Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

ensconced in the fine Spanish-style mansion the partners built for themselves high above the damsite, he received regular progress reports from Crowe during a weekly pinochle game. It was Shea, however, who provided the day-to-day liaison with Crowe, straightening out difficulties before they reached the field superintendent. Kahn, meanwhile, added legal affairs and oversight of the workers’ feeding and housing to his financial responsibilities. The fourth executive-committee member, Henry J. Kaiser, was designated chief lobbyist and dispatched to Washington. The posting was fine with Kaiser, who had suffered heat prostration during one tour of the damsite and was never to visit it again thereafter.

Soon after its formation, the four-man executive committee was confronted with a crisis that threatened to shut Boulder down. Under intense pressure from his profit-conscious bosses, Crowe had been driving his men mercilessly. “Some of the carpenters were working so fast, they’d put handfuls of nails in the cuffs of their pants, [so] they wouldn’t have to keep going back to the keg for more,” one Boulder veteran recalled. “One foreman was so tough, we used to say he had three crews: the one working with him today, the one he had coming on tomorrow, and the one he had just fired. “7 By August, the daytime temperatures at Boulder hadn’t dropped below 98 degrees for a solid month, and the workers were ready to walk off the job. Led by a group of “muckers”-tunnel shovelers, whose salaries had been cut when they were displaced by mechanical shovels-the workers compiled a number of grievances. Among their complaints were the primitive sanitary conditions and the fact that they were being charged half of their $4-a-day salary .for meals and the privilege of living in a Six Companies tent. They demanded that their pay be raised to match the $5.50 to $6

per day workers were making elsewhere in the Southwest, and that a number of safety improvements be made, including the provision of ice water on the canyon floor, where 13 men had already died of heat prostration. Unless Six Companies complied, the workers said they would strike.

Crowe was not intimidated. Rejecting the workers’ demands, he reported to his superiors, “We are six months ahead of schedule’ … and 38

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we can afford to refuse concessions which would cost us $2,000 daily or $3 million in the seven years we are allowed to finish the work. “8

In the face of Crowe’s intransigence, the ranks of the dissidents, who had originally numbered no more than a few hundred, began to swell, and by August, totaled 1,400, two-thirds of the Boulder work force.

Still unmoved, Crowe announced on August 10 that Six Companies was firing the entire group. They were to be given three days’ pay and were to pack up and leave the damsite immediately.

To ensure that they did, and to quell possible rioting, the government sent in troops from Fort Douglas, Utah. Meanwhile, state and federal officials were brought in to search the workers’ cars for firearms and liquor. In what would be the first of a series of bitter strikes at Boulder, the laborers, many of them members of the American Federation of Labor or the Industrial Workers of the World, refused their severance checks, took up pickets and set up their own camp in the desert.

The unions rallied quickly to their cause. “We feel it’s a crime against humanity to ask men to work in that hell-hole of heat at Boulder Dam