Former Avondale Shipyard workers remember the heyday of the business

Jun 03, 2023

Booker T. Sanderfer vividly remembers the morning his supervisors at Avondale Shipyard told him to check a ship's engine room for "something unusual."

"As laborers, one of our jobs was to clean the engine room, and we knew it better than anybody," Sanderfer, who goes by Bud, said recently. "So me and some guys went down there and started looking for something unusual."

When nothing presented itself, Sanderfer and another man returned to the deck and asked the pusher -- a liaison between the foreman and the workers -- what exactly they were looking for.

"'I'm'a tell y'all the truth,'" Sanderfer recalled the man saying. "'Somebody called in a bomb threat, and they asking y'all to look for the bomb.'"

The men froze. It was around 9:55 a.m. on a sunny day in 1972. The pusher added that the bomb was supposed to go off at 10 a.m.

"If we hadn't walked out of there," Sanderfer said, laughing now at the memory, "there wasn't nobody coming to get us."

The bomb threat turned out to be a false alarm. But the story is one of many memories that four long-term Avondale employees shared one afternoon last week at the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union hall in Metairie.

Once Louisiana's largest private employer with 26,000 workers at its peak, Avondale Shipyard is a shadow of what it was during the shipbuilding frenzy of World War II and the ensuing oil booms. The facility was down to 5,000 employees in 2010, when defense contractor Northrop Grumman announced its intent to shutter the yard by 2013, due in part to a decreased demand for naval shipbuilding. It remains open at the start of 2014, but with just 644 workers.

And while the shipyard's new parent company, Huntington Ingalls, says it is working to keep the 75-year-old facility open for the foreseeable future, the company has so far failed to secure new clients from the state's expanding oil and gas sector.

Sanderfer, who is 65, worked for Avondale from 1972 until he was laid off Dec. 13. Two other men at the union hall -- Andrew Croome, 61, and Harry Lee Thompson, Jr., 66 -- were laid off in late 2013. Only Ray Mercier, a 62-year-old automation technician, is still employed there.

Avondale is remembered as an oasis of well-paying blue-collar, working class jobs for thousands of residents of New Orleans. High school graduates whose parents couldn't afford college tuition could get a job at Avondale and receive training for skilled jobs like welding, pipefitting and insulating. And there was always plenty of work.

"When I arrived, there were signs posted all over the shipyard saying, 'Work every day!'" said Thompson, who started at Avondale at $1.90-an-hour in 1969, after serving a tour in Vietnam.

"If you wanted to, you could work 12-hour shifts seven days a week," said Croome, who showed up in 1971 for $2.30 an hour. "There was all the overtime you could get."

In the 1970s, Avondale secured commissions to build 27 destroyer escorts ("They take the hit for the destroyers," Croome explained), plus a number of cargo ships and liquified natural gas carriers. The men at the union hall fondly remember the names of the vessels, among them the Green Valley, the Delta Queen and the Philippine Bear.

Still, working at Avondale could be hazardous. Asbestos was outlawed in 1972, but it was still present in many older ships that came to the shipyard for repairs. The use of respirators was not enforced at the yard; instead, workers wore rags over their noses as they blew dust out of the compartments with air-hoses.

"I knew a lot of people who died from asbestos exposure," Thompson said, adding that it often led to lung cancer and other complications.

In the years before the Metal Trades Union came to Avondale in 2000, the men agreed, production took precedent over safety. In lieu of earplugs, workers tucked cigarette butts into their ears to protect against the piercing sounds of metal-chipping machines. Fumes from the degreaser, used to clean a ship's stove, sometimes caused men to hallucinate, they said.

Death was a constant risk of the job, the men said, though the management didn't like to admit it.

"The saying was, 'Nobody ever died at Avondale, they died on the way to the hospital,'" said Thompson. "But I sure saw some people die at Avondale."

On one occasion, a 40-ton crane toppled, killing its operator and a worker on the ground. On another, a welder took his torch to an empty barge, unaware that it still contained gas fumes. The barge exploded, killing several people on board and rocking the 1,200-ton destroyer escort beside it.

In the late 1970s, a worker slipped off a narrow, handrail-less catwalk and fell 98 feet into the bottom of the ship. Not long after, a female employee plunged through an uncovered anchor-chain hole into the water below. The current sucked her under the ship. She was discovered days later when the ship pulled out.

Immediately after such accidents, employees were often ordered to install the very safety mechanisms that would have prevented a death. The morning after the woman fell through the anchor hole, for instance, Croome discovered new coils of rebar encircling its mouth.

Still, the men felt fortunate to work for Avondale. It was, in many ways, "the place to be," they said. During a round of layoffs in the '80s, Croome took a pay cut to continue working there. Sanderfer got laid off twice, but managed to get re-hired when work came around again.

