Talked To Some Union Guys Building Buses And The Secret Service, Also Kamala Harris Was There

Vice President Kamala Harris (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

The news cycle has been dominated by deadly military jets shooting down mysterious but apparently benign objects with $400,000 Sidewinder missiles. So, naturally we have all been galloping around cackling like a pack of wild hyenas about it. Hey, I’m not judging. I’ve been irresponsibly speculating with the best of them.

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That being said, other things were happening slightly before this, even though they now seem like they happened a hundred years ago. One of these things was Vice President Kamala Harris barnstorming the country to tout the White House’s recent accomplishments and to promote the administration’s agenda moving forward.

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I happened to be in town on the day of one of these local events featuring Kamala Harris, and, figuring it might be a good thing to write about, decided to try to score an invite. It was kind of a surreal experience.

First of all, if the vice president is visiting your community, and the event is not open to the public, it is really difficult to get in if you are not already invited. It took even a media luminary like yours truly — and I cannot emphasize enough just what a winning personality I have over here on top of this massive writing talent, just the whole package — several hours of emailing people to figure out how to apply to get pre-credentialed as press.

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This mountain summited, you then get kind of a vague email with a time and place where you need to be. Being a member of the press, next you obviously do as much snooping as possible beforehand to figure out what kind of facility you’re going to.

Turns out this particular event was to celebrate the hardworking members of the Communications Workers of America labor union and their accomplishments in constructing electric passenger buses for the manufacturer New Flyer. In fact, shortly after arriving I was directed onto one of those very buses.

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As the buses filled with CWA workers, I got some stares, and eventually questions, about the suit and tie getup. They warmed up to me pretty quickly though.

Before long a good-looking young gentleman named Giovanni Solares took the seat next to mine. He’d been working at New Flyer for about five years, and his role was installing flooring on the buses. I looked down at my feet and back at him; the flooring was immaculate. Solares described how these buses started as nothing at this facility, but left ready to drive, like the one we were on. It was impressive.

We didn’t go far on the bus. At the back of the building, everyone waited outside for a few minutes while the Secret Service finished setting up a security checkpoint, complete with magnetometer. Agents checked us in one by one. Inside, hundreds of folding chairs (I’d soon help a couple other guys set up even more chairs near the back — it got very full) were opposite a podium framed by three gigantic electric buses.

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Then, everyone waited on the vice president. For hours. Being a writer burdened with nothing more than a notebook and a voice recorder, the evident misery of the cumbersomely equipped television media amused me. Of course, the chatty chatted.

Another New Flyer worker, John Koltes — an 18-year veteran of this particular plant — told me how it was straight-diesel buses being made when he started. He showed me his employee ID: they apparently don’t update the photos. The flowing dark hair of the boy in the photo had turned silver on the man before me. Koltes said he liked that they let him drive the nearly completed buses now, right before the safety inspectors did their work. We discussed his interest in writing poetry, and he invited me to stop by to sing with his barbershop quartet sometime.

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I also had a very nice conversation with a Secret Service agent. Which I promised not to write about substantively, because, well, it’s literally got the word “secret” right in the name.

Finally, the speeches started. Of the several speakers who preceded Kamala Harris, Wade Walvatine, a maintenance technician and vice president of CWA Local 7304, seemed to be most popular with the crowd.

After Walvatine, America’s Vice President took the stage and offered some stirring remarks. Her celebrity status was undeniable. The crowd loved it. Harris focused more on the health consequences of breathing diesel fumes than on climate change, which was an interesting, and probably good, choice. She mentioned the $5.5 billion-plus Congress has invested in new electric transit buses, and the well-paying union jobs places like New Flyer were creating. It was a good speech.

Still, considering everything that preceded it, I could not help but be a bit underwhelmed with a speech that lasted only around 15 minutes. Inevitably, though it was a pleasure listening to the vice president, I learned a lot more about the new green economy from hours of talking to the union laborers actually building it.

I lingered for a long time after the vice president’s motorcade pulled away from the facility. I’m not sure why. Finally, I went back onto another New Flyer bus set to bring me around to where I started. John Koltes was behind the wheel.

I smiled, and said, “They really do let you drive these things, don’t they?”

He beamed back at me. “They sure do.”

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

ATL Finance, Finance, Finance Docket, Green Economy, Jonathan Wolf, Kamala Harris, Labor / Employment, Labor Unions