C. Richard (Dick) Bennett discusses his career as a production worker, UAW committeeman and Local 602 Bargaining Chair at the Fisher Body plant in Lansing, MI


Cheryl McQuaid:	This is the Lansing Fisher Body Historical T-, Team.  Today is March 14, 2006.  It’s approximately 10:20 a.m.  We’re at the UAW Local 602 Frank Dryer Greenhouse.  [coughing] First, we’ll introduce the team.

Marilyn Coulter:	Marilyn Coulter.

John Fedewa:	John Fedewa.

Doug Rademacher:	Doug Rademacher.

Gary Judy:	Gary Judy.

Earl Nicholson:	Earl Nicholson.

Jerri Smith:	Jerri Smith.

Cheryl McQuaid:	And I am Cheryl McQuaid.  Today we’re interviewing Richard Bennett.  [0:31] Dick, will you please state your name and spell it for us?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I went by C. Richard Bennett when I was [chuckle] working in the plant.  C stands for Charles, C-h-a-r-l-e-s, Richard, R-i-c-h-a-r-d, Bennett, B-e-n-n-e-t-t.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[0:51] And what is your address?

Richard Bennett:	Currently living at 11954 South Star Lake Drive, Baldwin, Michigan 49304.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[1:04] And are you married?

Richard Bennett:	Yes, I am.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[1:07] How many children do you have?

Richard Bennett:	I have six, uh, children of my own and four stepchildren.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[1:15] Where were you born and raised, Dick?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I was born in Hastings, Michigan, and I was raised in many places.  [chuckle] My dad was a metallurgist in the missile industry and because of the type of work he did, we, we did a lot of moving.  I went to 14 schools in 13 years, but most of it was in Michigan, uh, but I did live in North Carolina for three years and those were probably my most formative years were those three years I lived in North Carolina.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[1:47] What is your educational level?

Richard Bennett:	I graduated from high school in Hastings.  I wound up back in Hastings and graduated from there.  [chuckle]

Cheryl McQuaid:	[1:59] And were you in the military at all?

Richard Bennett:	No.  I had gotten in a bad automobile accident and I wasn’t able to go in the service.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[2:08] Could you tell us a little bit about your work history before hiring in to Fisher Body?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I started working on farms for all the farmers around the area when I was about 13 years old and I stayed busy pretty much every day of the summer all my, all the time I was off from school.

And I, when I was 15 years old I hired in to a place in Battle Creek called Springhill Nursing Home.  It was a brand new facility at that time.  I hired in there as a dishwasher in the kitchen.  I worked there a few months and they asked me if I’d be interested in going off and starting working on the floor as an orderly, so they trained me as an orderly and I started working there.  And from there, they asked me if I’d be interested in, in working in phys-, physical therapy, so I did that [throat clearing] for a while up until the time I quit there and that was, I had been there about 16 months when I quit, grand total.

And when I quit there, I went to work for a burial vault company in Battle Creek called Wilbert Burial Vault, so I went from trying to save lives to burying people.  [laughter] And, uh, I worked at Wilbert for just a very short time and I had an opportunity to start working in construction, which was considerably more money, so I went to work for Fastdecks Construction Company out of Walled Lake, Michigan, and we built ramp parking lots at that time.  And I worked there up until I got laid off for the winter and at that time I had to, I was graduated from high school but I had to lie about my age ‘cause I was only 17 and you had to be 18 to work construction, so oddly enough I had to keep dodging the, the union guy that kept coming around checking on things, making sure they didn’t have no illegal workers.  [chuckle] But anyway, I survived on that job up until they laid me off for the, for the winter months.

And after that, [throat clearing] I started working for a fellow by the name of Chuck Doxtater.  He had his own business laying carpet and so I worked with him and we worked together for quite a long time.  We had 23 different carpet suppliers we had supplying us with the carpet and suddenly Teamsters went on strike and we couldn’t get any carpet for three weeks.  And I had a wife and a child to support at that time and I couldn’t go three weeks without working ‘cause I needed the money, so after three weeks I started looking for a job but in the meantime a friend of mine was working at Fisher Body in Lansing and he brought me home an application.

Well, I had gone ahead and filled that out and sent it back with him.  And Fisher Body had sent me what they call a Mailgram and, um, I ignored it because in the meantime I had already been hired in and out of Grand Trunk Railroad in Battle Creek and I had also been hired in and out of [chuckle] Eaton Manufacturing in Battle Creek, and Clark Equipment in Battle Creek.  All three good jobs but when they x-rayed me they’d see where my, my pelvis was all smashed to pieces when I was in that accident, so they wouldn’t take a chance on me and hire me so I just figured there was no sense in going to Fisher Body because they’re going to do the same thing so I just ignored it.

Well, by the time the Teamsters were on strike and I had been out of work for three weeks, Fisher Body had sent me three Mailgrams, one a month for three months.  Well, Chuck Doxtater who I was working with, had worked for Chevrolet over in Flint years before that, so he said “Well, let’s go up there to, to Lansing.”  He said “I’ll take you.”  I said “I don’t even know where Lansing is at.  I have no idea where that’s at.”  [throat clearing] He said “Well, I’ll take you up there.”  And he said “Maybe they’ll let me put in my application while we’re up there.”  I said “All right.”  So we came to Lansing.  They gave me a physical.  They didn’t x-ray me.  And they took his application.  And when I got done going down to the plant hospital and getting my physical, I went back to the employment line there and they were interviewing a number of people and I talked to, I can’t think of Jeff’s last name.  He would up be in suggestions later on.

Cheryl McQuaid:	Andros.

Male:	Andros.

Richard Bennett:	Jeff Andros, yes.  I talked to Jeff Andros and he hired me and asked me if I wanted to go to work on nights that night or days the next day.  I said “I need a job right now.  I’ll go to work on nights tonight.”  He said “Okay.  Come in tomorrow morning.”  [laughter] That was my first taste of how things go at Fisher Body.  [laughter] So I, I started there April 30, 1968, and worked production line.  It was interesting because the first thing they put me on was cleaning up cars at the end of the line, just wiping them down with oleum, taking – kind of spot cleaning them and getting them ready to ship over to Oldsmobile to have the body and the chassis put together, so, uh, I worked about a week with a bunch of older folks.  They had kind of what they called the old folks’ home there.  That’s what those people did.  And we had two lines running parallel to each other at the time.  So they liked the way I worked with them so they, when they was, when management was going to put me over on the regular production line and put me on a regular production job they tried to fight that.  They tried to keep me there at the old folks’ home but that didn’t work out too good.

With a new hire they’re going to put you to work, so I went over and I was up in Building 3X Second and just kept going from job to job until they finally, finally get me a job.  And once I landed on a regular job, I decided I didn’t like doing the same thing over and over every day so then I went to Utility voluntarily.  A lot of people didn’t like Utility but I liked it ‘cause I got to do something different every day.  I got to meet a lot of people that way and got to learn a lot of jobs.

Cheryl McQuaid:	[9:19] Dick, why did a lot of people not like Utility?

Richard Bennett:	Well, because you had to do something different every day.  Some people are not really adaptable to doing that.  Some people just want to learn a job.  Those jobs are very difficult.  People don’t realize or didn’t realize at that time, and still don’t I think, just how difficult it is working in an auto assembly plant, you know.  You hear about that and you, you hear some of these, well, like there was an old country song talking about being the #1 washer crammer in the whole shock absorber division, you know.  It sounds so simple, stuff like that.  It wasn’t simple.  You had to do a whole lot of hard work.  Anybody that worked there knew that.  And you had to be able to adapt if you had to do a different job every day, you’re using different muscles every day, you’re having to do all different kinds of things, learn different kind of things, deal with somebody new not only in management but production, on the production line, so it was, uh, it was difficult for a lot of people but I liked doing that kind of stuff.  Other people like just learning one thing and sticking to it.  [throat clearing]

Cheryl McQuaid:	And you mentioned that you worked in 3X Second.  [10:30] Could you tell us a little bit what is 3X Second?

Richard Bennett:	Well, at that time, I guess 3X Second was the, the newest building that had been built on at Fisher Body and I guess it was about 16 years old at that time.  Um, but 3X Second was where they did the soft trim, the, the – of course, the job started down in the basement in the body shop at that time and then they went on up, uh, into the paint shop and then they went from the paint shop on up into what we call Trim Hardware and then finally they went up into 3X Second where you did all the soft trim, the interior trim, things like that, the final trim before it was sent over to Oldsmobile to be married to the chassis.

Cheryl McQuaid:	Doug Rademacher.

Doug Rademacher:	[11:21] Dick, you said you came up here with a partner.  Did he happen to get hired in?

Richard Bennett:	No, he didn’t.  He was 50-something years old at that time and Vietnam War was going pretty good still and they had a need for people but they really weren’t I guess looking for older people.  When there was younger people available that’s what they wanted.

Doug Rademacher:	The other thing I was going to ask you is you mentioned that you walked into the plant and they gave you cleanup.  You said you worked with oleum.  [11:53] What exactly was oleum?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I don’t know what the chemical makeup of it was [throat clearing] but it was I guess some kind of a solvent or something that would, they would wipe the bodies down on the car but I know it’d really eat at your hands if you didn’t wear rubber gloves.  You didn’t want to do, do too much work with it barehanded.

Doug Rademacher:	[12:16] And were the gloves you mentioned, were they supplied or did you have to request them or was it, was there a concern for people at that time?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] we had an elderly lady at that time, her name was Sally, that worked in that area and part of her responsibility, she was kind of overseeing, she had to work on the line with us but she kind of overseen that whole thing as well.  We didn’t really have a foreman that did a lot around there for us so it kind of fell, fell on her and every day when we got to work she would go ahead and get the gloves that we needed for the day and all that kind of stuff and then she would make sure you had all those whatever it is you needed, the oleum, the gloves, anything that was necessary for the job.

Doug Rademacher:	Now you said you didn’t know where Lansing was and you found out through your partner, he brought you up here.  [13:08] Um, you told the guy you wanted to work nights, I’m assuming that you were ready to work, but what shift did you end up on and how far did you drive and how did you get here, did you carpool, things like that?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] I drove at that time.  It was about 48 miles one way.  And, uh, it was kind of interesting because I didn’t know where Lansing was and I was trying to remember how we got there ‘cause Chuck didn’t get hired in, so the next morning I took off real early to make sure I was going to be here in plenty of time and it was a good thing because I come in on 27 between Charlotte and Lansing and I knew I had to go left on Waverly Road so I got to the light, I went left.  The thing I had forgotten is we turned right on Saginaw Highway.  I didn’t realize that and I went clear to the end of Waverly Road and wound up there by the airport, so now I’m starting to panic.  I don’t know where I’m at or how I’m going to get back to where the plant is.  I don’t know how to get there.  And here’s my first day, I don’t want to be late ‘cause I’m thinking they’re going to fire me for sure.

