Junior Won't Meet His Grandkids
There's a blue collar worker who goes by Junior working in the chemical plant with me. He's been working at the plant for 20 years, so everyone looks up to him. Apparently when he started working here all those years ago there was an older worker who looked a lot like him, so everyone started calling him Junior and it continues to stick with him even now that he's everyone's senior.
"Does the nickname bother you at all?" I asked him once.
"Nah," he said. "Nobody can pronounce my name anyway, so every group of people I know calls me by a different nickname. People at work call me Junior, so here I'm Junior."
Junior emigrated to the US from Cambodia with his parents when he was a child. As soon as you look past his traditional name, he's as American as a man could be. He believes in hard work, he loves big loud trucks and motorcycles, and he devours pizza and wings like a feral animal.
Junior acts like a big brother to everyone he meets. He's always happy to lend a hand or some advice, and he's always the first to call you an idiot if you're acting like one. He's been working at this plant for so long that he knows how to do every job on the factory floor better than anyone else, so he often fills in for other people when they get sick.
Junior mainly works in the isocyanate mixing area, in the business people call it "iso" for short. The mixers Junior works with aren't so different from kitchen blenders, but they're 3 stories tall and have dozens of pipes as thick as your thigh running into them. When a new batch is made, all of the pumps spring to life, creating a thunderous racket of asynchronous pumps each making their own contribution to the iso mixing tank. Junior stands at the center of that storm. His job is to carefully control the pumps to ensure the right amount of each ingredient is added to the tank and mixes properly. Not every ingredient in the formula has a dedicated pipe and pump. The ingredients that make up smaller portions of the formula are stored in big tanks off to the side, so once the pumping is done Junior fills a bucket from a side tank, weighs the contents to make sure the amount is right, then he walks up the metal stairs on the side of the mixer to pour his bucket into the top. He repeats this until all of the amounts are just right.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
The smell from Junior's bucket is strong. It's like a whole dumpster full of rotten fish got crammed into one bucket, and the liquid is so pungent that the smell opens your sinuses and irritates your throat. Once Junior has carried his bucket to the top of the mixer tank, he plants his feet to ensure his balance is stable, then he opens the tank lid. The tank is easily big enough to fall in, and the older workers tell stories about times years ago when people have. Junior pours his bucket into the tank, closes the lid, then walks down the stairs to fill his bucket with the next required ingredient.
Junior's son is in elementary school. There's a workbench in the factory where Junior tracks his schedule and any adjustments that he has needed to make to the product batches due to differences in humidity or pump issues on a given day. The edges of the workbench are covered in tiny wallet-sized photos of Junior's wife and son. Junior mostly likes to keep his personal life private, but ever since the plant moved to a mandatory 60 hour work week for all hourly employees he complains constantly about how little time he gets to spend with his family.
I asked him, "With all the extra hours, are you going to have a hard time finding someone to watch your son?"
"My wife and my mom can watch him, it'll be fine...but I want to spend time with him too. I don't want my son to grow up and ask why I wasn't around."
Junior makes $27 per hour. For a regular 40-hour work week, that's $56k per year before taxes. For a 60-hour work week, counting overtime pay, it's $98k per year. That's a pretty good wage for an hourly worker, but Junior doesn't see it that way.
"Maybe when I was younger I would have been excited for the money, but I don't need it like that anymore. Now I just want time with my son, but now if I miss a Saturday unexpectedly because I'm sick or my son is sick, then I get 2 demerit points. If I hit 12 points, then I get fired automatically. We need to give 24-hours notice before taking any sick time."
"Could you get a job somewhere else? You know this business so well."
"Maybe I could, but I don't know if it would be any better at another plant. We'll see, maybe soon I'll get pissed off enough to leave."
Junior likes me because unlike the other scientists and engineers, I don't talk down to him. Junior has been working in this plant since I was the age his son is now, so I know that no matter how good an idea sounds to me on paper, if Junior says it won't work then it won't work. I know my book smarts can only get me so far, so I rely on Junior to help me get the rest of the way.
