The union president, Joe Mazurs son, said, Mr. Wojcik, your Helen was one of the first women in that mill. I grew up hearing her name. You tell me they said she quit in 1991.
I told him. The audit. The break in service. The forty-six thousand dollars. The payments stopping.
That was no break in service, he said, and I could hear him getting hot. In 1991 Local 1014 was out on an authorized strike. Helen walked that picket line in the snow. A sanctioned strike does not count as quitting, it does not break a single day of pension service, and the fund knows it, or ought to. Somebody ran an audit that counted the strike as a gap, and they picked a widow to send the bill to.
The pay stub taped inside Helens hard hat was from the strike fund, 1991, proof she never left the company, only stood with her union.
They tried to take back the pension that keeps me warm, over a strike my wife walked in the snow thirty-four years ago.
Local 1014 put its own lawyers on it, at no cost to me, and the union had the strike records going back decades. The fund reversed the audit. I did not owe forty-six thousand dollars. My monthly payments started again, with the months they had stopped paid back in full.
I keep Helens white hard hat on the mantel now, with all its union stickers. Thirty-one years she ran a crane at Gary Works, one of the first women to do it. She paid her dues every single month, and when it counted, her union paid her back.