So I turned around and I just kept driving slowly until I got back to Saginaw.  Of course, that was a wide, wide road so I decided, well, that, that might have been where we turned, so I turned left and went on down there and by golly, there was Fisher Body up there on the right.  But then I didn’t know where to go to park, so I parked out in front of the plant and fortunately, I don’t know why but they, I didn’t get a ticket that day but I was parked out in front of the plant.  So I didn’t know how to get in the plant other than the front, front entrance ‘cause that’s where I had to go to get interviewed and hired.  Well, after I got in the plant and started working that first day, I said “How do I, how do I get to my car [throat clearing] when the shift is over?”  And they said “Just follow the crowd, follow the crowd, they’re going right out to that parking lot.”  Well, up in 3X Second everybody parked out here in the, the South Lot.  I was parked out front, so I followed the crowd and wound up in a big old strange parking lot, then I didn’t have any idea where the world I was at.  [chuckle]

That plant was huge to me.  I mean later on it became a lot larger because they kept adding on but at that time it was like a whole city within itself.  And take a little country boy like me, I was just lost.  [chuckle]

Doug Rademacher:	Well, that was my next question is that you had a vast amount of work experience outside before you came in.  [15:47] Can you just share that feeling of when they walked you out to the assembly line, what did that look like and, and can you describe that?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I’ll tell you, years later I went to New York City and it was kind of the same feeling.  [chuckle] When, when I walked out there that, in that plant and seen how big and this was only 3X Second I was looking at.  But they, when they walked me up through Hardware to get to 3X Second, I thought wow, this is enormous.  I hadn’t even seen the body shop or the [coughing] paint shop or the cushion room at that time because at that time we still had the cushion room, so I didn’t even see half of the plant but I thought it was just like a whole new other world, it was huge.

Doug Rademacher:	[16:34] Were you a little bit afraid of working on automobiles or what was your feeling?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I was real, real nervous, you know.  I had never done that kind of work before.  I had never worked in a factory.  In fact, years before that I said I’ll never work in a factory.  I loved being outdoors.  I loved working outdoors.  I loved working hard and so I couldn’t see myself ever being in a factory.  So yeah, I was, I was real nervous and especially ‘cause I don’t know anybody, I don’t know the town, I don’t know the plant and it was just completely new.  Everything was completely new to me.

Doug Rademacher:	[17:10] Now with that in mind, did you make that 48-mile trip one way every day by yourself or did you say 58 or 48?

Richard Bennett:	Forty-eight.

Doug Rademacher:	Okay.

Richard Bennett:	Mm-hm.  I did it for about two years by myself and there was a supervisor at that time that I became friends with.  His name was George Ruffner and George lived over by Hastings so George and I started carpooling.  And he usually worked, I always wound up working the long line, whichever line worked the longest.  Back in those days we didn’t have any restrictions on overtime but there was a State law that wouldn’t let women work I believe it was over 54 or 56 hours a week, so come Saturday we had already gotten the hours and women couldn’t come in and work Saturdays normally because they had already gotten their 54 or 56 hours in.  So they would shut one production line down [throat clearing] on Saturday and shift everybody over to the other one ‘cause normally we were, at that time, we were working like between 11 and 11.4 hours a day on the production line and that was six days a week.

Sometimes on Saturdays we’d get out in eight hours but [coughing] I’ll never forget the first day I worked eight hours it was like I only worked a half a shift.  I, I couldn’t believe it.  In fact, I blew my truck up going home that day.  I left the shop and it was so early in the afternoon, I wasn’t used to that and I thought I’m just, it was a beautiful sunny day and I thought I’m just going to take my time and drive slow.  I had an old beater Dodge truck at that time [throat clearing].  It looked like a semi.  It was a cab over the engine job.  I probably didn’t go over 45 miles an hour all the way home, I just took my time.  And I got in to Hastings and all of a sudden the water shot up the stack and I busted the, or I had cracked the block and blew the truck up.  But that’s, I put some long hours in back in those days.

Marilyn Coulter:	Marilyn Coulter.  [19:16] Dick, um, outside of the size of it, was there anything else about the plant that might have shocked you or surprised you when you came in there?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] back at that time I can tell you, there was, [coughing] there were women that worked there but very few younger women.  There was quite a few ladies that were elderly or I figured elderly at that time.  Of course, if you was 55, 60 years old at that time I thought you were elderly.  I don’t think that way anymore.  [laughter] But a lot of them ladies had hired in back during the wartime when they couldn’t get men and then there was quite a, quite a long period of time I guess that they didn’t do a lot of hiring as far as women were concerned but they had just started hiring some women at that time so there was a few women in there probably around my age but not very many and I thought that was kind of strange, you know, for that big of an operation.  And I couldn’t get over the amount of people that worked there.  I mean, I just, I never imagined that many people working in one place.  I wasn’t used to working with over, you know, a few dozen people at the very most.

Doug Rademacher:	Earl Nicholson.

Earl Nicholson:	Earl Nicholson.  Uh, so you hired, so you hired in.  You’re in this huge factory.  You didn’t see a whole lot of women.  [20:45] Did you see any other minority groups?  Did you see, did you see blacks?  Did you see Mexicans?  Did you see Asians?

Richard Bennett:	Uh, there were blacks and, uh, Mexicans, not too many, but other than that no.  I mean Asians and stuff like that you didn’t see a lot of that, not at that time but later on, of course, that changed.

Earl Nicholson:	[21:14] So how, how was the interaction with, um, with, between the different groups?

Richard Bennett:	Well, you know, I guess to me I, I got along with everybody I ran into pretty much until I started getting political and getting involved with the union, then sometimes you don’t get along with people ‘cause you can’t do everything [chuckle] they want you to.  [throat clearing] But, uh, as far as the interaction between myself and others, I, I really got along great.

In fact, it was – I worked production for nine years before I ever decided to get involved with the union.  And it happened that a friend of mine, uh, who was a Mexican and I was working on the big station wagons at that time, 88s, Olds 88 station wagon and there was three of us assigned to put in the second seat and the rear seats and that rear seat was a real rough job.   You had to take it off of a monorail and load it in the back end of that wagon [throat clearing] and do all the bolting down and so forth and all the trim work around it and it was real heavy and there was, so there was three of us working on that.  Well, at that time, about every sixth job that would come down the production line was an 88 station wagon, so by the time you got out of that, got that one done and got out of it, you had to hurry back up the line and start catching the next one.

We had a coffee wagon back at that time [throat clearing] and what that was was a cart that they brought around once in the morning and once in the afternoon and it had coffee and doughnuts and milk and so forth and the line would shut down for six minutes and that was strictly a Fisher Body thing.  Fisher Body had that negotiated years and years before that.  But that, when they shut that line down this one particular day, we had gone from when I first hired in there we used nothing but electric motors.  Well, we had gone to pneumatic motors at that time and somebody, and I don’t know which one of us, one of the three of us had left the motor in the back of the station wagon that we had just finished ‘cause the line shut down, we went to the wagon.

When we got back to the job a little bit late, the line had already started and that rubber hose had stretched to the max because that motor lodged in that seat and that rubber hose was stretched out and when it finally caught loose it completely went over the top of the next job, landed on the roof of the next car, smack, smacked that in, it put a big old dent in it, bounced to the next car and took the windshield out, [whistle] smashed that out and wound up way back up the line six jobs where we were supposed to start on the next station wagon.

Well, a friend of mine, Oscar Vela, at that time I was working with him and a fellow by the name of Wayne Neveu and they come over there and the foreman just about went nuts and raising Cain and they ushered Oscar right over to the office and they started interviewing him.  And we had a committeeman at that time that later became our financial secretary, as a matter of fact, of the Local and that was, um, Wayne Kinney.  And Wayne was our committeeman and I, I thought the world of Wayne and I thought he did a real good job.  But anyway, Wayne went over there, tried to defend Oscar, and they threw Oscar out.  They disciplined him, threw him out for I think it was three days at that time.  And they never took me or Wayne Neveu over and interviewed us.  Well, when the foreman come back and we found out that they put Oscar out and never even interviewed us to find out what happened, I didn’t know what to think to start with.  I thought, well, maybe he told them that he did that or something but really none of the three of us I don’t think at that time really realized who did it, we just was interested in going to get something off the coffee wagon.

So I got a hold of Wayne Kinney, the committeeman, and I said “Wayne, what in the world is going on?  What happened to Oscar?”  He said “Well, they put him out.”  And I said “For what?”  He said “Well, they put him out for smashing the roof of the car and smashing the window out of the other one.”  I said “Well, did he say he did it?”  And he said “No.  He said he wasn’t sure who did it.”  I said “Well, they’re going to, they’re going to interview me or Wayne?”  And he said “No.  I don’t think so.  I guess they’re going to leave it at that.”  I said “You’re kidding me.”  He said “No.”  Right then and there I decided that I was going to do something about getting involved with the union.  [throat clearing] And so I told Wayne, I said “Hey, I don’t know if it was me.  I don’t know if it was Oscar.  I don’t know if it was Wayne.  I have no idea which one of us did that but it’s not right.  They should have took us all three over there and interviewed us and either one of us admitted to and took the rap, fine, or all of us or none of us, but this isn’t right.”  He said “Would you give me a written statement to that effect?”  I said “You bet I will.”  So I sat down and wrote out a statement, signed it.

And to tell you the truth, I don’t remember now if, if they ever did make it right with Oscar but I knew that certainly was not right.  But that wasn’t, at that time that was not out of the ordinary the way that things were done with certain managers.  Now they wasn’t all that way, but certain managers over there was that way.

Earl Nicholson:	Fantastic.  So one other thing, um, you’re newly hired into the factory.  You, you know, you’ve been, you’ve been trained on your job, you know.  You’re getting to the point where you know your job well.  [27:25] Did – were there any initiation pranks, uh, any, any hazings?  [chuckle]

Richard Bennett:	[throat clearing] Well, that’s interesting you say that or ask that question.  Yes, in fact, um, I was putting on an armrest on this one job and we had to reach way up, way, way up above our heads so you couldn’t see where the, where the stock was in the boxes and stuff to get the armrest out, and so I reached up there one time getting an armrest out and four glasses of water dumped all over me.  One of the guys had filled up four paper cups with water and put it on that top box and when I flipped that box over [chuckle] water come dousing me.  [throat clearing]

Uh, they used to grease the guns an awful lot back then.  And like I said, we had elec-, electric motors.  They were slow.  They were cumbersome.  They were heavy and you had to unhook from a rail and then hook up.  You had to keep unhooking and hooking them up.  And what the guys would do is they would grease the, the motor.  You had a drill and you had a driver.  And it’s kind of dangerous.  A lot of people, I, I drilled my pant leg and my legs I don’t know how many times because the drill sometimes wouldn’t shut off and you’d drop them down and they’d drill your leg.  But anyway, so you go to pick up one motor and they might have greased it and so you got all this black grease all over your hands and stuff and you had to clean all that up.

