Trump Voters To Oscar Winners: Shut Up About Politics

For a period of time, I was honored to be a union safety representative at my plant. Though I find faults with unions, I find virtues too. Safety is one of those things that a good local union president choosing people with a passion for safety can have significant impact on the membership.

I was impassioned, I had my specialities, and I would try to assure our members were safe consistent with OSHA, and various other agencies that are used as references by OSHA and just otherwise promote good safety and industrial hygiene.

I quickly learned if you talk safety all the time, people zone out, they don’t want to be preached to. There’s a time for safety talk and a time for informal talk common in the mill. People know the ones that are dedicated to safety, and they come to you with questions. Years after being off safety (the new local president was a sleeze bag, he tossed the entire safety department except for those that gave him political advantage, and appointed people that would promote his reelection, which he didn’t succeed at 3 years later) people would come to me with questions, I’d research them, and give them the answers.

An international safety trainer told me this story:

He worked at a plant that handled products where respirators were warranted, but, being years ago, the company wouldn’t provide them (no OSHA or no OSHA requirement). He persisted, finally the company gave in and bought them, but in the sarcastic ways of heavy industry, didn’t buy the cartridges. Back to the drawing board, he persisted, over many months I’m sure, and the company started buying the cartridges.

But guess what? Respirators and cartridges in hand, the membership refused to wear them. So he appealed to them, again and again, with no luck. Showing up at a union meeting, he rose to discuss the respirator issue, and people were yelling for him to sit down, they were tired of hearing about it. He told them he had one more thing to say, and after that, they’d never hear from him. He told them that exposure to the chemical they worked with reduces their, ahem, manhood. They told him they didn’t believe him, so he produced technical literature that described that effect.

Respirator use shot up nearing 100% after that meeting, and each year they held an informal session where they would measure to be sure they hadn’t lost anything. (I’m sure the measurements were done by each union guy of himself in private, but after working 25 years in the mill I have no problems believing they’d do such a thing, guys can be crazy).

Hollywood directors, actors, etc., cudgelling us with their disapprobation of Trump falls on deaf ears, nay, worse then deaf, it’s irritating and the more they discuss it the less people want to hear. It’s human nature, perhaps that’s why Hollywood doesn’t understand the principle.