Archives for September 2023

As longtime Writing Boots readers know, I am committed to never offering anything truly useful here, lest I begin resenting my readers, as moochers. But I guess I don’t feel bad about letting my communicator correspondent Larry Crittendon offer a potentially helpful analysis of the current contract negotiations between U.S. automotive companies and the United Auto Workers. And also, all other contract negotiations by all other employers and all other unions, past and future. The artwork is Larry’s too. Thanks for the wisdom, Larry. —DM

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Although I don’t have a role or stake in the negotiations, I’m following the contract talks between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers. I don’t have any inside sources, so I can read only the public coverage, including the usual posturing and pronouncements from both parties.

And I’m recalling the days when I had a front row seat during negotiations between a public utility (my employer at the time) and the IBEW local. I was assigned to the management negotiating team, and tasked with producing the daily updates to managers. This was long before the days of texts and emails, so I wrote my updates and recorded them on a voice mail machine. Managers from around the company could call the “secret” number and listen to my carefully worded summaries of progress and potholes for the day. The summaries were carefully worded because we knew that the union negotiating team probably had access to the number, and listened carefully to every word.

My tenure included a couple of major contract negotiations that lasted several weeks, and I learned a few things that still apply:

Public announcements don’t equal private positions. Each side must maintain a tough public persona. The management team needs to appear tough to company leadership, and the union reps need to be tough in the eyes of their members. Communications from either camp should tell of tense moments and incremental gains, and should not mention funny exchanges or ice cream breaks.

Don’t wrap up too early. Nothing would be more unsettling to the masses than for the negotiations to conclude well before the deadline. Both sides would assume that they didn’t have the best possible agreement from their team, and would wonder if a better deal was left unattended on the table.

Don’t assume that any public conflict between negotiating teams translates into conflict between salaried and union employees. In fact, they sometimes root for each other. When I was handling communications, I knew that my colleagues on the salaried side of the company were quietly hoping for a generous wage increase for union employees because we knew that the company would be obligated to match the increase over on the salaried side. And the union reps would use any increase in salaried compensation as leverage in the next round of contract talks.

I hope that the UAW and the automakers wrestle right up to the deadline and produce a contract that the membership will support. I hope that union membership will grow, and that the companies will prosper. As noted, I don’t have a stake in the negotiations, but I do have a 14-year-old truck that I might need to replace one of these years, and I hope to have some good options.

Took a seven-hour drive with my 13-year-old niece Parker last weekend, as part of a family caravan to visit my daughter (and Parker’s cousin) at college, in Ohio. About halfway through the drive (most of it on the old Lincoln Highway), I started telling Parker what a rare pleasure it is to spend that kind of time in a car alone, with somebody you love.

My college pal Tom and recently tallied it up: Since we started in our 20s, we’ve taken more than 50 trips together to places beyond our homes of Chicago and Cleveland. Sometimes to destinations as modest as Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, but lots of times to far-off places, too, like Nova Scotia, Ireland and Ecuador.

When we were young, these were mostly driving trips.

Since I bought a motorcycle when I was 40 and we both developed a dangerous taste for riding long distances, ours are now mostly motorcycle trips.

Motorcycle trips might be more adventurous and in some ways more thrilling, but lots of communication is lost on a trip like that.

The time we drove a pick-up truck from Chicago to Las Vegas without stopping—

—roaring through a case of beer, gallon of coffee and a carton of cigarettes—we got as much communication done in those 27 hours than we did in three weeks riding motorcycles to Nova Scotia and back.

Why?

Because when you ride motorcycles together, you’re on totally separate trips for each three-hour stretch between tank refills. You’re in your head—in the total way one is in one’s head over the hypnotizing roar of the engine and scream of the wind—and your buddy is in his. You might be ruminating about a troubled relationship, a work problem, getting home—while he’s inevitably in another mental dimension and might as well be on the bottomside of the planet. (And you cannot believe how much meditation you do, even while making difficult technical turns on mountain switchbacks, which is why I’ve called a motorcycle “a daydreaming machine.”)

Instead of telling long stories, cracking jokes, free-associating, remarking on things seen along the roadside or heard over the radio and sharing thoughts and feelings in real time, as you do on a long trip in a car—as young Parker and I joyfully did last weekend—you ride like hell for a few hours, you stop at a roadhouse, you get off your bikes with grunts and sighs, you take off your helmets and rub your itchy scalp, you walk into the bar, you sit down, you rub your wind-numbed faces back to life, you order a beer, and you think of things to share from all those miles gone by. But the one thing you do have in common is a stupor of mutual temporary introversion from all those hours inside your helmet, so it takes awhile to talk coherently.

Then one guy says something like, “Hey, did you see that big hawk, when we went through that valley with the stream running alongside the road?”

And the other guy usually says, “No.”

And that’s about it.

There will be talk during dinner, later; and breakfast the next morning and maybe lunch the next day. And we’ll have a grand story to tell one another in the end.

But it won’t be that spontaneous road trip talk that can make two people feel, for once, that they are on the very same page, in the same rhythm, in the same small compartment for endless hours, over consecutive days. The kind of trip where, as I wrote long ago, “As you cruise the last few hours in gathering quiet, you begin to realize that a four-day conversation between two friends amounts to a kind of Constitution As Far As We’re Concerned.”

After all the disruption and disconnection that began with COVID (or did it begin when Trump was elected?)—and for many of us never quite got fixed—I think a lot of us could use one of those trips, one of these days.

I didn’t know how badly I needed one myself.

Thanks for coming along, Parker Bosch.