Waste not, want not always a good goal

With the economy in the tank and worries about federal spending, I can’t help but look back on my civilian employment for the Department of Defense at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash. I was part of the Shipwrights union in Shop 64.

Our main responsibility was building scaffolding wherever it was needed. We also constructed the dry-dock settings for all ships coming into the shipyard, identified specific points on the hull and bulkheads using levels and transits and a myriad of other tasks. Unlike many of the other shops, it kept us outside and moving around the shipyard, which was great on a sunny day and miserable on a cold, wet Washington winter day.

Just like many other places across the country, the shipyard had unions representing all the different shops. The union-negotiated workday started at 7:20 a.m., had a 47-minute lunch, and was over at 4:02 p.m. When the morning whistle sounded it was time for the safety briefing, a 30-minute work assignment meeting and then 20 minutes of exercises to stretch and flex.

After this was over, you went to see the job site you would be working, put together a materials list, tool requirements and whatever else you needed for the job. By then, it was time for a 10-minute morning break, which sometimes lasted for a half-hour depending on which senior mechanic you were assigned to. Finally, after break you could begin work. Then about 15 minutes before lunch it was time to go back to the shack and drop your tools. After lunch, there would be another safety briefing and then back to work until the 3 p.m. break. Finally, about 20 minutes before the end-of-the-day whistle, it was time to head back and drop your tools in order to get ready to go home. On a really busy day, you might get a total of three honest hours of work done.

I recall a memo mandating that from that point forward, rolling chairs with four legs would no longer be allowed in the shipyard. Someone had fallen out of their chair and broken their wrist and such chairs were deemed a safety hazard. The offending chairs were trucked to the dump — some brand new — and replaced with several hundred new five-legged chairs.

Another time, several hundred brand-new, heavy-duty table vices were discovered still wrapped in their grease bags in one of the older buildings. We weren’t allowed to use them, and regulations prevented them from being sold, so a welder was paid about $20 an hour to sit on a dock and use a torch to destroy the vices all day for a few weeks.

Then there was the special retractable roof system we built over the ship we were scrapping. When the crane needed to pull something out of the ship, we could roll it open and then close it again to keep the weather off the workers. The union mandated that only Shop 64 was allowed to touch them. This meant 12-hour overtime shifts on the weekends lounging in our shack waiting for the call to run out and open and close the roof.

During my third year at the shipyard, I got a call from a superintendant asking if I was willing to do temporary duty in San Francisco for a week. The government had closed down a building and a handful of us were to go down, disassemble all the office furniture, load it into a truck and prepare it for shipment back to Bremerton.

They estimated it would take a week of working all night (we couldn’t do it during the day because the truck would be blocking an alley).

I was provided with estimated fuel money (or an airline ticket, my choice), a room in a hotel right on the Embarcadero (tourist, water-front location in San Francisco), a rental car and $75 per day on top of my regular pay. When we arrived, we discovered that there was a one-day wait for the truck and were told to just enjoy ourselves while we waited.

On the second evening we went to work and without any supervisors or union stewards on hand, finished the job in one night. I figured we would be headed back to Bremerton the following day, where we would be heralded as heroes and congratulated for our speediness. Nope. They were annoyed. Apparently, it was too much of a hassle to change everything so we were told to go ahead and finish out the trip.

On another temporary duty assignment I was sent to San Diego for a summer to be on stand-by in case they needed scaffolding to work on an aircraft carrier that was tied up dockside on Coronado Island. I was given a fully furnished apartment in La Jolla with maid service, a car and a $75 a day per diem. We were paid overtime since we were on the job site 10 to 12 hours per day.

But most of our time was spent soaking up the San Diego sun, watching the SEALS practice on the bay and waiting for the next page out. Glenny and the kids loved that trip.

In conclusion, I say, “thank you, taxpayers,” and share in your frustration regarding wasteful government spending.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.