Four Men Who Refused to Stay Silent

I run first shift receiving. For years I ran the dock for the whole east side of the building. Prairieland Farm and Home is a regional distribution center on Route 36 outside Wellman Bend, Illinois. We supply about sixty feed stores, hardware stores and farm co-ops across five counties. Pet food, fencing staples, work gloves, mineral blocks, bagged lime, rubber boots, and in the spring about a million garden hoses. Two hundred and ten people work there. It is the biggest employer in town after the school district.

I made $27.15 an hour, which came to $1,086 a week before taxes. I have a wife named Trudy, who works the teller line at the credit union on the square, a daughter in Champaign finishing her master’s, and a truck payment with fourteen months left.

The last week of October is the rush. Beans were coming out of the fields, everybody who runs cattle wanted their winter mineral and their lime, and the building was running behind. Bart came down the dock at 9:30 with his clipboard. There was a truck for the Mattoon co-op set to roll at 3:00, forty-two pallets, and we were short eleven.

“Corporate’s got a man coming Friday,” he said, to me and to everybody on the east dock. “Thirty-eight days from the 450 mark. I need those pallets staged and on the trailer by two-thirty.”

There is a white board by the front door of that building, and the number on it says how many days we have gone without a recordable injury. When I clocked in that morning it said 412. At 450 the whole plant got a catered lunch from the barbecue place in Mattoon and a jacket with the company logo, and the foremen got a bonus. Bart’s, I found out later, was $2,100.

I was proud of that board, to tell you the truth. I had walked past it a lot of times.

The cross aisle between nine and ten has a yellow chain hung across it at forearm height, with a laminated sign that says no forklift traffic with raised forks. The rule is a good rule. The aisle is narrow, the racks go twenty feet, and a load carried high will hit a beam.

Bart walked to it with his clipboard under one arm and unhooked the chain himself. Arlo Kopp was wrapping a pallet two feet from his elbow and I was twenty feet off with a pallet jack, close enough to see his hand on the clasp.

“Go through here,” he said to Calvin Spangler, who was sitting on the lift truck with a double stack of bagged lime. “Saves you the loop around the staging lane. Five minutes a trip.”

“Bart, the forks are going to be up,” Calvin said.

“Then go slow.”

That was the whole order. Four men heard it. Calvin on the truck. Arlo, who was 64 and had been wrapping pallets next to me since the first Bush administration. Eddie Sorrell, who ran the dock scanner from his little desk at the end of the aisle. And a 23-year-old named Jared Wills, who was two months into his first real job and kneeling at the mouth of the aisle with a roll of stretch wrap and his back to everything.