Editor’s Note: Louise DeSalvo is a writer, professor, lecturer and scholar who lives in New Jersey. She has written several books, including a memoir — On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again — which takes a unique look at the pain, hope and turmoil involved in moving.

"Louise, can you help me?" This from my father, who never asked me for help. I was a senior in college, and my father wanted me to help him write a letter to his boss, asking to enroll in a pension plan – my father called it a "bonus plan" – reserved, he’d been told, for "professionals."

My father wasn’t considered a "professional." So, unlike the engineers he worked with, he wasn’t eligible. But my father was a highly skilled machinist, and his job – in a prestigious research facility – was to make working test models of ships, submarines and racing yachts from engineers’ crude plans. My father’s work was so highly regarded that when National Geographic ran an article about the facility, he’d been chosen to appear in a photo. But the rules were the rules. Engineers got pension plans; machinists didn’t.

I sat at our dining-room table at my portable typewriter as my father told me his story. Years later I learned why he couldn’t write the letter himself: He’d stopped attending school in the eighth grade; he was dyslexic; he couldn’t spell. But he was smart, curious, well-read, hard working and he’d been a conscientious, loyal employee for 15 years.

My father earned less than I did at 16 in my first summer job. He knew he was underpaid for his work, and he believed he was entitled to a pension. After he retired he’d be living on Social Security, and he needed a pension to supplement that sum. Criteria for determining who received pensions were inconsistent; no one had adequately defined the meaning of "professional." Men like him who didn’t get yearly bonuses reserved for the "higher ups," as my father called them, couldn’t possibly save for their retirement. Yet without my father’s work, the research facility couldn’t function: "You can’t test a ship without a model," my father said. "Those damn engineers," he’d told my mother. "I spend half my time fixing what they screw up."

My father didn’t want to pressure his employers about their "moral obligation" to him. But he wanted what was fair.

My father won his case. He was granted a pension – not as much, surely, as the engineers. But something.

Winning meant more to him than just money. He believed he’d proven his worth. Still, he understood that the work of men like him wasn’t equitably rewarded.

"My life’s been worthless." This from my father during the last lucid week of his life. "I’m a member of a dying breed. No one has any use for men like me anymore, men who make things." Through the years, he’s tracked plant closings. Whenever I see him, he reports how many working men and women have lost their jobs since we last met. The cause, he believes, is a lack of vision, poor management, greed. He can’t understand why executives in these failing corporations earn so much money, can take home so many millions in bonuses. "Hell," he says, "if I did my job as poorly as they did theirs, I would have been sent packing, without so much as a ‘fair thee well.’"

I find a copy of my father’s letter as I’m cleaning out his papers five years after his death. He’s saved it for 43 years, and this lets me know how much my writing it meant to him. I find it as millions of dollars in bonuses are given to AIG employees. I also find a monthly statement listing earnings from the "bonus plan" my father fought for: $264.17.