Hoerner-Waldorf

• Continued from Trane Home Comfort Center

I moved to Southern California in 1971. After some time as an assistant manager of an apartment building, and as a tow truck driver, I went to work as a telephone solicitor for Trane Home Comfort Center. I absolutely hated that job so, in one of only a couple of times that I left one job without having another one in line, I was left without a job.

I went to ManPower, at temporary job placement company, and the first place they sent me to was a Hoerner-Waldorf bag plant in Fullerton. There were five of us from ManPower and they had us scraping and cleaning the floors around some of their bag machines that they weren't running on the graveyard shift, since they ran only a skeleton crew during the third shift.

The other four guys were the laziest people I have ever seen, and I was embarrassed to be seen with them. They would actually sit in the lunch room after the buzzer clearly signaled the end of a break, despite the fact that all of the regular employees were going back to work, staying there until someone came to get them. I went back to work when I was supposed to.

Hoerner-Waldorf bought out my contract after two weeks and hired me as a starting level employee, which was as a stacker, placing the finished bales of bags onto the pallets as they came out of the machine.

Before too long, an opening came up as a machine operator, and I applied for it. Although I wasn't particularly mechanically inclined, I learned that if the machine was running well when I got it, it would continue to run well as long as I kept it cleaned and oiled, and that if I paid close attention to any changes, such as a new noise, I could usually avoid any major problems.

Hoerner-Waldorf was a publicly traded company that was still in the hands of the Hoerner and the Waldorf families. Rare in Southern California, the bag plant was non-union. Several votes to unionize the plant failed. Although we weren't earning as much money per hour as employees with any of the four unionized bag plants in the area, we were paid quite well, and we were treated very well.

Everyone was salaried. Although our pay was calculated as if it were per hour for a forty-eight hour week, we generally worked only forty, and we were paid overtime if we worked over forty, and we were paid for at least forty-eight hours regardless of the number of hours worked, and vacations were calculated at forty-eight hours a week.

Although the company obviously wanted us to produce, there were no quotas, and no one expected someone to pretend to be busy if there was nothing to do. As a machine operator on the graveyard shift, as long as my machine was running up to speed and producing a good quality product, I could make a bed out of loose bales of bags, bring in a coffee pot, as I usually did, and recline on my table while my machine was running, getting up every now and then to check quality. A new roll of paper would be good for an hour and a half.

When things weren't running well, we'd work our butts off. Since the graveyard shift usually ran only three of the company's six grocery sack machines, when someone had reason to believe they had a problem coming, such as a machine that didn't sound right, we could simply set the same order up on another machine while the machine adjuster fixed whatever the problem was on our assigned machine.

Being naturally competitive, those of us who were running the same type of machines would compete, and the shifts would compete but, while we'd be congratulated for breaking plant records, no one seemed to be placing any pressure on anyone, in large part because they hired and promoted people who didn't need to have pressure put on them.

Rather than shutting our machines down for lunch or breaks, as long as they were all running well, one operator would often watch two or even three machines, especially if we were going for a plant record, which was an advantage that the graveyard shift had.

When an opening for machine adjuster came up, I applied for that and was promoted. Again, while I came to know my way around a paper bag machine reasonably well, I am not mechanically inclined. When I inherited a machine from the last shift that wasn't running well, I struggled with it. However, if they were running well when I got them, I could keep them running well.

Some machine adjusters would wait for something to break before fixing it. I wasn't sure if I could fix it if I waited for it to break, since one thing often leads to other things going wrong, so I would take it upon myself to blow the machines off with compressed air during roll changes, make sure they were kept oiled, and making sure that things were tight whenever the machine was down for any reason, such as roll changes, print changes, etc. As long as they were running well, my job consisted of walking around with a cup of coffee.

Hoerner-Waldorf was a good company to work for. Once while I was on vacation, my car broke down in some little town in Arizona or Nevada, and the only service station had to send out for a part. I called work to let them know that I'd be a couple of days getting back. When they asked me where I was, and who was doing the work on my car, I was hurt, because it sounded like the plant manager didn't believe me, and was planning to check on my story. However, I soon learned that wasn't the case. When I went to pick the car up, everything had been paid for.

Unfortunately, Hoerner-Waldorf lost a proxy fight to Champion Paper Company and we became employees of Champion. Since they brought in all of the negatives that might be expected in a union plant, but without the pay and benefits to go with it, the union was voted in within a year.

But that will be another post.

• Continued on Champion Paper Company

 

Yes, it is. Plus, they paid plenty well enough to earn a good living, plus terrific working conditions. Pretty much anyone who had anything resembling a work ethic enjoyed coming to work at Hoerner-Waldorf, although we generally referred to the place as Horny Waldo, and were known to cut the labeling stamp to remove the last "r" from "Hoerner" and the "rf" from "Waldorf."