Before losing his hearing 16 years ago, Rollie Workman enjoyed his job and the steady income that supported his family. But when this self-described “60s hippie” discovered that he could no longer hear the music he loved, or the familiar voice of his beloved wife Jo Ann, Workman suddenly found himself rethinking how he was going to put food on the table.
A victim of bilateral progressive nerve deafness, Workman had lost well over 60 percent of his hearing by the time he was just 43 years old. As a late-deafened adult, the Fort Wayne, Ind., native found himself in unfamiliar waters, unable to communicate with anyone. “I was waiting on hearing aids,” he says. “Everything had to be written on paper. I couldn’t read lips yet and I didn’t know sign language. We didn’t have a box for closed captioning on the TV or a TDD or anything.” Although he tried writing on notepads, as a poor speller, Workman eventually became frustrated with that method of communication and considered it the ultimate failure.
“Forty-three years of hearing was now over,” he recalls. “Silence was not golden for me at all.”
Workman found himself unemployed for three years. Unwilling to try speech therapy or sign language, he was depressed and angry. Eventually, he took a temporary job caulking windows. “My first job as a deaf person,” he says wryly. “I didn’t have to talk to anyone and they hired me for the tax credit that the state gave employers at that time.” Six months later he was reassigned to a full-time job for a company that made go-carts. It was there that he was introduced to the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agriculture Implement Workers of America (UAW), a national labor union. It was also where he decided to work on his communication. “I knew that no employer would meet me half way when it came to being able to communicate,” Workman remembers. “If I was going to support my family, I had to be able to communicate like a hearing person.” He had just received his hearing aids, but his hearing was deteriorating steadily. So he began working hard – at speech therapy, signing and learning to watch people and their mannerisms. It all helped.
After six years, Workman took a job on a production line at a factory four times larger than the place he had left. Learning the ropes was hard. For a time, he was forced to revert back to the painful pen-and-paper means of communication, which he viewed as a major step backwards. Then one day, a breakthrough: One of the women he had been working with asked Workman if he would teach her to sign. Pretty soon, others at work were also taking sign language classes.
Despite being able to sign, Workman discovered that with training and concentration, he was actually quite adept at lip reading, which today is his preferred method of communicating with coworkers. With the help of a speech therapist, he has also learned how to maintain his voice at a normal level when speaking with others.
Workman does still require certain accommodations when interacting with others at work. Sometimes he needs someone to interpret for him and he prefers to sit up front in a room full of people so that he can read the lips of the speaker. “People have to tell me when there is a fire drill or when it is break time, since I can’t hear the alarms and bells,” Workman explains. “One thing they have done for me is to hook me into the automated attendance call-in line. My TTY will work on that system, so now I’m connected through my computer.”
Workman had been at his job for six years when, to his amazement, he was asked to run for president of the UAW local. He had opted out of monthly meetings because he didn’t think he would fit in. And, says Workman, he was pretty certain it took the local some time to ask him to participate because they were unsure of how much work would be involved to keep him up to speed at a meeting. “It took them nine months to talk me into it and then I only said yes because I didn’t think they would vote me in. Wrong. Won by a landslide.”
The UAW would never be the same again. When his plant closed in 2006, Workman moved to a new plant, where he became president of UAW Local 3055 in Columbia City, Ind. Workman is now on the executive board of UAW Region 3 Auto Council. He is also a member of the Region 3 executive board of the Civil and Human Rights Committee, which, at Workman’s urging, has developed an interpreter list, not only for individuals who need assistance on the job, but also for their family members and friends who may occasionally require someone to interpret for them. It has been such a successful project that interpreter lists are now also being developed at the union’s national level.
“Our committee at UAW Local 3055 has opened up to a whole lot of things on how we look at everyone’s human rights,” says Workman. “There are more and more people with disabilities that are coming into the workplace. I heard on the news recently that there is a warehouse where 40 percent of the employees have disabilities.” Workman admits that having been a hearing person for the first 43 years of his life, he simply couldn’t relate then to people with disabilities. Now he aims to create a bridge of understanding for others.
“The UAW has been a good place for me to start as more and more people with disabilities come into the workplace,” says Workman. “People with disabilities love working and being able to take care of their families just like anyone else.”
To help bridge the gap between the hearing and nonhearing, Workman and his wife maintain an online store called Silent Connection (http://silentconnection06.com) which sells T-shirts and hats with text “written” in sign language. “Sometimes just seeing a hand sign on a shirt is enough to open a conversation,” Workman smiles. Avid travelers, he and his wife are often stopped by fellow explorers simply because of the sign language T-shirts they are wearing.
Workman admits that losing his hearing and the ways he has grown as a result have made him a better person and brought his family closer together. “I could never have done this without my wife standing by my side for 40 years,” he says. “I fell more in love with her than I knew was possible. I am now so much more aware of what is going on around me. I fought God for a while. Now I know if God lets me wake another day, then there isn’t another human being on this earth that can mess that up. Silence isn’t golden, but life is golden.”