I remember one time one of the guys I was working with decided that he was going to douse me with a bucket of water.  The restrooms were between the floors, between the second floor and I guess you call it the third floor where 3X Second was, so you had to go down between the floors, down the stairway to get to the restrooms.  Well, he had gone down there, he knew, he was on break and he knew I was the next one on break so he went down there and he drew a bucket of water and he was waiting for me to come down the stairway.  I was coming down the stairway and he could see my legs so he’d know it was me and as soon as I rounded that corner, he’d douse me with a bucket of water but the only thing was in the meantime the general foreman from the body shop had came up the stairs and he beat me into the restroom and he doused the general foreman.  [laughter] And that guy was mad.  I mean they had plant security running up and down that line the whole rest of the, the night, the rest of that shift to try and find out who did that because as soon as he seen what he did, he took off on a run.  He got back up there on that line and went to work.  Nobody squealed on him so he, he got away with it.

Uh, a lot of times, uh, we used, we used to have to wear screw aprons and they would touch your apron strings on fire with a cigarette lighter or something and it would, it would smolder and they would burn slowly the material that they had.  And I remember one time this one fellow I was working with his name was Howard Houghton.  He touched one of the guy’s apron strings off and this, this fellow’s name was Homer Cummings.  He had just gotten back from Vietnam.  He was a Vietnam Vet.  And Homer had never seen that happen so he didn’t know what was going on.  Well, there’s smoke all over the place so he’s turning around and around in a circle like a dog chasing, chasing his tail trying to figure out what’s wrong, where’s that smoke coming from.  It’s his apron strings and that burned all the way up to his britches [throat clearing] before he finally figured out what in the world it was and got that apron off.  And I mean everybody of course was laughin’.

Or they would take your lunch bucket and screw it down to your bench and you’d grab your lunch bucket at lunchtime and pull the handle off or something because you catch it on a dead run.  The doggone thing would be screwed to the bench.  [chuckle] It was just things like that.

Another time we had, we had a general foreman back then his name was Beaver Fisk.  Beaver was down in the, in the restroom.  He was in one of the stalls and going to the bathroom and one of the guys took a bunch of water, a cup of water, a large cup, and threw it over the top of the stall and doused him and I remember him, I was just happened to be down there at the time so he was cussing and swearing “You son of a gun, I, I’ll, if I can get my pants up in time I’ll get you.”  [laughter] And he was pretty wet when he came upstairs.  [laughter] But he never did find out who did it because he couldn’t get his pants up in time.  [laughter] But a lot of things like that went on back then.

Earl Nicholson:	Now you mentioned your apron strings and your, and your belt pouches.  [32:35] Could you tell me what type of safety equipment were you issued back then?

Richard Bennett:	Oh, I’ll tell you, [throat clearing] we didn’t – back at that time I was doing a lot of trim work around the, the back glass and, and the front glass or the windshield and back in those days you didn’t, you could wear safety glasses if you requested them but you didn’t have to and I never did like the things.  They were hot, so I usually didn’t wear’m.  Later on I got a little wiser.  Of course, they forced us into wearing them years later but for a long, long time there wasn’t a lot of safety standards and we didn’t have to comply with a lot of safety standards or rules.

And a lot of times you really had a rough time even getting gloves to protect your hands or your fingers or anything.  I mean it was like pulling teeth to get the things that you, you really needed and you avoided the things you probably should have had that you didn’t want to deal with just like I did with the safety glasses until they finally made it a plant rule.  And a lot of people got disciplined for failure to wear their glasses for a long time after that.  It was something that, you know, it was something being imposed on you.  I guess it’s just human nature you don’t like to be told what you have to do, so a lot of people resisted, including myself.  At that time, I watched out for the supervisor to make sure he didn’t catch me with my glasses off but anytime I could work without them, I didn’t work with them.

Earl Nicholson:	[34:06] So was your, was your, your environment was fairly safe then you’d say?

Richard Bennett:	In that area of the plant, yes.  It wasn’t anything like the body shop.  We didn’t have no spot welders going off all the time and all that kind of stuff.  It was, that was one of the, the cleaner and the safer areas of the plant to work in.

Earl Nicholson:	[34:26] So do you, do you recall any workplace injuries?

Richard Bennett:	Oh yeah.  There was a lot of, a lot of workplace injuries.  And, uh, well, just like that incident with the station wagon, somebody could have gotten hurt very seriously if they would have been in the path of that gun.  Fortunately, there wasn’t anybody at that time.  But we had a lot of people that had a lot of different kind of injuries over, over the time that I was in there.  And, of course, when OSHA come in to play and things became more stringent, I think that probably helped our injury record an awful lot.

Marilyn Coulter:	[35:10] OSHA?

Richard Bennett:	Mm-hm.  Oh, excuse me.  Occupational Safety, I can’t remember what.

Male:	Hazard Agency.

Richard Bennett:	Yeah, Hazard Agency I think that’s what it is, yeah.  I ought to know that well too.  When you get away from that stuff you tend to just start forgetting things.  But anyway, anyway, the law, the OSHA law, uh, I think certainly helped but unfortunately even then we had a lot of injuries.  We still had a lot of things that went on that could have been avoided.  They say every accident can be avoided but I couldn’t believe that.  Like I said, I finally wised up.  When I finally got involved with the union and found out what really needed to be done and started to actually kind of trying to get other people to comply with things that I should have been complying with all along myself, then I started realizing the necessity of safety and the importance of it and all of a sudden it became my job not only to start looking out for myself but others as well and that kind of changed my attitude a whole lot.

Marilyn Coulter:	Marilyn Coulter.  [36:31] Dick, now did you work in Trim, um, through your whole, um, GM career?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I worked all over the plant but I, my, I was reporting to Trim every day for the most part.  Uh, I finally became a final repairperson, back at that time they called it Group 25.  But while I was a utility person, which was for quite a few years, I worked in the body shop, I got shipped out to the paint shop, I, I worked all over the plant but I reported to Trim and then they’d ship me around all the different places and that’s while I was in Production.

And, um, then I got involved, like I said, with the union and I got involved with a lot of other things and became, I got, became quite active in the union and I was very fortunate I got elected as an alternate district committee person.  And then I decided I wanted to see what the executive board was all about, so [coughing] I ran for a trustee job and I was fortunate enough to get elected to that, so I became a trustee.  And then I got to go to the executive board meetings and find out more about what this Local was all about and the UAW.  And then I ran for district committee and I won that position and later on was appointed as district shop committee.  And from there, I became a zone committee person, shop committee person if you will, and eventually after three tries [chuckle] became chairman of the bargaining committee and that was when Louie Schultz went on UAW staff and then I was elected again.  And shortly after that, I was asked to go on staff with International Union.  Ruben Burks at the time was our regional director.

And so my last 10 years was spent as a UAW staff member for Region 1C but I was very fortunate ‘cause I had a lot of positions in Local 602 and people were really good to me and I just, things I never, never, ever imagined would ever happen to me.  It was just a wonderful experience.

Doug Rademacher:	Doug Rademacher.  Dick, I want to take you back into the plant.  A lot of people come in to the Fisher Body plant and just like you said when you first came in, you didn’t know where you’re at.  You go to your job, you go to the parking lot, you go home, you go to your job.  You said you got to work all over the plant.  [39:40] Can you tell me the first day you saw the body shop and the diverse differences in jobs?  You were in an area that was somewhat safe and clean.  What was your thoughts when you saw people who had came in and did jobs that you saw down there?  Can you share some of that thought?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] I would say I probably worked there I’m going to say maybe two months before I really got introduced to the body shop, excuse me, [throat clearing] and I got shipped to the body shop.  Of course, I didn’t know where exactly it was or where I was going so they sent somebody down there with me to take me down where the body shop was to the supervisor’s area where they were sending me for the day.  I got down there and I mean there’s – they, they called it the jungle.  There was this place where they had all these welders, people welding like crazy all over the place, welding on the bodies, sparks are flying every which direction [throat clearing] and they were flying clear out into the aisleways and everything.  And I didn’t know whether to walk down the aisleway or not.  I didn’t know if I was going to get burned or what was going to happen to me.

But anyway, that was, that was kind of a scary thing down there for the very first time.  You go down there in that body shop and I mean it, it was hard, hot, and looked like really dangerous work to me.  And quite honestly, I never ran spot welder.  To this day, I’ve never ran a spot welder.  I never did get assigned to a job where I had to run a spot welder but I did get assigned to a lot of different jobs in the body shop, fortunately spot welding wasn’t one of them.

Doug Rademacher:	[41:33] You can see my, my question is I guess did you see how fortunate you were and do you recognize – you said there was thousands of people working there and here you were blessed with this great opportunity in the job and, and here people come every day and face that job you can’t hardly fathom.  What did you think about people that did that, faced that struggle every day?

Richard Bennett:	Well...

Doug Rademacher:	Now that you went on to represent them.

Richard Bennett:	I think, I think it took a lot of stamina, a, a, a lot of stick-to-itiveness to even work in that body shop.  I, I admired everybody that ever worked in the body shop.  That was some tough place to work.

In fact, I’ll tell you, [throat clearing] my brother hired in there probably a year or maybe year and a half after I was working there and they assigned him to the body shop immediately.  And three days later, he called me up about 5:00 in the morning and he said “Can you clear me out when you go in this morning?”  He said “I quit.”  I said “What?  This is a good job.  You don’t quit a job like this.”  He said “There is no way in the world I am going to work my life like that.”  He said “I ain’t intending to die young.”  He said “People got to be nuts to work in that body shop.”  He said “They got me running six spot welders and I ain’t going to do it.”  So I said “Well, yeah, I guess I can clear you out.”  And I did that day, I went to Employment and told him he quit and they said “Well, if he ever wants a job, tell him to come on back, we’ll hire him.”  Which he never did want to go back ‘cause he never wanted to be in that body shop.  [throat clearing] But yeah, that, that took some kind of an individual to be able to deal with that body shop.

Doug Rademacher:	Thank you.  [43:25] And so were there any other family members that worked in, in the plant or came to Lansing in the General Motors?

Richard Bennett:	No.  I never had any, like I said, my brother, he worked there three days.  That’s the only family member I ever had that worked there.

Doug Rademacher:	Just a minute.  I wanted to – so early on I asked you about the shift you got put on.  You said you were married with a child that’s why you took the job.  [43:53] How did that work out?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] it didn’t work out real good.  [chuckle] Like I said, we, we worked long, long hours and, uh, my marriage didn’t last too long.  I was only married for two years, wound up divorced.  In fact, and I know I’m out of  the ordinary because I was married five times during the time I worked at Fisher Body, so.  [chuckle] And probably a lot of it was due to the fact that I wasn’t home much.  I wound up spending most of my time at Fisher Body.  That was pretty much my life, like a lot of other people, so.

