18. The Foreman

Work, Men, Muscle, Weather: A Memoir of Building Houses

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The Foreman

So, I was artificially elevated to the position of foreman. I had not expected, prepared, or schemed to get the promotion, in fact, I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready. Gene, Jeff’s actual foreman, had broken an ankle in the fall we had all taken together (16. Men In Pairs) and he wasn’t recovering anytime soon. This was the second fall, in thirty-five years of falls and mishaps, in which I had been extravagantly rewarded by good fortune. I walked away from it. Although it seems unlucky to admit, after tens of thousands of hours of climbing ladders and scaffolding, of using skilsaws, tablesaws, chopsaws, and chainsaws, I have all my fingers and no broken bones. Every six months I developed a bad back that had me crawling to the bathroom, but in a couple of days, I returned to work—I kept everyone going, sans toolbelt, and the crew covered for me. In a week, I was good for another six months. Jeff couldn’t stay on the job all day, he needed someone, and as is often the default in construction, he opted for the “known quantity” meaning me. Although his experience wasn’t any more than mine, he offered to help when he could, which was a relief, not so much for his assistance, but for the recognition that I might be in over my head.

I had never been a boss of anyone. I was not even much of a master of myself. Everything felt different when I was the one doing the deciding, and yet nothing felt unfamiliar. Whatever philosophy I had of telling other people what to do was assembled on the fly, and based on presumptions I hardly knew I had. Maybe it was my unqualified usurpation of the role of foreman that made me adopt such a moderate style of leadership, I don’t know, but once I began to work with the crew, it felt very comfortable. Later on, perhaps, I rationalized some justification, although I know, even now, it was predicated upon a single conviction: People don’t like being told what to do. It was my opinion that human beings felt their freedom keenly, that authority does not often know its own weight, that the work was hard enough. If men were required to wear a yoke, the yoke must rest lightly on their shoulders. Now I laugh when I see someone pretending to act like a boss, according to how they think bosses should act. When I told a man what to do, I always made sure to thank him for doing it. And when he completed a task, I acknowledged his accomplishment. This I did briefly, without fuss, and it cost me nothing. I also understood that every gesture of gratitude on my part only served to further establish my authority. I learned most men were not only fine with being told what to do, if done considerately, but they were often relieved to be shed of the burden of figuring it out for themselves.

Dee’s brief but pithy education flowed back to mind. If at first the crew knew nothing of my inexperience, I have no doubt that I confessed it on day one. The houses we built were like the houses I had helped Dee build, on steep hillsides where my housebuilding infancy had been born and bred. When years later I finally worked on a flat lot, it felt like there was something incomplete about the experience. A set of building plans in those days was little more than a dozen pages, and a house was fastened with boxes and boxes of nails. We hammered all day long, and rarely used a nailgun, although a gun could spit out nails at four times the speed. But with its air hose and compressor, the gun was awkward, too big for some nailing positions—and the laborers, who were most likely to use it, could never tell if the nail had hit solid wood behind the plywood surface they were nailing. So when you looked behind a wall, you’d see whole rows of nails missing, what we called “shiners.” Of course, there were always moments when a decision had to be reached, or a setback appeared, and I suddenly had to stop and think. Even a small pause on the job site could eclipse momentum. Those first times when all the bodies stopped moving unnerved me, but over the years, I learned that if I wasn’t sure what to do, simply soliciting the opinions of the crew very often produced a better idea. And by reserving the final decision to myself, I could simultaneously exert authority and seem open-minded.

If keeping all the bodies moving was half the battle, laboring alongside a crew, subject to the same hardship, put the foreman’s direction beyond reproach. Rather than leading with oratory, he was expected to demonstrate what he wanted from a crew—by doing it. If he could hammer faster and cut straighter, his leadership was a forgone conclusion. Tasks that included risk could not be delegated, so he himself always cut the fascia board, hanging over the edge of the roof while someone gripped the back of his toolbelt. And if a beam that stuck out ten feet from the deck and fifteen feet above the ground needed trimming, he was expected to walk out and calmly cut it. A foreman could try to run a crew by raising his voice but it only worked with a crew who was actually afraid of losing their jobs. If you shouted at good people, it ended with “fuck you” and screeching tires. The only possible response to a man who is shouting at you is to do as little work as you can get away with. I knew an insulation contractor who would regularly humiliate his employees. Everyone on the jobsite would wince when his voice began to rise, and his employees went about everyday with a terrorized look on their faces. When a house was ready for insulation, I dreaded it because he was always lowest bidder. He must have understood how much everyone hated him—probably that was exactly why he kept doing it. When I found out that he hired all his employees from a rehabilitation center connected with a church in which he was an upstanding member, it all made sense. They were slaves.

