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Saturday, May 21, 2005
Roofers
The house being built across the street, it needed better roofing than plywood. With all the recent rain, that plywood must have begun to swell. Finally today a roofing 'company' showed up. It was a shabby little old Econoline van with the top nearly invisible under a forest of ladders. Five little men got out, no, not Leprechuans, little skinny Hispanic individuals gabbling loudly to one another in rapid-fire Espanol. One of these was clearly a kid too young to go up on the roof. Another seemed to have something wrong with him. First he sat down on a pile of lumber, took off his shoes and socks, and played with his toes. Then he put his shoes back on, but strolled around the house with his shirt half on/half off, held down at waist level by his arms. Now and then he sat down and appeared to suffer from abdominal cramp. That left three workers. They tore into the job as though it would be their last chance to prove to St. Peter that they deserve to go to Heaven. My, the frantic scramble. Since the work began well after noon, I assumed that they were just on hand to set up for tomorrow. Not so. In less than three hours, those three little men completely tar-papered the roof, cleaned up the site, repacked their van, and disappeared. At first I watched their progress, than gave it up as too scary. They showed no regard for their safety, leaped from section to section. Stood upside down pounding nails on an eighty percent grade. A man below threw material up to a fellow above who jumped to catch while standing on steep roof with no safety equipment of any kind. They just leaped around like mountain goats. It was sickening to see. Each minute I was sure that I would witness an ugly fall. Didn't happen. They are such a small "company" that their rusty old van had no lettering on the side. I guessed that this means they are illegal Mexican workers, going around doing roofing jobs like other migrant workers travel to pick fruit and veg. Good workers, though. Outstanding.
In today's paper I see that Mexican president Vicente Fox is in trouble with the NAACP for saying, "America needs the Mexican worker who will do work that not even blacks will take on." Blacks, of course, are furious about the word EVEN, and it was a silly, demeaning thing to say. I have no idea whether a black roofing company was offered that job or whether they would have taken it if offered. I do know that there are very few people of any race who could have accomplished a neat, efficient tar-paper roof on that entire house in three hours with only three speedy little workers. Those men deserve a chance to work in the USA. Actually, they're too darn good for this country. Nobody else here works like that. The only thing an American worker might hold against them is that if they lived here all the time, no contractor would want to hire anyone else.
An all-black crew did the masonry. An all-white crew framed the building. Now an all-Hispanic crew papered the roof. Of the three groups, if I were a contractor, I'd try to get a permanent lock on the services of those roofers. All three crews did a good job, but the roofers were unbelievable.
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