Earl Nicholson:	Earl, Earl Nicholson.  [44:41] So would you, were you, were you starting to think of the people you worked around as like members of your family?

Richard Bennett:	Oh, there’s no doubt.  You’d be, you were like a family.  [throat clearing] You took care of each other.  When you were in there, I mean you all had common ground.  You all were working in the same plant.  It was all hard work.  You may have had the cleaner, I may have been in a safer, more cleaner environment but it was still real hard work and you still had the same struggles day in and day out as everybody else did, maybe not quite so much when you had the opportunity to work where I did but you became a family.  In fact, that’s why I decided to get involved in the union because I had seen things going on in the family, if you will, that I didn’t think was right and I thought maybe I could help make a difference.

Doug Rademacher:	Dick – Doug Rademacher.  You, uh, said you were a country boy who came to the city and, uh, you saw a few women and a few minorities.  Now you say that people became your family.  [45:52] Did that break down the walls of, that you had?  I’m sure you hadn’t seen many minorities.  When you started working on them, working with them and counting on them, did that break down the walls of, of, uh, [throat clearing] you know, growing up in an all-white environment?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I grew up pretty much in an all-white environment but as soon as I started working, when I worked in Battle Creek I worked with a large number of, well, I say a large number, at that time I thought it was a large number, of people that were blacks and some Hispanics and, uh, I got to be very good friends with a lot of them, did, you know, went to outside activities and things, so I really – I was always taught not to be discriminatory.  I mean a person is a person, you know.  It’s the person, regardless of skin or nationality or whatever, my folks raised me that it’s the person that counts and so that was my belief in the beginning, so I probably didn’t have to overcome a lot of things that some people may have had to when they hired in to a place like that.  So to me, we were all family in a short time because, like I said, we all had the same problems and we all shared the same types of work and had to come to the same place and all that.

Marilyn Coulter:	Dick – uh, Marilyn.  I just want to go back a couple of places.  [47:23] By you being, uh, a utility person and you were a vacation replacement, you went all over and you went in the trim shop and the body shop, did you also work in the paint shop?

Richard Bennett:	Oh yeah.  I not only worked in the paint shop, I was fortunate enough to get elected as committeeman for the paint shop even though I had never been assigned there at that time.  [throat clearing] And, uh, so yeah, I had worked a number of jobs being shipped out to the paint shop and the cushion room.  I worked in the cushion room and, uh, basically all over the plant.

Marilyn Coulter:	[48:00] So in terms of working and there’s a couple of questions, like in terms of working, would you say that, where would you say like the best jobs were and what would you say the worst jobs were?  Were Trim the preferred jobs at that time?

Richard Bennett:	Oh yeah, obviously.  Trim was definitely the preferred jobs.

Marilyn Coulter:	[48:16] Now did you find that you had more minorities in the body shop or the paint shop or the trim shop?

Richard Bennett:	Oh, there’s definitely in, more in the body shop I think than anyplace and then the paint shop, mm-hm.

Marilyn Coulter:	[48:30] And now when you worked in the paint shop, was there special health equipment that you had to wear also there?

Richard Bennett:	In the paint shop depending on what the job was, what area you were assigned to, as to what you had to wear.  But in the paint shop you had to wear, particularly later on in years, you had to wear a lot of special things for the quality of the job.  They were worried about the paint and the quality of the, of the product.  They weren’t so much worried for a long time I think about the people as they were the quality.  It’s just like when robotics came in to play in the, in the plant.  It used to get just beastly hot in there.  It, it would be 115, 120 degrees in there in the summertime and that was all right.  They weren’t going to shut no lines down [inaudible 49:20] like that.  But when the robots came in to play, they wouldn’t work under those conditions, they shut the line down.  [laughter] So they, they paid more attention there for a long time I think to worrying about their robots than they did their workers.  [throat clearing] But yeah, that was, in whatever part of the plant you worked in, there was specific things that you needed to, to wear as far as clothing or protective equipment, things of that nature, the paint shop included.

Marilyn Coulter:	[49:51] Now in terms of having your coworkers being seen as your work family, your brothers and sisters, how did you, how did you handle things like holidays?  Were special things done?  And then not only that, was the communication the same in all the different areas or were some more friendlier than others because of the environment?

Richard Bennett:	Well, again, I, I really didn’t have any trouble as far as getting along with anybody in any, any particular area.  I really didn’t notice so much difference myself, so I can’t really say as far as the environment, um, other than I will say in the body shop it was a lot harder to communicate because it was so doggone...

Marilyn Coulter:	Difficult environment.

Richard Bennett:	...noisy down there and you couldn’t move around much because you had sparks flying everywhere, so you didn’t get to go around and communicate with other people like you could in other areas of the plant.  The body shop was more restrictive, much more restrictive.

Marilyn Coulter:	And the paint shop had the booths, yes.

Richard Bennett:	In the paint shop they had the paint booths and, of course, that was restrictive too, mm-hm.

Marilyn Coulter:	[50:58] Now in terms of the plant, which department was the largest department?

Richard Bennett:	Uh, I believe the body shop was the largest department.

Marilyn Coulter:	[51:09] In terms of people or size?

Richard Bennett:	Its size.

Marilyn Coulter:	[51:11] But in terms of people, you had your largest congregation of people?

Richard Bennett:	I’m not sure.  [throat clearing] I’m not sure if the body shop, if you – I guess if you put Hardware and Soft Trim together it was probably the trim shop.

Marilyn Coulter:	The trim shop.

Richard Bennett:	Because it was the nature of the jobs there being they’re, you know, trimming everything out.

Marilyn Coulter:	[51:36] Now physically I know as far as environment now you could, could you not almost be on one side of the trim shop and almost see all the way through to the other side as opposed to the body shops and the [inaudible 51:48] shops?

Richard Bennett:	Oh yes.  [throat clearing] Yes.  In Trim, of course, you didn’t have all the obstructions of spot welders and big machinery and all the kind of things you had to deal with there, you know, presses or whatever it may, may have been.  [throat clearing] In the trim shop it was real wide open and you could see, other than the racks.  I mean, you had stock racks that was naturally in the way but other than that, yes, you could definitely see more people for a further distance.

Marilyn Coulter:	And, and my, my last question for right now, um, now you said you were married five times and a lot of it was due to working and stuff like that.  [52:30] Did you have a tendency to work nights for a long period of time?  Did you work day shifts or both shifts and was one more conducive to marriage than the other?

Richard Bennett:	Well, like I said, when I hired in they, they started me out on days.  They kept me on days for six months.  They had another fellow who had more seniority than me kept trying to bump me but he didn’t put in his what they called a shift preference so he didn’t have a right to bump me off my shift.  And at that time you could put in a shift preference twice a year, so he had to wait for six months before he could put one in and bump me.  [throat clearing] In the meantime, my supervisor on the day shift liked me and he wanted to keep me there so he tried every kind of way to keep this guy from bumping me [chuckle] and putting me on the night shift, but after six months I got bumped to the night shift.  And after about two years, at that time in the trim shop I could have gone back to days and I could have probably held days for years but I chose not to.

It was kind of funny because when I went to the night shift, like I said, I, I have always been kind of a country bumpkin so I wasn’t in to all that hippie stuff back in those days and the long hair and I guess some of the stuff that went on, smoking the dope or whatever and all that but [throat clearing] so I go over to the night shift and it’s a whole different world.  You have your supervisors around there but you don’t have general foremen, you don’t have nobody in the office to deal with, you don’t have the plant manager walking out on the floor, you just got each other.

And I’m going over on this night shift and the first night I walked in there, I mean these long-haired, goofy-looking people and [chuckle] talking this crazy jive stuff and I’m thinking what in the world.  [throat clearing] How am I ever going to survive this?  So to start with, I kind of kept to myself for a short time until I started kind of seeing what was going on and everything and then I started opening up a little bit and I found out, you know what, they ain’t no different than anybody else.  They’re the same people.  [laughter] They just dress different and things like that but they didn’t – and the thing I liked about the night shift is you work.  You were more like a family on the night shift.  You didn’t have all that interference.

I remember the first plant manager when I hired in there was named Tom [inaudible 54:54].  He was a big, tall fellow.  They called him High Pockets.  And, uh, I remember him coming out on the production line on the day shift and just getting mad over nothing and he would start yelling and cussing and he would pick up the nearest thing to him and just start throwing it at people.  That’s the kind of plant manager they had back at that time.  Now I’m not saying he was a bad guy.  I don’t really know the guy but I know how he acted out there on the plant floor and it just flabbergasted me to think a plant manager would be acting like that.

Gary Judy:	G-, Gary Judy.  You said he started throwing things at people.  [55:30] Were, were these hourly people or supervisors that he threw things at?

Richard Bennett:	He didn’t care.  He, he just started throwing things.  If you was in the way, too bad, watch out because if he hits you, he hits you.  That’s the way it was.

Gary Judy:	[55:42] Did he hit anybody that you know of or?

Richard Bennett:	Well, you know what, I know he hit one person in the foot.  I can’t tell you who it was.  I can’t remember the name.

Marilyn Coulter:	[chuckle] So working nights it was...

Richard Bennett:	Working nights it was, it was a much more peaceful atmosphere.  Like I said, there was a lot more camaraderie if you will and you didn’t have all that management interference [coughing] I guess you can call it.  [chuckle]  You kind of took care of each other and got the job done however you had to get it done.  If you needed to talk to somebody like a general foreman or somebody from the day shift or need some, something down in the office, you had to come in on your own time and, and do it ‘cause they weren’t going to accommodate you.

Marilyn Coulter:	Hm.

Doug Rademacher:	Dick, you said nights was completely different, had a different group of people.  [56:34] Did music come to play in the daily [coughing] work life?  What was the difference?  Did days listen to other things and what did nights do?

Richard Bennett:	Well, on the day shift back at that time having radios was almost out of the question.  If you were fortunate enough to be able to have a radio, you was keeping that thing low enough where just you were hearing it and if a supervisor came around you better hide it ‘cause you weren’t supposed to have it.  Uh, but sometime later it got to where they were allowing radios, now this is on the day shift, uh, as long as nobody complained about it.  If there was any complaints, then they would make it, make you take the radio out or they would take it away from you.  On the night shift on the other hand, you’d walk in there and they’d have music going and radios going and as long as nobody complained, it was still a privilege but it was a more allowable privilege on the night shift.  And so, you know, things were just more relaxed and, and you could do things that you couldn’t do on the day shift.

