.
Behind the table the vending machine hums. Bo leans over Hollis and taps the refrigerated door sheet with the pen from behind his ear, twice, like he's ringing up a sale. "Cold doors won't hurt you, loader emeritus." Hollis has heard worse. He wipes his hands on the rag in his back pocket and says nothing at all.
The new man looks up from his coffee for the first time all shift. He says one calm sentence in defense of the old hand, and Bo takes him off the board for it. Terrell goes back to his coffee, and the room decides the argument is over.
It isn't. There's a metal lunchbox on the table, and the corner of a sealed envelope has worked its way out past the flap — thick paper, raised seal, and a return address that doesn't match anything this local mails out.
Then Bo gets loud about the thing he brags about most. "I speak for this local in every meeting. Nobody checks me." And the gate scheme comes out of his mouth in plain numbers, on the record, while the phone lying face-up in that lunchbox keeps its little red dot going.
The last thing Bo does is the thing that ends him: he calls the hall president down to settle both of them. Dana Pruitt wouldn't walk this floor over a casual card, and everybody in the room knows it.
She comes through the break-room door already holding the letter.
Bo's own voice is still talking off the lunchbox — fifty a man, dispatch is mine — when the time clock buzzes, and he backs into the locker row with his coffee cup still in his fist. The wet paper badge is still floating in it.
Nobody rules on anything in that break room.
What the trustee's ruling does to every dollar Bo sold, and the morning Hollis finally got his shoulder off the cold doors, is written out in the first comment.
So tell me what you think he deserves, then click the link.
Advertisement