I was working the midnight shift at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore, Maryland. It was just after 11:00 p.m. and I was waiting with my coworkers outside the brick department office for my assignment for the night. The brick department was responsible for lining the walls of various furnaces with high temperature refractory brick to protect the furnaces from hot or molten steel. I was assigned to the #1 basic oxygen furnace, more commonly known as the #1 BOF, along with six other men.
When we got to the BOF, we could see that the work there had been almost finished by the crew working the 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. shift. We spent about three hours lining the tube at the top of the furnace with brick and were then told to take our lunch break and to head over to the hot strip mill. Our group took a walk to the canteen at the front gate and hung out for a while chatting over our food. We had just gotten up and had started to walk over to the hot strip mill when a foreman intercepted us and sent everyone except me to the coke ovens. My assignment had remained unchanged, so I headed for the hot strip mill.
When I arrived there, the crew was leaving for their lunch break. The foreman asked me if I had already taken lunch. I told him that I had, so he asked me to take a shift on the pad. I explained that I hadn’t worked that job before, so he sent another fellow up to the pad with me and he quickly showed me the job.
It seemed like a simple and not so strenuous assignment. An overhead crane was landing pallets of bricks on a wooden scaffolding (that they called the pad). The crane operator did not have a clear line of sight to lower the pallet so my job was to stand where the crane operator could see me and give hand signals to guide the pallet down on the pad. I then needed to take bricks off the pallet two at a time and place them on an adjacent roller conveyor. It was a gravy job, i.e., very easy. There was no heavy lifting involved and everything was within reach.
The crane came by, and I landed my first pallet of bricks and began putting them on the roller conveyor. After about 15 minutes, the bricklayers signaled to me that the conveyor was full, and I didn’t need to send them any more bricks. I made myself comfortable on a stack of empty wood pallets and pulled out a newspaper to read until I was needed again.
A few minutes later, I heard someone yelling from a distance and spotted a man with a white hard hat (all foreman wear white hard hats) jogging towards me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first but as he got closer, I could see he was clearly upset, and he was clearly upset with me. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I had done.
You need to understand that everyone on the crew was wearing the same green fire protectant suit and the same hard hat. From a distance it was hard to tell one person from another. It quickly became apparent that he had given some order to the fellow working on the pad before me and he thought he had given the order to me. He was a big man, tall and wide. He got right up in my face and towered over me. It turned out he was upset about where the pallets were being landed. They were blocking part of a path that carpenters needed to move lumber through. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t me that he had given the instructions to, but he wouldn’t hear it and kept yelling at me. I wasn’t so much concerned about my safety. He just seemed like a bully, and I quickly got sick of his rantings and turned around and walked away from him and down off the pad to where a group of workers were having their lunch. He continued his diatribe when he caught up with me and I could tell from the wide eyes of my coworkers that this foreman (who I later learned was named Sabrosky) had clearly stepped over the line.
After another minute or so of Sabrosky’s tantrum, a general foreman (one rank up from Sabrosky) came over to see what all the fuss was about. The general foreman had been the one who wrote up my orders to come to the hot strip mill, so he knew that I had just arrived. He also knew that Sabrosky had been at the office the entire time since I had arrived and could not have possibly given me instructions previously about how to land the pallets. I didn’t expect the general foreman to criticize a foreman in public view, but I was relieved when he sent Sabrosky off to manage another job in another part of the mill.
Word travels quickly in a mill, even one with 24,000 workers, and about two hours later, my United Steelworkers shop steward called me aside in the hot strip mill. Sabrosky was a hothead, he explained, and he had gotten away with his bullying tactics for years as people were reluctant to challenge him. The shop steward asked me if I wanted to file a grievance against Sabrosky. He explained that a few people had already done so, and the more grievances filed, the sooner we would be able to get rid of the guy. I told him that I had to think about it. In truth, there were several people I wanted to consult about the grievance. I wasn’t sure it was the best move since it was unlikely I would see the guy again on the job and it might make me a target for harassment by management.
Everyone I spoke to encouraged me to go ahead with the grievance, so I told my shop steward that it was OK to proceed. About a week later, he told me that they were going to hear the grievance on Friday on day shift and that I didn’t have to attend but I could if I wanted to do so. I chose to just let the union represent me at the grievance hearing and on Monday night, the shop steward told me that the company had agreed to settle the grievance. What exactly does that mean, I asked the steward and he said they were offering me a payment of $150. I thought that was a rather odd arrangement and the steward explained that most grievances were related to pay disputes and the company was used to settling agreements with cash payments. I asked if there were any other options and he said, what did you have in mind?
Well, I wanted Sabrosky to apologize to me in front of the entire midnight shift in the brick department. The steward told me he wasn’t sure if they would agree to it, but he would take it back to the grievance committee. I learned that Sabrosky wouldn’t go for the public apology at first, but the general foreman pressured him to do it and Sabrosky relented.
Three days later while my shift was standing outside the office waiting for our timecards to be distributed, out walked Sabrosky from the office. He made a beeline for me, stopped, put out his hand, and said he was sorry for what he had said to me in the hot strip mill. I shook his hand and he walked back into the office. Right after that, they put out the timecards, so everyone took them and took off towards the front gate, but the next night in the locker room before work, there was a buzz about the Sabrosky apology. Almost every member of the department working that night stopped by my locker to congratulate me and to thank me for standing up to the bully. And that was worth way more than a check for $150.00.