Male:	[Inaudible 57:48].  [recording clicked off]

Marilyn Coulter:	Uh, Dick, you said that you got involved with labor because you wanted to make life different and better for your brothers and sisters at work.  Um, during your time there I know you were very instrumental in making some changes that helped to change the work life of the employees at Fisher Body, the UAW workers.  [58:13] Do you want to tell us a little bit about your involvement in some of those programs and how it changed the way we did business and the type of employees involved?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] I guess there was a number of things I got involved with.  Uh, we had what we called employee participation groups under QWL, which stood for Quality of Work Life.  And I was fortunate enough to be on the committee when that first Quality of Work Life I’m going to say attempt [chuckle] happened in our plant.  [throat clearing] And we had a number of union officials at that time that was involved with it.  Our bargaining committee was handed up for the union and it was risky business, especially politically for those individuals that were in leadership positions at that time.  [sneezing] This was something totally new and it was actually trying to work together with management for the benefit of everybody.

And I remember we had a two-day offsite, Don Chenoweth was the plant manager at the time we had this two-day offsite.  [throat clearing] Don Brown was the chairman of the bargaining committee.  And we had a two-day offsite with [coughing] management and we basically kind of aired our differences and decided that – we spent a great deal of time just forming a mission statement so we could decide what it is we wanted to do, what direction did we want to head in in this plant for the benefit of everybody.  And we had to do a lot of soul searching, both, both sides and the one thing I think was we all understood and we knew was that we had to do business differently than what we had in the past.

When I hired in that plant probably the best way to get things done was if you could out-scream and out-cuss the foreman or if the foreman could out-scream and out-cuss you, one of you was going to get your way, whichever one could be the most obstinate I guess.  And we realized that kind of way of doing business just wasn’t the way to do business anymore.  [throat clearing] So we knew we had to turn the corner but we weren’t just sure how we were going to do it and we asked for some, some help from outside consultants and eventually we had some trained consultants within the plant of which I went through all that consulting training over the years and stuff too.  I, I felt very proud of that.

But anyway, [throat clearing] so we started through Quality of Work Life and it was difficult because when you were in your meetings and everybody was talking about this is the way we want to do business and then you go back out on the plant floor and nothing out there changed, so you kind of fell backwards into the old style of doing things and then as a result of that you reacted the same way you used to, management and union people a lot of times.  And so each other was kind of holding the other hostage saying QWL is never going to work because nothing has changed.  Well, I was one of those guys.  I wanted to see it changed but when it, when I was out on the plant floor I didn’t see things changing.

In fact, I stood up at one of the union meetings and read a five-page challenge if you will that I had put together.  [throat clearing] I upset some of the members of the bargaining committee at that time by doing that but basically what my intentions were is to draw attention to some of the things that was going on that was not in line with what we said we were doing for QWL and let’s make a decision here, are we going to do what we say we’re going to do or are we going to continue talking one way and doing something another way?  And I kind of ruffled the feathers on some of the leadership but I, I did that every now and then myself anyway, so.  And I had others do it to me later on and that was all right too.  But, um, I felt very strongly that we all put our pants on the same way, we all had a common goal and that’s to make a living out of that plant and if was going to continue then we needed to do things differently but I also felt strongly that we needed to do things differently.  We needed to start doing things differently other than just having umpteen meetings and talking about it.  [coughing]

Well, in the meantime, when I became a zone committeeman, I wasn’t exactly happy with some of the things that I had seen our own leadership doing so I decided that I thought I could do a better job so I ran for chairman and I lost out on that.  [throat clearing] This is sometime later after we had been involved in this Quality of Work Life process for some time.  But anyway, I went back to the production line and I had been off the production line for about 10 years and the first thing I was told by the supervisor when I got back [coughing] on the production line is “Well, we, we know you haven’t done anything, you know, as far as working production stuff for 10 years so you just take it easy and you, [coughing] you know, we’ll just give you some easy jobs and let you break in easy.”   I said “Whoa, wait a minute.  I can do the same thing anybody else out here can do.  Don’t be babying me.  I can do my job.”  And so they said “Well, you know, you don’t have to.”  I said “Yeah, I do have to.”

Because even though I went back to production, I wasn’t in a leadership position if you will, I didn’t feel any differently.  I mean still it was all the same.  I was no different than anybody else.  And I was on utility again, that’s where I went back to, so I told them I don’t want to be no different than anybody else.  I wanted to do my job.  I’ll do my best.  I always took pride in doing my best whether it was on the production line or whatever because I had to live with myself.  I’m not saying I always did the right thing but I always tried to do the right thing.  Anyhow, so they didn’t baby me [throat clearing] and I got along just fine.

But fortunately – and Louie Schultz was the chairman at that time that I had run against and lost and, uh, Al Presley was the president of the Local at that time and Louie asked me up to his office one day.  I had been back on production I think about four or five months and he asked me if I would consider taking a job, that he was going to make an appointment pretty soon and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in it.  And I said “Well, it depends on what it is.”  He said “Well, we need somebody in, in training.  We need a production training coordinator.”  And I said “What’s that?”

So he started explaining the, you know, somebody to kind of work with some of the management people and the union people involved in the training and kind of oversee the thing for production people, not for skilled trades but for production.  And I said “Yeah, I might be interested.”  [throat clearing] He said “Well, it would be kind of foolish for me to appoint somebody that might turn around and run against me again, though, wouldn’t it?”  I said “Well, that’s your choice, Lou.”  I said “I’m getting along just fine on production line and I don’t have no problem being there.”  I said “If you’re looking for a commitment out of me, you ain’t going to get it because I’m going to do what I think is right at the time.”  I said “If I think I should run again, I’m going to and if I don’t think I should, I won’t.”

Well, so I didn’t hear no more until I had been on the production line for about 10 months and Louie and Al Presley came on the production line, pulled me into the supervisor’s office, had me covered with a relief person, and offered me that production coordinator job.  In fact, that’s how I met Cheryl McQuaid because she worked down there with the training folks at the time.  And so anyway, I, I was offered the job.  I took it, no strings attached, and I had a lot of training to, to help me do my job, a lot of expensive training and I felt real fortunate to do that.  [throat clearing]

And it was a while later, I think I was production training coordinator about a year or maybe a little more or something like that, when they got a hold of me and wanted to know, specifically I guess it was Louie Schultz got a hold of me and wanted to know if I would get involved with something else.  They wanted me to, it was a new position they really didn’t know too much about and he, he told me quite frankly he said “It’s an impossible job.  We know that nobody can do it but on the other hand we figured if anybody was to try, you would.”  So he said “We got a new job coming up called simultaneous engineering rep and we want to know if you’d be interested in it.”  I didn’t even know what the heck that was, so I said “Well, what is it?”  [throat clearing] He said, so he explained “Well, it’s getting hourly involvement in future products.”  And I said “Well, I’ll give it a try if you want me to, no strings attached.”  [chuckle] So he said “Okay.”  So anyway, I wound up taking that, they appointed me to that job [throat clearing] and I worked with a number of people.

We had what we called product development teams and what that was is PDT is the acronym we used and what that was we jointly selected people to, to work on forward planning projects for future cars that were getting built or somebody was going to build, hopefully us, that was the whole thrust of it.  And our hourly folks went down and spent a lot of time down at Warren with the engineers and we had what we called 19 product development teams [throat clearing] when I left that particular position and I was real proud of that.  We held meetings weekly, usually couple of meetings a week, and it was my job just to coordinate it.  Um, we had a lot of very, very good, dedicated people on the hourly side that were selected.  We, we used a selection process that we thought was a fair process.  In fact, we selected people that I never thought, knowing some of those people I never thought we would select them for anything and there’s other people I didn’t know naturally you’d think they weren’t getting selected for something but those are the people who did get selected because we used a process and we found out, fortunately, I found out how important user processes are when I was in the training department.  [throat clearing] User processes is very important.

But anyway, [throat clearing] so we started gaining a lot of recognition, our plant, because of working so closely with the engineers down in Warren and it was all because of these people and their involvement and their dedication.  And when I say dedication, they were, they were dedicated to the product and dedicated to the people in the plant.  And it was really a great thing [throat clearing] I think when Jim Zubkus became our plant manager because Jim Zubkus invited me to his staff meetings.  He had staff meetings every day and as chairman he invited to those staff meetings.  I didn’t make them all but I made as many of them as I could.  And he told me when he invited me, he said “There’s going to be things said in there you’re not going to like, you’re not going to agree with.”  And he said “I’m not asking you to.”  He said “All I want you to do is be open and honest.”  He said “There’s things in there that you’re going to say we’re not going to like as managers.”  But he said “That’s how we’re going to do business because we need to communicate and we need to go forward and the way we’re going to make things better is  to bring things out in the open and deal with them.”  And he was true to that.  That’s the kind of thing he did.

In fact, Jim Zubkus was out on the floor all over that plant a large amount of the time while he was plant manager.  I had a lot of respect for, for Jim Zubkus.  I think he genuinely was interested in not only the product and furthering the plant but the people.  He, he understood the people is what made that, that plant.

Marilyn Coulter:	[72:14] Do you feel that having those types of programs and having hourly workers doing non-traditional jobs and being involved in non-traditional, um, what I would say decisions, is that something that you feel that was instrumental in making Lansing the capital of quality [inaudible 72:33]?

Richard Bennett:	Well, [throat clearing] I think it was, in that, in that timeframe I think it was absolutely a necessity.  I don’t think we would have survived if we hadn’t done some things differently.  [throat clearing] And the engineers – our, our people gained a lot of knowledge working down there in Warren with those engineers and interacting with the engineers as well as the management folks in the higher echelon I guess you would say in our plant.  And they learned, they gained mutual respect for each other because they started gaining knowledge of each other’s ways and, and how they interrelated just how much alike we were rather than how different we were.  [throat clearing] And the whole focus of course was on the product but that focus turned out to be a little more intimate between people than what just the product was.

And it was great.  I remember the first time that we brought engineers into the plant to work out on the production line with the hourly people out there.  Because those engineers they, they were down there and they were kind of untouchable to the hourly workforce and they were doing the best job they could but they didn’t realize when they were engineering something in Warren what kind of effect that had on a person that actually had to build the product back there in Lansing.  And they really had some eye openers when they went out there on that production line and started working on things that they had engineered and they said how in the world, you can’t twist your wrist four different kind of ways to do this.  Well, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you guys.  We’re going back and re-engineer this thing.  It was great.  It was great for the product.  It was great for the union-management relations.  Everybody started I think gaining a whole lot more respect for, for the others.

Marilyn Coulter:	[74:28] Again about the Lansing workforce, do you think that, um, because we were that unified family, slightly different from other workers, did the [inaudible 74:40] the way we treated each other, the way we interacted with each other, did that have an impact on that type of project?

