b"He said to me: What is it that you want? And I said: We want the overtime. It's just fair, you know? So, he went to arbitration at that point. Carl Haynes worked it out with the Housing Authority to pay us the overtime. We got the over-time and it turned out to be rather lucrative. First year, I made $5,000 which was a lot of money at that time.What year did the overtime start?I don't know '92, '93 or something like that.One of my friends made $15,000. He was doing computer work thatno one knew how to do. He was getting a manager's wage and they put him on overtime all the time, so he did well. But I didn't know what was going to happen after that. So, we got our overtime. A year or two later I was getting threat-ened by the administrator, he was in my face.I didn't like the guy at all and I thought: Why do I have to work for thischaracter? Anyway, I called Carl Haynes and said to him on the phone he might never have expected me to call, but I'd love to work for him if he would actually consider it and whatever I did for the managers, I'd do for the union. I camedown for an interview and he told me the next job was mine, as business agent. Within a couple of months, he hired meas a business agent and I went from Housing Authority over to the union. That was in 1995.Going back to when you were a housing assistant and then assistant manager, what would a typical day orweek on the job be like? Well, it was a busy job and the whole year was pretty much the same. Each month you had stuff to do in the begin-ning, the middle and the end of the month. One of your primary jobs was reviewing the tenants incomes. They had tosubmit income papers every year.When you live in public housing, your rent is set by the amount of your income.Whether you remain in public housing is also determined by your income. You examine the family records and see whowas in the household, what income is there and make sure everything is accounting and set the rent for the followingyear. That was done for every tenant once a year, it was a big portion of your job. You also had to go on apartment inspec-tions. You were required to visit every apartment, go in and speak to the resident about their concerns, any kind of repairsor anything outstanding. Sometimes you had to call tenants into the office to collect the rent, not physically, but you hadto make sure they paid the rent. Rent was collected in the bookkeeping office and sometimes people had trouble payingtheir rent for one reason or another. You would call them into the office, speak about it and set up plans for them, workwith the Department of Welfare, see if you could work it out so the rent got paid. Sometimes you had to take legal actionagainst tenants who didn't pay the rent, involving dispossesses and people got evicted occasionally. You were involvedwith legal issues and you were there at the eviction and you did those kinds of things. That wasn't the pleasant part of thejob, but it happened. You also had to call in people that were problems, their kids were messing up, they were sellingdrugs or they had illegal people in the apartments and that sort of thing. A lot of times, people would move in with rela-tives. Sometimes people would die and people would come over and take over the apartment. You had to go find outwho's living there. Your legal was due at a certain time of the month and you had so many days to follow up on certainlegal actions, that kind of stuff. There were different rules and regulations that were put in by HUD [United States Depart-ment of Housing and Urban Development] to the Housing Authority. You were trained on how these worked and how toapply them. Housing did give you good training, I got to say that. They trained us very, very well. Every place you went towas pretty much the same. You could go from Project to Project and do the same job.94 "