Wages were flat for decades and cost of living raises unheard of, so compensation for a crew often took alternate forms. Because a man could only increase his take-home pay by improving his skill, I got in the habit of working and talking, answering questions as I cut and nailed. Laborers were poor at petitioning for a raise, so when a man’s skills improved, I advocated for him, and Jeff was usually happy to kick in a few bucks an hour. And to alleviate some of the burden on the laborers, we came up with a plan to build wooden chutes from the street to the floor of the house, so the piles and piles of lumber could be moved without each stick having to be carried by hand. Lumber that would take a day to move was moved in an hour. Everyone loved the sight of those 2x4s and 2x12s flying down the chute and sliding across the living room floor. After years of humping lumber down steep hillsides, the laborers were freed to work as helpers to the carpenters, which they much preferred, and the carpenters much preferred having helpers.

There are other theories of leadership, I know—and if mine was mostly mild, it was all the more important to draw the line on a man who didn’t pull his weight.

I began to monitor how my voice sounded when I delivered instructions, saving urgency for when it mattered. If I had to fire someone, I’d let my voice get hard, so he was warned of what was about to happen. I remember driving an astonished day laborer back down the hill after firing him, and paying him off with cash from my pocket. The lifted mood of the crew in the days after a firing was always confirmation of its rightness. Jeff’s own son, Jay, had been a crew member off and on, unfortunately, and a problem from the beginning. Getting in fights, arguing, skipping work, showing up late. Each time, I asked Jeff for advice—and to his credit, he told me to use my own judgment. So, twice over the years, I accepted Jay’s apologies and promises to do better, and three times I was forced to fire him anyway. The last time, he locked the door on us as he was grouting tile in the master bathroom, refusing to leave the job. We heard him crying inside for hours, squeezing water from the grouting sponge as tears ran down his face.

In later years I began to bring my own crew along with me, no matter who I was working for. Sally’s job was a spec project on an upslope lot between two already built houses on a lower street in the Montclair hills. She awarded the plumbing contract to a man who had been recently released from prison, supposedly, for killing a policeman. Jimmy was a noisy, chattering, middle-aged man who could not resist making sexual advances to the men on the crew. About this, they were amused and tolerant, mainly because he took it upon himself to pay for everyone’s lunch everyday. I didn’t like him, but I was resigned. When he started working weekends against my wishes, and installed a gas line on a wall where I had yet to hang plywood (about which I had warned him) I had a laborer undo the gas line and install the required plywood. The next day he returned, and within minutes, I heard a scream from the floor above and then the rattling sound of Jimmy pounding down the stairs, his continuous wail wavering with each step. He burst into the kitchen with threats, waving a 2x4 above his head. I slipped the framing hammer from my belt (in case the rumors about him were true) and the whole crew came downstairs to see what was happening. But it was just a standoff. Benny, my bodybuilder laborer, hovered protectively near me while I endured ten more minutes of Jimmy’s screaming until Benny helped him gather his tools, and he drove off. In all those years, this turned out to be the most hilarious and serious challenge to my foremanship.

Most men just wanted their labor acknowledged. Small mistakes were hardly worth the time it took to bring them to a man’s attention. You couldn’t be afraid to point it out—you had to—but quickly changing the subject, allowing the man to fix his mistake was always the right play. You never ever called a man out in front of his fellow workers. All problems in construction are repairable. It is called remodeling. If a foreman showed some consideration for each man’s task, nothing else was necessary. Over the years, not only did I know each man’s job, but I could anticipate the snags he would likely face. I began to realize that my job was not just telling people what to do, but helping to remove the obstacles to doing it. If a man had strengths and weaknesses, my job was to design the work around his capacities. If you assigned a task to a man that he could not do, that was your mistake, not his. Once I had no choice but to assign a single laborer to dig a three-foot deep footing of a large addition by himself—a task that would have been more humanely assigned to two. But I had no choice, and by himself he dug for a month in winter, wheelbarrowing the dirt from the front of the house to the back of the house where it formed an enormous mound. When the whole crew was finally assembled together on the same job, we dubbed the mound he had built “Pedro’s Hill”—a fitting monument to his doggedness.