Richard Bennett:	It had an impact I think not only on that particular, that project but all projects.  It didn’t matter where I went.  It didn’t matter if I was sitting in a meeting in Warren, Michigan with managers or if I was sitting in a meeting in Detroit [throat clearing] with the higher ups in the International Union or where I was, you heard nothing but good things about Local 602 and Lansing, and Lansing workforce in general.  It wasn’t just Local 602, it was Local 652, it was 1618.  Lansing was looked at very favorably and it was because we had actually shown the rest of the industry if you will, at least within Michigan, how management and union could cooperate with each other and could be successful doing that and we gained a lot of recognition.  The people in the plant I don’t think ever really realized just how important those things were [throat clearing] and just how much that helped to secure their, their future.  We still had people that sat back and lobbed grenades if you will and you got to expect that anyway, but overall, Lansing was looked at so favorably.

I remember when we negotiated the, the J car agreement [throat clearing] and they were going to roll it out so they held a special news conference.  And I remember Steve Yokich came to town for that and he is sitting up on the stage.  We hadn’t even ratified the agreement yet and he didn’t know that.  He thought it was a done deal, ratified and everything, and here we’re making, they’re making a big news flash all over about what Lansing just did to, to get the J car.  And something was said when Yokich was up there and he turned around and he says “We do have this agreement ratified, don’t we?”  We said “No, not yet, but we’re going to have.”  [chuckle] He didn’t know what to do at that point because he, he wouldn’t have been there without a ratification.  [laughter] But we felt strongly enough, you know.  I mean it was, it was, it was ratified.  It was nip and tuck.  It wasn’t by a whole lot.  I think it was like 51%, 52% or something like that.

But the whole shop committee went right out on the floor [throat clearing] and we held meetings day and night and met with all the departments, all the people and explained all of these things.  You could take it for what it was worth to you as an individual but at least we was going to go out there and let you know about it and let you make an informed decision on whether you wanted that or not but we felt very strongly that was the future of our plant in our hands and we had to do whatever.  And we didn’t give up a lot I want to say, if you want to take a look at it in the long run.  But the J car and the N car were things that were very controversial when we had to negotiate agreement to get those things.

I remember they brought – they wanted to negotiate, management wanted to negotiate with 602 and 652 together.  Well, 602 and 652 we worked together but on the other hand we didn’t want to negotiate our agreements together.  We were two separate groups and we wanted to stay two separate groups.  We wanted to stay two separate local unions [throat clearing] so we were reluctant but on the other hand we knew we had to do something.  If management wanted to negotiate that way, we had to do something because we needed th-, that agreement to get that product.  So we met together and at that time Art Baker was chairman at 652 and I was chairman at 602 and so when we got in at the bargaining table and we sat down with negotiations, Art and I had already worked together some anyway.  And quite frankly, not everybody was trusting Art from 602 and probably not everybody was trusting me from 652 but we knew we had to do that so we sat down with management.

And the first thing I, I tried to do is to find out what it is management was looking at, so I started asking questions about what, what is it you want to negotiate on.  They started talking about these various things of which [throat clearing] one of the big things was there was a six-minute shutdown time for a coffee wagon twice a day.  That was a huge, huge issue ‘cause we were the last plant in the world to have that from my understanding and had been a tradition for Fisher Body for many, many years.  And originally when management started talking that I said “You mean the 12 minutes or do you mean just pushing the cart out on the, on the floor?”  And originally they said “No.  We’re talking – we’re not talking about the 12 minutes.  We’re just talking about the cart.  We, we’re not going to take the time away.  We don’t want to take your time away.  What we want to do is keep the production line working and give you more tag-relief time for the six minutes.”  Well, by the time it got around to sitting down for negotiations, they wanted the 12 minutes [throat clearing] and of course that was a real tough issue.

In fact, years later I was talking to Don Brown and, over here to the union hall, and Don told me, he said “Well, you know, they came after us every year for that, every, every negotiations.”  And he said “We, we should have took care of that years, years before.”  But he said “It was just too hot of a political issue and we just didn’t think we could weather the storm so nobody ever, ever dealt with it.”  [throat clearing] But anyway, during my tenure we dealt with it all right.  I didn’t like to but we wound up making an agreement whereby we didn’t have that 12 minutes, that coffee wagon anymore.  And like I said, we had a, we finally got an agreement, reached an agreement, very controversial but we got it and we got the product.  We did what we had to do at the time.

It was kind of interesting to me, though, because we again, we all went out.  The bargaining committee, we went all over the plant before we ever signed any of the tentative agreement sheets with management over that issue and we talked to people and we said okay, here’s what they want.  We knew the coffee wagon was going to be the big issue, the 12 minutes was going to be the biggest issue to deal with.  We said “How do you feel about it?”  And, and I talked to people that I had worked on the line for years about that issue and they said “To heck with it, give it up.  We want product.”  I said “You mean keep the 12 minutes, just give rid of the cart.”  “No, no, no.  If you get, whatever you got to do, if you got to give up the 12 minutes, we want that job.  We want a future here.”  Okay.

Well, it’s kind of interesting because after we finally had signed the agreement and took it out for ratification, those same individuals “You’re throwing us down the river.”  [laughter] I’d say “What are you talking about?  I talked to you personally.”  “Well, I, I didn’t ever say that.”  “Okay.  If that’s what you didn’t say, that’s fine but I remember it that way.  Regardless, here’s what we’ve got, you can vote for it or against it, it’s up to you.  And you can believe our future is hanging in the balance on this issue or not, that’s up to you too.  That’s why we have to take the issue back out to you because it’s no more my future that it is yours.  It’s everybody’s.  You’re the ones, no matter what we negotiate, membership’s got to ratify it.”  [throat clearing] 

Marilyn Coulter:	[82:32] So is, um, the N car, getting that there under your watch, is that one of the things that you were most proud of as a ch-, bargaining chair?

Richard Bennett:	Definitely, definitely.  [throat clearing] I think the, again, like I said, I think to this day I think the future of the plant was really at risk at that point in time and I think we did what we had to do.  I think the membership – I mean the reason they ratify those things is ‘cause they did realize that.  They hate – nobody likes to give up something like that.  That was very important.  It was very important to me.

Marilyn Coulter:	[83:08] What would you say would be one of your worst memories that you had?

Richard Bennett:	[chuckle] Uh, probably the incident I talked about earlier off record involving a gun incident [chuckle] in an interview when I was a district committeeman.  Uh, there was an individual that had come from another plant and came in to this plant and really wasn’t used to doing production work if you will and had quite an attitude about it and fortunately wound up going back to his previous plant when all was said and done.  I’m thankful for that.  But anyway, this particular incident what happened is [throat clearing] this individual had done something wrong, I don’t even recall what it was now, in management’s eyes but they had held an interview.  They were going to discipline this person, so they called me to represent him and I, I got over to the office and they got in a, between the general foreman and the individual they got in a heated name-calling contest which totally shocked me, particular with the general foreman because I had known him for years and he was really an easy going, soft-spoken, nice guy.  I had never seen him react like this.  But they got into name calling and pounding fists on the desk and, and threatening each other and all kinds of stuff.

To make a long story short, when the whole thing ended up, this guy ran out of the plant [throat clearing] and I followed him.  He was parked out in front.  When I walked out the door he was popping his trunk open.  I ran over to where he was, he was standing.  He reached in a bag and pulled out a pistol.  And I told him he wasn’t going to go back in that plant and he wasn’t going to use that pistol and all this kind of stuff ‘cause he had threatened to kill this general foreman.  This general foreman had threatened him different things.  [throat clearing] But anyway, fortunately, like I said, I was kind of talking to him like a preacher at that time but he finally cooled down enough, he put the gun back away, he closed the trunk.  He said he wasn’t going back in the plant, which I was glad that time.  First, I told him he had to come back to the plant or they was going to fire him but after I see what he was doing I didn’t want him back in the plant.  But anyway, and he drove off and I don’t recall exactly whatever became of that whole thing at Fisher Body but I do remember that he got, shortly thereafter got called back to his previous plant and he didn’t lose his job, so.

Marilyn Coulter:	[86:07] Was that type of incident, uh, a rare occasion?  Is that a really isolated incident, things like that happening in the factory?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I don’t want to say it was necessarily isolated but I’m going to say it is, it was rare things like that happening to that extent.  I know there were other, other incidents that someone, I wasn’t involved with where [throat clearing] there were things that could have turned out violent.

I remember one time we had one of our members that had called in and threatened to kill myself and everybody in the work center in the plant and the president over at the union hall and [throat clearing] so the plant had gotten a hold of the police department.  The police department had told them to get a hold of us and they called us in labor relations and they notified us of the threat, told us to stay away from this person and they, they had police around the plant trying to apprehend this person if they tried to enter the plant and all that.  Nothing ever happened that, during the shift that day so when I, [chuckle] when I walked out to my vehicle after the end of the shift, [throat clearing] I went to unlock the door, this individual that had made the threats come out from behind my car and naturally startled me.  I didn’t know, I didn’t know if he had a gun or what but as it turned out it was another thing that it didn’t turn out bad.  He didn’t do anything bad as far as hurting anybody.  We got him some counseling and he went on to eventually retire, so something that could have been bad turned out okay.

Doug Rademacher:	Doug Rademacher.  [88:00] Dick, um, one, I want to touch on you were talking about the J and the N car.  This was – Fisher Body and Lansing is also known for an Olds Town.  Can you share the change of those particular car models that had a huge impact?  Um, what exactly were these products and, and wasn’t that a piece of the problem was what we were going to be breaking away from our heritage?

Richard Bennett:	Yeah, that was a big piece of the problem too because historically we had built Oldsmobiles.  In fact, from the time I hired in, that’s pretty much all we had built was Oldsmobiles.  We built the 88, the 98, the F85 station wagon, the F85 Olds, the 88 station wagon, we built the convertibles.  Um, and I mean this was, this was Oldsmobile.  Lansing was known for Oldsmobile and we had Oldsmobile headquarters here in town and Oldsmobile was everybody’s bread and butter for all those years and suddenly everything shifted from large cars to small cars and we didn’t see where at that time where that was going to be such a good thing for us.  First of all, from a work standpoint, supposedly those small cars took a whole lot less manpower which means we were going to lose a lot of our membership so that was a concern for us because we didn’t want to see our, our friends or family members, if you will, get laid off, lose their jobs.  [throat clearing] Secondly, because even from the, the local union standpoint, that could be a real financial problem for us with less union dues coming in, so that was another big concern from the Local standpoint.

But just the idea of having to make that change was something that again people lot of times resist change and that was a huge change.  That was a huge change for, for anybody that had worked for any length of time here at Fisher Body and other areas of the plant or other areas of town too, of course, so it was kind of a natural resistance to that.  We were going in to some uncharted waters and we just didn’t know if that was the right thing to do.  Particularly people I think out on the floor, they didn’t, they didn’t know if that was a wise decision.  What they really wanted to do was keep doing what we’ve always done, build big cars and make good cars and just keep plowing forward but naturally the corporation didn’t have that in mind.  They had other thigs in mind.  They were going to, they were going to put small car products somewhere and if they were going to go to small car products, we wanted to be the ones that was going to get it.  If they were going to phase out the big cars, we wanted the small cars, from a leadership standpoint anyway.  [throat clearing]

And, um, so yeah, it was a, it was a big, big issue not only for the, for the folks in the union but management people as well.  I mean that was their livelihood as well.  You had a lot of supervisors and so forth that that’s all they knew was building big Oldsmobiles, so they were worried about their future too.