My background is in chemical toxicity, and my specialty is redesigning chemical products to make them safer for everyone involved. I knew this job would involve a lot of dangerous chemicals, which is why I sought it out. During the interview process, my bosses told me they wanted to make their products cleaner and safer, which seemed like a perfect opportunity for me to do a lot of good all in one place. Once I arrived though, tides in the market began to shift and the company's profits began to fall. The past 3 years have all been record-breaking for the company, each stronger than the last, but they also fell short of the company's goals, so record-breaking wasn't good enough. Now cleaner and safer products are no longer a priority, higher profits are all that matter.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
Iso is a really nasty chemical. It's essentially an extremely sticky glue, which makes it great for everything from holding roofs on buildings, to upholstery on foam cushions. Once it has finished its chemical reaction, it is nontoxic (aside from it being a non-biodegradable synthetic plastic), but until it reacts it sticks to anything and everything it touches.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
The toxicity of iso starts in the lungs. Any little bit of iso that a person inhales will stick bits of their lungs together from the inside. This gradually reduces lung capacity and massively increases the risk of serious lung diseases like lung cancer, COPD, and emphysema. A large enough dose of iso all at once can cause a person to stop breathing, but most of the time people are careful enough to avoid that.
There are required safety procedures for handling iso. Workers need to be in a properly ventilated space, and if the concentration of iso is high enough in the air then special respirator gas masks are required. The trouble with iso though is that it gradually builds up in the lungs over years and gas masks aren't 100% effective. Chemical safety organizations all over the world have known since the 1990s that even the tiny amount of iso that makes it past a gas mask can build up over a decades-long career and make serious lung diseases practically a guarantee for the workers who handle iso day in and day out. Despite this, iso hasn't been banned for use because there is no "feasible alternative material" available to replace it with, so until an alternative is invented and mass produced, workers will continue to be exposed to iso. There are nontoxic glue options that work well, but nothing works as well as iso.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
Junior is a strong man in his 40s, and the physical nature of his job has made him as wide and strong as a tree trunk. I'm sure he could beat me in a fight easily even though I'm more than 10 years younger than him. But I don't want to fight him.
When I started this job, my first project was to replace iso with safer chemical alternatives, but I never got the chance to finish that project. I managed to show my talent for chemical product design in the early days of that project, so when the company changed direction away from safety and towards profit, the bosses decided that since I was good at replacing iso I must understand iso pretty well. Now it's my job to design several new iso-based products to increase our sales of those materials.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
I've tried to console myself by using as little iso as possible in the products I'm designing. I've managed to reduce the amount of iso in my formulas by 20% compared to the company's other products and I've convinced the bosses that I made this decision to maximize product performance and profit, since any time I mention safety I get reprimanded. The new formulas are complicated, but I know that when the time comes for mass production, Junior will have no problem making them perfectly.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
There is a chemical safety law called "Right to Know and Understand." It requires any chemical facility to have safety information about every chemical onsite available for every employee to read, and if the employees have any questions, a qualified person needs to be available to answer their questions. To fulfill this obligation there are big yellow binders next to every door in this facility, with each page detailing the hazards of a different chemical used in the building. They're all covered in dust. English literacy isn't very high in this factory, as in most factories, and even if it was higher, the documents are written in jargon-filled chemical language that the average English reader couldn't understand anyway. No one wants to read all that, and no one wants to stick their neck out by exercising their right to have someone explain the dangers to them.
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
I asked Junior one day, "Aren't you concerned about what could happen to your health from working here? A lot of these chemicals are really nasty and dangerous."
"I can't worry about what's gonna happen to me when I'm 60." Junior paused to cough a few times. "I have to take care of myself and my family today. Besides I take good care of myself, I'll be fine."
"Have you read anything in the yellow safety binders about the chemicals you're working with?"
"What? No. I can't read them on my shift, and you think after working a 10 hour shift I'm gonna go waste my time doing that?"
Junior won't meet his grandkids.
The company bosses don't seem to think that matters. Chemical regulators think it's a problem, but not a big enough problem to make banning the chemicals responsible worthwhile. The blue collar workers in the factory are too concerned about paying their bills tomorrow to think it matters. Some days Junior seems to think he's so invincible that it doesn't matter. But I think it matters.
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