The Gary Puleio Story, Part 4: Multiple Murderers - Matewan - Journal

The Gary Puleio Story, Part 4: Multiple Murderers - Matewan - Journal
The Gary Puleio Story, Part 4: Multiple Murderers
There are three killers responsible for Gary Puleio’s death: two corporations, one wallowing in penny-ante greed and the other criminally negligent, and, squeezed between them, a powerful illusion pushing him toward a single decision.
Accessory Before the Fact
With The Donald making regular visits to the Children’s Hospital as more and more problems surfaced related to the Apert’s, Gary’s short-haul job with Modern Transportation, a trucking company in nearby Portersville that specialized in construction hauling and heavy equipment, became more than just a job—it was a lifeline. He was hauling sand from Chardon, Ohio to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant in Meadville, PA, just up the road as trucking goes. Two, even three trips a day would still allow him to be home with Donald at night.
That job was stability: it was being home nights, it was uninterrupted care for The Donald, and it meant that Gary’s determination to be or remain middle-class despite all obstacles was still alive and functioning. They may have been on the edge, but the edge was holding. As the years went by and The Donald’s treatments and surgeries eased some of his difficulties, the accomodations that had to be made along with them would ease as well. And now there was Gary Jr. to think about, too. At the very least they deserved a home and all the things the other kids had. They could keep it together. If they could just hang tough, things were bound to get better.
And it might have worked out that way except that Modern Trans was looking for ways to cut its payroll. In i998, they fired Gary’s best friend and fellow trucker, Martin Gall. Gall was older than Gary, a long-term employee with senority pay and a 401K plan along with three weeks’ vacation. Gall didn’t know why he was being fired after all that time and only a few years from retirement, so he asked. His boss answered, “We need new blood.” Translation: they wanted to divest themselves of expensive older workers and replace them with younger ones who would work cheap.
This tactic, like so many, goes back to Jack ‘The Axe’ Welch at GE, one of the most profitable global corporations in the world. In the mid-80’s, GE was enjoying tremendous profits—$$10-15 Bil$$/yr on average—but its profit percentage hadn’t changed much. What that meant was that while investors were reaping healthy dividends, their dividends weren’t constantly growing. Reagan’s pro-business Administrations and laissez-faire approach to regulation—when he bothered with it at all—had opened the doors for a massive re-alignment of American business practices. Gone were the restrictions on corporate accounting tricks; gone was any concept of protecting the rights of American workers to unionize; and gone was any threat that the government would enforce the laws and keep corporate employers playing fair with their employees.
Welch—whose main talent, really, was less as a corporate manager than as a predictor of government trends—was the first one to see what Reagan’s policies meant to business if extended to their logical conclusions. As soon as he had wangled himself the job as GE’s CEO, he started taking advantage of those Business-Knows-Best policies. First, crying poverty and whining about global competition, he pretended that GE’s tremendous profits didn’t exist and ordered deep cuts in every non-managerial dept of the General Electric empire. Tens of thousands were fired in massive lay-offs, their jobs shoved onto the remaining employees who suddenly found themselves responsible for an amount of work that three or four people had previously done, and who were too frightened of losing their own jobs and joining the unemployment line with the rest of their ex-co-workers to complain. Managers helped by making sure that all those left standing understood that everybody’s job was on the line and nobody was safe unless they went along.
The stock market responded by pushing GE’s stock up significantly for the first time in nearly a decade. Investors were ecstatic. Jack was a Wall Street Hero.
But because it was basically an artificial, one-time jolt, GE’s stock price soon settled down—higher, yes, but not growing. So Jack came up with his second tactic, and again it involved boosting GE’s stock on the backs of its employees. Looking at the payroll sheets, Welch realized that if he could find an excuse to replace older workers making high rates of pay with younger workers right out of school who would work for entry-level pay, he could save $$millions$$ in payroll and create another artificial jump in GE’s stock price. Since his deal with GE meant that roughly a third of his paycheck would be in stock and another quarter in bonuses based on how well that stock did, he had a major incentive to boost the price of his stock any way he could. So he did.