When Croome was hired in 1971, having graduated from the Alcee Fortier High School in Uptown, the shipyard's recruiters asked him what he wanted to be. "Anything," he said. He became an insulator the next day, and gradually learned how to weld, seal fiberglass and insulate air-conditioning ducts and water pipes aboard naval warships.

It may sound dull, Croome said, but "it could be real interesting working on those big ships. I enjoyed it."

To boost morale, the shipyard held an annual fishing tournament, the Avondale Fishing Rodeo. Croome won the rodeo's bass category several times, before graduating to larger fishing tournaments along the Gulf Coast. Last year, he was named Angler of the Year in the Gold Rod Bass Club in LaPlace.

The work at Avondale could be physically grueling, but endurance was a point of pride among its workforce, the men said. For years, those working on the dry docks in winter burned shipping pallets in 55-gallon drums for warmth. Before the yard invested in forklifts, workers unloaded everything they could by hand. There was no cafeteria, so they ate lunch outside, rain or shine. Flies pursued them everywhere.

Then there was the heat. Barge carriers they worked on were powered by boilers. Walking into a boiler room, the men agreed, was comparable to being slapped in the face.

Thompson, who served in the Army Reserves for 23 years and earned two combat medals, did two tours as a staff sergeant in Iraq in the 2000s. Soldiers in his unit marveled at his ability to withstand the desert heat.

"If you've ever worked in a Louisiana shipyard in the summer," he told them, "this ain't nothing but a piece of cake."

But the men, all union stalwarts, said the unfair labor practices at the yard were harder to tolerate. In the pre-union days, some men worked for 20 years without a raise. A worker could be fired -- and they were -- for the following infractions: running in the yard, jumping rope on deck, sliding down the handrail of a gangway, and talking back to a superior, the men said.

African-American workers faced additional hurdles. In the 1970s and '80s, Thompson said, it was harder for them than it was for white workers to learn skilled crafts, which paid more than unskilled labor jobs.

"Some of the white guys who knew those crafts wouldn't talk to you," he said. "If you wanted to practice, you had to do it at lunchtime, or hide it."

In the '90s, the Teamsters tried to recruit Avondale workers, but the company defeated them. The Metal Trades Union, which encompasses affiliates like the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and the International Association of Machinists, finally succeeded in 2000. Croome, Sanderfer, Thompson and Mercier were all heavily involved in the early contract negotiations.

Today, they each hold top positions in their unions: Croome and Thompson as, respectively, president and vice president of the New Orleans Metal Trades Council; Mercier as president of the local machinist union; and Sanderfer as president of the local boilermakers union.

As union leaders at Avondale, the men said they served as mentors for younger workers, guiding them toward the more lucrative skilled-labor jobs. They said they also helped institute a four-year apprenticeship program at Delgado Community College, which offers college-accredited courses in crafts like carpentry and metal work.

But given the recent layoffs at Avondale, the men voiced concern over the futures of their former apprentices. "I watched a lot of young guys come off the street, get their G.E.D.s, and go on to make $23.40-an-hour as skilled laborers at Avondale," Croome said. "Many of them can't make that kind of money elsewhere. I'm worried they're going to wind up back on the street."

Huntington Ingalls has offered a $10,000 relocation plan for former Avondale employees interested in joining its shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., where an amphibious transport dock ship is now being assembled. But seniority accrued at Avondale is not transferable to Pascagoula, Croome said, meaning workers would have to take a pay-cut.

Perhaps as a result, few former Avondale employees have relocated to Pascagoula, Croome said. Those who tried the two-hour commute each way from New Orleans quickly wrote it off as unmanageable, he said.

Huntington Ingalls recently announced its intent to re-open Avondale's former outfitting yard in Waggaman, where ships built at the shipyard were modified and adjusted. In December, a spokesperson for Huntington Ingalls said the smaller yard could employ between 200 and 250 workers under a collective-bargaining agreement reached last fall. As yet, however, no new hires have been announced.

Sitting beneath a poster reading "America Works Best When We Say ... Union Yes," the former Avondale workers reflected on their departure from the shipyard after 40-plus years. Croome retired in October, and Thompson and Sanderfer each plan on retiring soon. But they still rise before daybreak -- Croome, who had a one-hour commute from Vacherie, at 3:30 a.m. -- ready to head to work.

"Some bad stuff happened, but it was a good job," Croome said, adding that he would have kept working at Avondale for another four or five years. "It was a place where you could be a middle-class worker and play a role in the community."

Croome wore a hat bearing the words "USS Somerset," the name of the 684-foot warship that passed sea trials in October. It is expected to be the last ship that Avondale builds.

"I'd get real attached to whatever ship I was working on," Croome said. "You always got a little sad when you saw it moving down the river without you."