Doug Rademacher:	[91:33] There’s another group that we haven’t touched on yet and I want you to share the difference and, uh, between the assembly line worker in all those departments and the skilled trades arena and the challenge to move that group of, of workers and I know that had a lot of battles for you there too.

Richard Bennett:	Skilled trades was a, [throat clearing] was a, yeah, it was a battle all right ‘cause it was a big issue.  Uh, skilled trades have what they call lines of demarcation and as things progressed over the years it became a big issue as far as negotiations was concerned because you had electricians that their, their particular jobs were dealing with specific things.  You had no right to their particular jobs.  They’re dealing with specific things and all the other trades as well.  We had a number of skilled trades in our plant.  I think back at that time I think we had something like 17 clearly defined different skilled trades [throat clearing] and nobody wanted anybody else working in their turf.  I mean that was the way it was.  You didn’t want anybody else taking your work away from you because that was jeopardizing your futures possibly and so that was a big issue when other plants started doing these things.  And of course, a lot of non-union places have always done those kinds of things, overlapping.

And then we had Local 1618 over here.  In order to survive, they had to enter into an agreement whereby they broke down those lines of demarcation and they had skilled trades people in there doing all kinds of things that normally they wouldn’t have been allowed to do because it didn’t belong in their trade, it belonged to another trade.  And that became a big issue here in Lansing site, not just Local 602 but Lansing.  But [throat clearing] in order to survive they had to negotiate those kinds of agreements, they didn’t want to but they had to.  They realized it.  Their membership realized it.  They ratified the agreements.  The international union realized it.  They, they sanctioned those agreements and it made it tougher on the rest of us that didn’t necessarily have to go into those kind of agreements at that time because it put a lot of pressure on us.

In fact, we had a number of membership meetings where our own members stood up and, and were very upset with the leadership of Local 1618 for doing those kind of things [throat clearing] and, you know, we, we tried to explain, I tried to explain to them when I was chairman, you got to put yourself in their shoes.  When you’re walking in their shoes, what would you do differently and quite frankly I don’t think we would have done a bit of things differently.  I think we would have been doing the same as what they had to do.  And so that pressure was always on us from that point forward particularly after they had finally got it in one area in this, in this town, they wanted to always do that.

Well, then we realized too some of that stuff just didn’t make sense.  It didn’t make sense for an electrician to stop working on something to have a millwright come out and, and move something that the electrician could have picked up and sat over there two feet.  It didn’t amount to nothing.  It didn’t, it really wasn’t taking anybody’s work away.  [throat clearing] So we, we formed a committee.  It was a joint committee of our skilled trades’ workforce later on and their skilled trades guys selected their own representatives from the various trades, or major trades at that time, to work with management on trying to call out, if you will, those kind of things that didn’t make sense to keep clearly defined within a particular trade.  And they did a lot of work.  It was tough.  It was hard for those individuals.  It was very political in some, some situations.  It made it tough for the leadership.

Of course, I guess that’s one thing you, the committees helped to do was kind of take some of the edge off from the leadership as far as the politics of it all but it still all pointed back to the leadership because those committees were basically doing the work of the leadership.  They were doing what the leadership’s responsibilities were.  If you’re going to do the job right, you get the experts involved and that’s the people that’s out there doing the work.  That’s one thing we always tried to convince management of.  If you really want the job done right, you know, you can either do it management’s way or you can do it the right way.  [laughter] I used to tell everybody, you know, the, you got a foreman that’s giving you a problem, and I practiced this when I was on the production line, you got a foreman who’s giving you a problem, the best way to break him down is do exactly what they tell you ‘cause they can’t live with doing what they tell you.

Doug Rademacher:	Dick, a lot of people don’t understand, um, that within the union we’re all union representatives but we voted individually, the trades’ arena and the general production had separate ballot boxes also.  And so those things were – it was very difficult to keep everybody happy, isn’t that true, with where they could actually vote in the opposite direction of the – they could hold you hostage is something I guess is what I want to say.

Richard Bennett:	Well, it really wasn’t difficult.  It was impossible [laughter] to make everybody happy.  You didn’t have to be in a leadership position very long to figure that out.  [throat clearing] You couldn’t make everybody happy.  The best thing you could try and do is what was best for the majority and hope that the majority carried the ball, ratified your agreements, and lived with your agreements and hope that you could keep management [inaudible 97:52].  You always had to constantly remember, remind management this isn’t a union contract.  This is a management-union contract.  We both agreed.  This is the way we’re going to do business together.

And, [throat clearing] you know, Ruben Burks years and years ago, long before I ever went on International staff, said something that always stuck in my mind.  We were over here at the union hall, we were in a, in a training class, bargaining class, and Ruben came in and we were just going in to negotiations and it was going to be a tough set of negotiations, we knew that, and Ruben spoke for a while and, and then in his closing remarks something that I will never forget probably until the day I die, [throat clearing] he told us, he said “One thing you never want to do, do not force management into agreeing to something that they can’t live with because they won’t.  You can put it in writing but if they can’t live with it, you’re going to be the bad guy ‘cause you can’t make them live with it and all you can do is write grievances and everything and you’re the bad guy ‘cause you can’t make them do what they already said they’d do.”  So I always kept that in mind when I was in negotiating whether it was grievance settlements or contracts and that is you got to consider their position and what they are able and not able to do at the same time you’re negotiating with them.  Don’t force to win something they can’t live with ‘cause they ain’t going to live with it.

Doug Rademacher:	Well, Dick, you, that leads you to a story I think.  Groups in the plant could control the work environment or the production and, uh, you talked about, uh, maybe an incident about something in the cushion room where they were able to, they were able to control the flow of the production.

Richard Bennett:	Yeah, the cushion, the cushion room was known as the rowdy group [throat clearing] in the plant for a long time.  They had a couple of incidences I, I remember that actually shut the plant down.  [throat clearing] One of them was a, was a walkout where they just flat walked out and is what they call a work stoppage, which if you were caught by our agreement, our national agreement, if you were caught leading a work stoppage by the terms of the agreement you could not only be fired but the union couldn’t negotiate you back to work.  And – but some of those individuals – conditions were not good out there in that cushion room and some of those individuals took it upon themselves to bring it to management’s attention by walking off the job.  Another incident they had what they called a Blue Monday [throat clearing] and what that was is a bunch of people called in sick on a Monday so they couldn’t even start up.

And in fact, we had two individuals that, that later became well known and I think well-respected union leaders that not only probably p-, played a part in that but were disciplined for that.  In fact, they were both on five years’ probation as a result of that.  Management felt that they had headed that whole thing up and convinced other people to go along with it.  [throat clearing] They held a lot of interviews for a long time.  And to make a long story short, what finally was agreed to for those two individuals and I always thought this was a strange agreement but it’s what came out of it, they did not admit to doing anything like that but on the other hand it was negotiated that what would happen they would be on five years’ probation, put back to work, and given their back pay.  [laughter] So they were paid their back pay for the time they were off on discipline and put on five years’ probation.  And, uh, and I have a lot of respect for both those people yet today.  [throat clearing]

In fact, one of them I love her dearly, that’s Dorothy Stevens and you probably in these interviews have heard that name more than once.  Dorothy was somebody that when I first came on the committee I looked up to.  She was an individual that didn’t hesitate to let her position be known on something and she didn’t hesitate to back it up.  And whether she was right or wrong sometimes, she didn’t back off until you proved her wrong.  And, and Dorothy for as many problems, problems that she gave some management people, was highly respected by management.  In fact, there was more than one occasion that I know of for a fact that management tried to convince her to jump over to their side and take a position in, in management.  I even had a couple incidences of that myself when I was in there.  I was offered a labor relations job one time and I was offered a supervisory job with, with a guarantee within six months I would be a general foreman and, uh, I turned, naturally, I turned them both down because I wasn’t interested in being a management person.  I was interested in being a union rep.  That’s what I was doing, that’s what I wanted to do but [throat clearing] Dorothy was looked at, looked upon I think as the kingpin of that whole business out there in the, in the cushion room and she paid the price for it and willingly so.

In fact, I remember a few years later she was, uh, [throat clearing] she was the top committee person, she was the first woman on the shop committee and no doubt in my mind could have been the chairman of this Local anytime she wanted to run, run for it I think after that but Dorothy wasn’t interested in any of that.  Obviously, she was just interested in trying to take care of the people.  That’s what she was all about.  I remember she – that five-year probation that couldn’t be, these two individuals couldn’t be involved with anything that even faintly resembled a work stoppage and we had our Olds haul drivers that hauled bodies between Fisher Body and Olds and Dorothy represented those individuals when she was on the shop committee and I remember they were, couple times they were going to do a work stoppage [throat clearing] and of course for her to protect herself she had to tell them you can’t do that, I mean, in an official capacity.  Now what she did in an unofficial capacity was probably support them individuals [chuckle] but her job was in jeopardy and they didn’t want to see her lose her job so they had to kind of work with her on some of those things but Dorothy was highly respected by the people that she represented and by management that she actually negotiated against.

Doug Rademacher:	Dick, you shared that you were offered and Dorothy possibly offered a job in management.  [105:32] Uh, it just brings to the mind of mine, I’ve only heard some stories but what about a guy named Rocky Wright, wasn’t he a union activist that did turn the other side?

Richard Bennett:	Yeah, Rocky Wright was a person that was involved with the union.   He was a union representative and they had an incident [throat clearing] and the story goes, now I wasn’t there, I did talk to Rocky several times later on when he became a management person, [coughing] when he was a general foreman, um, about the incident.  Now the story has it that Rocky Wright laid down in front of a truck and wouldn’t let them through the gate while they were on a work stoppage and Rocky always denied that but I also talked to people that were there at the time and they say that’s exactly what he did.  But be that as it may, let’s say that he did do that, that was very risky business.  He could have easily lost his job but it’s kind of ironic because rather than lose his job later on he became a management person, became a supervisor, became a general foreman, eventually a superintendent in the plant.

Gary Judy:	Gary Judy.  [throat clearing] I just want to know if it changed their working conditions for the people in the cushion room that did have the work stoppage.  [107:04] Did it improve their working conditions?

Richard Bennett:	As a matter of fact, it did.  [throat clearing] Now there was some hard cores out there that you weren’t going to change a whole lot as far as some of the management thinking out there.  They had some, some tough managers out there.  They were not good people to work for and that’s of course because the [inaudible 107:26] people to begin with [throat clearing] but it did change a lot of the conditions.  It wasn’t all for not.  They were successful [coughing] in helping people out, out there in a number of ways I guess.

