Terry Walls: 'Unions are the best thing to come along since sliced bread' (toxic spill story)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/heartofthemovement/hom_terry_walls.cfm

Terry Walls: 'Unions are the best thing to come along since sliced bread'


Terry Walls
Photo Credit: Thomas Pinski/IAMAW District 837Terry Walls knows that having a union literally can be a life-or-death matter.

He was working at the McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) aircraft plant in suburban St. Louis a few years ago when a container of chemicals fell and burst open on a warehouse floor.

A longtime activist with Local Lodge B of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 837, Walls was the lodge's safety committeeman at the time.

"I looked up the OSHA requirements, and I saw that the chemical was very volatile," he recalls. "If the fumes were in a contained area, they could have blown up."

Walls immediately reported the spill to the superintendent, but "he didn't think it was serious," he says. So Walls took matters into his own hands. "I ended up calling the fire department, and they came out and cleaned up the mess. They were in protective yellow suits when they took care of it. It was very toxic. People could have been injured."

Walls started at the plant as a sheet metal and rivet assembler, as his father was for many years. "He started in 1956," Walls explains. "It was prestigious to be an African American working at McDonnell-Douglas back in those years. I wanted to build airplanes myself, and I was able to get a job there in 1975 right out of high school. I was building the vertical stabilizers for the F-15 wings. Later, I moved on to being a production materials coordinator."

FULL story at link.