Tens of thousands more were laid off in every GE subsidiary. They were told that the company had to ‘cut back’ because it was in deep financial difficulties—a lie—and it was not for months that the newly unemployed workers discovered that their jobs had not, in fact, been cut, only re-cast with younger, less expensive workers.
GE’s stock rose again.
By this point, the rest of corporate America had taken notice of the extraordinary success of Welch’s pre-emptive strike. Why ‘pre-emptive’? Because previously this tactic had only been used by companies who really were in deep trouble and had little choice. Welch showed them that Reagan’s Labor Dept wasn’t interested in prosecuting corporations who had donated huge amounts of $$ to either his campaigns or the GOP’s Republican National Committee. He argued, ‘Why wait until it’s so late in the game that it doesn’t do you any good? If you do it now while you’re still profitable, you’ll prevent your company from facing potential disaster.’
By 1998, Jack’s ploy had become so common that in many companies long-term employment was simply a thing of the past. They hired people promising them pension plans and retirement benefits they had no intention of providing, and when those employees had begun to ‘cost’ the company too much money, they were fired on some pretext or other and the excuse given was likely to be the same one Martin Gall heard: ‘We need new blood.’ In ten short years it had gone from an unthinkable betrayal of a corporation’s responsibilities to its workers and their community, to a standard practice everyone accepted. In the process, corporations had moved from seeing themselves as a part of that community to seeing the community as just another expendable employee—if they don’t give us what we want, we fire them and move on. Profits are all that matter. The community either services our pursuit of money or we’ll go find one that will. The roots of globalization lie at Jack Welch’s back door.
When Modern Trans fired Martin Gall, they were following Jack ‘The Axe’ Welch’s prescription for healthier profits—fire people. Fire expensive ones, hire cheap ones. Two years later, when Gary reached the age when his retirement was threatening to be fully invested, he was fired, too, and at the age of 52, after years of working for the same company, Gary found himself pounding the pavement looking for a new job.
Redi-Mix
What happened after Modern Trans fired Gary has become an all-too-familar story in the new, post-Reagan America of Social-Darwinist, every-man-for-himself ‘individualism’ and the post-Welch era of Indonesian sweat-shops and compounds of teenage workers in Honduras and Sierra Leone and Sri Lanks and Mayanmar and..and..and..and…. He couldn’t find a job. Pennsylvania, along with Ohio and Michigan, had been one of the states hit hardest by factory closings and plants moving overseas to find ‘friendlier’ governments, lower (or non-existant) environmental standards, and labor so cheap you could buy a man there for less than a pair of sneakers would cost here. There wasn’t much around. Donna again:
He did a series of “temp” jobs while collecting unemployment. They never seemed to pay enough to meet the burgeoning demands of his family, ie credit card debt, mortgage payments, minivan payment etc etc. The “middle class” myth is like a toxic poison carrot waved in front of people like Gary. He took that job at Redi-Mix even though he knew it was risky. In fact, he told Martin not to look for work there.
‘A toxic poison carrot’, and the stick that went with it was just out of view. Redi-Mix had a terrible reputation for safety and a worse reputation as a lousy employer, yet faced with the prospect of losing the respect of his family and friends, not to mention his self-respect, Gary took a job he knew was dangerous because it was the only one he could find that carried within it the promise of higher pay and a theoretically greater stability than washing cars or serving up fries.



Gary and Gary Jr


He had his family to think of, yes, but somewhere in the back of his mind—as it is in the backs of most of our minds, whether we admit it or not—he couldn’t bear to let go of the myth, nor could he bear the thought of the criticism if not hatred that would come his way from former friends who would see his plunging finances as a fall from grace, who would never understand or forgive him if he took a lesser paying job because it was safer and ‘doomed’ his family (that’s how we think of it) to poverty when he didn’t have to.
Maybe he thought he’d keep looking and something else would turn up. Maybe he thought he’d be able to find a way to make it work. Maybe he thought it was better than nothing. What he hadn’t counted on was a company so deaf to safety concerns that it would send an untrained truck driver with acrophobia up a tower without safety equipment or training just because ‘he was the new guy’ and he’d be too afraid of losing his job to say No. He probably hadn’t thought anyone could be that callous, that careless with human life.
He was wrong.