Now I didn’t work out there at that time with any regularity so I can’t tell you all the ins and outs but I do know and I’m going to revert back a little bit to, to Dorothy Stevens as an example.  Um, they, they gave her fits afterwards ‘cause they knew they had her in a bind following that incident and they even had gone to the extent of [throat clearing] trying to intimidate her in doing things that would try and break her down if you will because she was a very strong-willed lady.  She was then and she is yet today but, um, even to the point of I, I remember telling one time about they assigned her, her assignment was to guard the drinking fountain in the cushion room.  Now can you imagine staying out there eight or nine hours a day watching a drinking fountain?  That’s your job for the day.  And first, first of all it was meant to humiliate her, intimidate her, and secondly that, that in itself was going to be a long, long day standing there watching the doggone drinking fountain and she had to do this day after day and it was just things like that.

They tried all kinds of tactics to try to break her down and not just her, other, other leadership I’m sure went through similar things but the cushion room was noted for probably being more innovative with those kind of things because some of the type of management they had out there.

Male:	[109:18] So speaking of management, in your opinion, in different positions that you’ve held, a wide variety of them, being a union representative, a production worker, International rep, what’s makes a good managemer, a manage, uh, a manager and a bad manager, can you tell us what the [inaudible 109:40]?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I guess I got, I got to go with the golden rule, [chuckle] you know, if you treat people the way you want to be treated, I think you’re going to be a good manager.  [throat clearing] If you put yourself in their shoes and you don’t ask them to do something you wouldn’t do yourself and if you’re open to suggestions and if you’re willing to look at the individuals doing the work as the expert and giving them some involvement, some input into what’s, what’s going on in their life, you’re going to find out those people are interested in making things work and making it work well because that’s their livelihood.  They’re not out to try and give management a tough time.  Management has caused their own problems over the years.  That why we have a union is because of management.  Bad managers make good unions.

Now [coughing] to me, I have worked for good managers in that plant and I’ve worked for bad managers and I’ve gone out of my way to give fits to bad managers and I’ve tried to do it in such a manner where I wasn’t going to get hurt but they wasn’t going to be happy when it was all over and I’ve been pretty successful in certain instances.  On the other hand, I have gone in the other direction for good managers and I’ve gone way, way beyond the call of duty to try and make them look good because I knew what they were trying to do was for my benefit and the other workers that I worked with and sometimes they weren’t even going along with the contract but they were doing it wh-, wh-, when they were breaking the contract they were doing it for the benefit of the workers to try and help them out.  [throat clearing] And, uh, that’s the difference between a good manager and a bad manager I think.  Put yourself – if a good manager puts themselves in the shoes of the person they’re, they’re managing, they’re going to be all right.

Doug Rademacher:	Dick, I’m going to move you on to benefits.  [111:46] What is your most appreciated bargain benefit that you’ve, that you’ve benefited from over these years?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I’ll say right now my pension.  [laughter] Before I retired it was something else, it was my wages and my, my benefits naturally.  [throat clearing] And of course, healthcare being the big issue for the last 25 or more years now, that’s a, that’s a big, big issue.  And I myself with all of my medical problems I’ve experienced over the years as well as my family members, I know that if I had to pay those bills it would be in excess of a million dollars, so healthcare is a big, big issue.  But [throat clearing] I’m very thankful for, for the pension that’s been negotiated, for the wages that I was fortunate enough to make over the years that was negotiated and, uh, and for the benefits.

Doug Rademacher:	[112:46] Did you use the tuition assistance program for your children or aid for the children and their schooling?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I didn’t, uh, my one, and I can’t recall all the details right now.  My one son tried to and he was unsuccessful because there was something there he didn’t quality for and I can’t remember what it was.  Myself, I used the tuition assistance as far as a lot of training that I received from both GM and the UAW, so.  As far as my family members, though, they, they weren’t either able to or didn’t apply for tuition assistance.

Doug Rademacher:	Doug Rademacher again.  [113:32] Dick, did you find yourself involved more in the political arena from being a union rep and has it carried over into your community?  Can you share some stories and how you’ve moved on?

Richard Bennett:	Yeah, I, [chuckle] first of all, being involved with the, with the union made me aware, attending union meetings made me aware of what was going on in politics both locally, statewide, and on a national scale.  It made me aware of a lot of issues and various people’s positions on those issues that were running for office that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to because I didn’t before that.  And, uh, [throat clearing] of course now, my kids when it comes time other than unfortunately I got a couple of stepsons that I don’t seem to be able to persuade sometimes but my kids it’s not unusual for them prior to election calling me up and say “Dad, who are you voting for and why?”  You know, and, uh, so I would tell them.  I don’t tell them how to vote but I tell them who I’m voting for and why and, uh, I think it’s had an influence on my children as far as, and as far as their participation because if I hadn’t have talked politics and tried to inform them of the importance of politics and stuff, they may not have even voted at all.

And I remember my, my third oldest daughter when she was going to school she was telling me about the great debates that she got into with her teacher.  Lived in a, in a predominantly Republican area, her teacher was obviously Republican and, of course, historically, the, the Democratic platform seems to go much more toward working concerns than what Republican platforms do and so she would, she would debate this teacher on a lot of issues.  And she felt confident in debating those issues because I had talked to her about those issues and, and where people stood on them and, and she used to come, she used to come home and say “Dad, we talked about this and that, Teacher said this and that and I fixed him up, I told him he don’t know what he’s talking about.”  [chuckle] She said “I corrected him.”  [chuckle] So overall, I think it’s had a real positive impact not only on myself as far as politics but my kids as well.

Doug Rademacher:	[116:18] Dick, would you share your, you have a passion, a hobby, and it carries over from the talent shows we’ve had and now I’ve seen you do this particular activity at gatherings in Flint, Michigan and, and now you carry on today, so would you share what that is?

Richard Bennett:	Well, I like to pick and grin a guitar a little bit and other things but I’ve – country music has always been something that’s near and dear to me.  I like other kinds of music too but country has been my favorite.  I love country and I love gospel.  And we’ve had a number of benefits over the years that me and various other people have either had a band or formed a band for specific reasons we’ve performed for.  And, um, I played at the Local Union picnic before with a band a couple times, two or three times, I don’t remember.  [coughing] Um, we have played for fundraisers.  We’ve played for political rallies.  And most recently since I’ve retired and moved up north, I’ve kind of fell into a group of people that we’ve played for fundraisers up there to help people out that are less fortunate, particularly people that don’t have healthcare coverage and had some real medical problems and very big expenses.  So we’ve been playing for fundraisers trying to help people, like a 15-year-old boy had cancer and his folks couldn’t afford to pay the bill and a lady that suffered with congestive heart disease and a big hospital bill and couldn’t afford that, things of that nature.

Doug Rademacher:	Okay.  Well, we, we see this plant close and you’re here today and I know you brought a camera.  Uh, Fisher Body is coming down.  We’ve – General Motors has invested quite a sum of money out here for a new product and a new plant.  [118:37] What’s your feelings on the closing, on the future, and what do you tell young people about the future?

Richard Bennett:	Well, from a personal standpoint, I can tell you it’s, it’s sad to me, first of all, to see the plant having to be destroyed.  I mean that’s a place where [throat clearing] I – it helped me grow up, let’s put it that way.  I might have already been grown up so to speak when I got there but it helped me grow up, [throat clearing] all the people that helped me grow up, and so it becomes a real important part of your life going there all those years and so many people that I was fortunate enough to work with, to represent.  And I think back of all the people that in fact I’ve seen a lot of people pass over the years, young and older, that I worked with [throat clearing] and I hate to see it.  On the other hand, I also am glad that they’re building a new plant that our members are going to have a future in working in that new plant and so it’s kind of good and bad, mixed feelings there.  But I brought the camera for two reasons actually, to take some pictures of the plant over there and the other is to take a picture of this committee because I think what you’re doing is a wonderful thing.  [throat clearing]

I kind of envy you because I know you already told me you’ve heard some, some great stories and I know you’re going to hear some great stories further in the future as you continue on this process and that’s great.  [throat clearing] I’ve been involved with enough things, interviewing people for selection of different positions and all kinds of things that really make you appreciate people and you learn things about people that you never imagine just sitting in your, just being in that plant working with somebody.  You don’t really know people, you know them from a working standpoint and that’s all.  When you find out things that they’re involved with on the outside or how they really are in family life or things of that nature, it’s, you just get a whole different perspective on individuals.  I’ve seen some people that I’ll tell you quite frankly I thought pretty rotten people in that plant.  I found out they’re just wonderful people.  It’s the atmosphere in the plant that caused them to do the things they do to or act the way they acted because when they got out of there, they’re some of the nicest people you ever met in the world.  It’s a whole different environment.  It’s a different life for them, so I envy you in a lot of ways what you’re going through now.  I’m sure you’re going to enrich your lives and I’m sure you already have in this process. 

As far as young people, um, I think, and I hate to say this but I think on an overall scale from what I see out there, there’s a whole different work ethic today than there used to be when, when I hired in that plant.  When I hired in that plant, you knew that you had to work for a living for the rest of your life so you might as well get in there and do the best you can if you’re going to make it good for yourself, you’re going to have to make it good for somebody else, who’s going to make it good for you.  [throat clearing] And you knew that and you didn’t back away from working.  You got in there and you did what had to be done.  It wasn’t always fun and it wasn’t always easy but it’s just what you had to do and you did it.

I see a lot of attitude in some of our young people nowadays and I’m not trying to put everybody in a basket here, the same basket, but I just see so much more of it.  I think that they have an attitude that if it’s going to get me dirty, I ain’t going to do it.  If I got to get up too early in the morning, I ain’t going to do it.  If I’m not going to make big money at it, I’m not going to work at all.  And, you know, it’s just I don’t know what the attitude of why the change and maybe some of it, I think a lot of it probably, I’ve heard other people say this and looking back they’re probably right, but maybe we’ve done too much, um, for our children or whatever to the point where they think that they don’t have to do all those kind of things because we were being, maybe being overprotective and trying to do too much for them so they didn’t have to do the things.  They didn’t have to suffer like we had to suffer.  They didn’t have to work as hard as we had to work.  They didn’t have to put up with conditions like we had to put up with, so they don’t expect they should ever have to do that and there just may come a time when they have to do that.

So my, my advice to young people is whatever you got to do, put your mind to it, put your body to it, get in there and get the job done and take pride in whatever it is, I don’t care what you do.  My folks always taught me, it doesn’t matter what you do in life and my grandfather told me it doesn’t matter what you do, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, give it your best.

Doug Rademacher:	Thanks Dick.

Jerri Smith:	Thank you Dick.

Male:	Thanks Dick.

Male:	Thanks Dick.

Male:	It was a great interview.  Thank you. 


/mlc