Oh, yes. The first real feeling that I had of bargaining, and the
responsibility of bargaining, was that the company had gotten into
trouble and had to borrow money from the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, RFC. And in order to loan the money, they had to agree, as
the way I understood it, that they would stay free of labor trouble.
This was the advantage of having a friendly government. And so to assure
that, they sent in a man who sort of headed up the operation to see that
things stayed level and on keel and he negotiated with us our first
raise. I think that we got negotiated a 2¼¢ an hour raise. And I felt
that we were doing something. You know, here we were talking to the man
about money and we had the union representative with us, and the man
said, "Alright, I'll give you this much." And we said, "Well, we need
some more money for some inequities." We didn't know what the word
"inequities" was then, but for adjustments. And he said, "Well, I'll
give you an extra 1¢ an hour. You put it where you want." And I'll never
forget how shocked we were. Here we were, going to be putting some money
somewhere for somebody to get it, you know. And the awful
responsibility, "Who are we going to give it to?" [laughter] So, that was the first feeling of collective bargaining. And I
mean, I really felt the fruits of it and over that little 2¼¢ and that
1¢. And from then on, we always did that.
What time is it?