Guest Post by James the Wanderer
In 1981 I was a fresh young fellow, just out of college, and needed a job. I joined the Port Arthur Research Laboratories of Texaco Inc. in Port Arthur, TX, which was the most lucrative offer I had gotten out of college. It was one of a couple of offers I had received at the time; another was a company that made fibers for carpets and other things, Millikan. There was something of a stigma on them at the time, for periodically the owner would fire an entire corps of engineers if something went wrong, and was known for it; other companies would eagerly hire the fallen, since it was known that Millikan did this, despite having only hired the best he could find. But I was not interested in this, so I went for stability, which was TXC (their stock exchange symbol back then, hereafter a handy shortcut for the name); they were known for their veteran employees, and rarely fired anyone except for theft, incompetence or similar good reasons. I was neither a thief nor incompetent, so I took their offer.
Here I must apologize; despite the passage of over a quarter-century, I have not been able to establish that ALL the people I worked with are dead, retired or otherwise employed. And TXC had people of honor, character and discipline, which I have come to value wherever I find them; so EVERY name here is a pseudonym, to protect those who might still be serving in some capacity for their successor company, which turned out to be mainly Chevron, or somewhere else. I have no interest in gossip, nor maligning by association those who honorably do their jobs in this world. The worst perpetrators in these stories are dead, so it serves no purpose to name them either.
This article is to demonstrate by example the challenge of working honorably for an organization that is corrupt at the top. And how, despite the existence of honorable men and women (such as those who worked for TXC all over the world), a corrupt organization is doomed eventually.
I didn’t work at PARL for long; about eighteen months. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers were restless; there was strike fever in the air at the oil refinery next door, but the Research lab staff didn’t think there would be one; after all, they had “gone out” a few years earlier, and several members of the union had lost cars, boats, even homes when they had insufficient funds coming in to keep up their payments; they were too hurt from the last time to go out again so soon, so if there was a strike it would be short, a kind of face-saving gesture.
