Interesting note about the toilet paper.
In the early '90s I worked at a bridge fabricator (Teamsters Union Shop) that hired mostly spanish speaking (Allegedly Legal) Central Americans. The company actually had to hold meetings in Spanish to educate the Central American Immigrants about the proper disposition of used toilet paper. They were throwing it in the pail used for the wet paper hand towels. In a single week we would hire three people to clean the bathroom and they would quit on the second day of work! Some of those cleaning people were Spanish speaking too.
Well, one persistent problem we had was, that even though we quickly solved the problem with the used toilet paper disposition, we never solved the new problem we created. When the paper hand towels got flushed instead of being thrown in the pail, and clogged up the toilet just about every day. We never could create the mind set, that the hand towells were different than the toilet paper segments, and could not be flushed.
We tried one of those continuous rolls of blue cotton towels that you would pull down to get a dry segment, and the uniform company would change it out and rewash it as needed. At the time we were drilling about 30,000 holes a month using Hougen Drills. They started cutting the rolls of the cotton towels up for cleaning rags to sop up the cutting fluid from the drilling operation. This was despite the fact that we had bales of clean rags purchased for that purpose. Of course the uniform company overcharged us in the back charges department, and we dumped them in less than a month.
Then the bales of rags would get looted for use as hand towells in the bathroom, because the CAs preferred them over paper towells. We tried to bring them back out for re-use in the cutting oil clean-up, and nobody would touch them!
Then in the summer of '91, we hired about 70 short term, temporary, CAs as laborers for a sewer treatment plant contract, and they worked outside assembling small fiberglass bolted components. (These were definitely Legals, because it was a special Federal Government program where the Feds paid for the insurance Etc, and supplemented the wages and paid the Union dues and initiation fees) There, they wouldn't use the Port-o-Sans we hired, many would just go squat in the weeds along the fence! It seemed that there was a continuous crisis because the CAs were used to outhouses or just squating in the field or whatever!
Despite the cultural differences,they were great workers. They gave you an honest days work in the hot sun. Some of them were quick learners and were eventually hired on as permanent workers in the shop.
Hey guys,
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