Working

by Studs Terkel

  “I get pretty peeved off lots of times, because I know I can do other work. They have their quota of blacks and they have just enough so you can’t say they’re prejudiced. I’m trying to graduate from college and I’d like to go into industry, where the money is.

  “I have all sorts of qualifications for the kind of work I want, but none has been offered to me. In 1969 they ran an ad in the paper wanting a junior accountant. I have a minor in accounting, so I applied. They wanted a person with good aptitude in mathematics and a high-school graduate. I had an associate arts degree from junior college and two years of accounting. They took me to the head of the department. He asked, ”What makes you want this type of work?’ ” (Laughs.)

  You can compare the plant to a miniature United States. You have people from all backgrounds, all cultures. But most of your foremen are white. It seems a lot of ’em are from Alabama, Arkansas, a large percentage Southern white. They don’t hide their opinions. They don’t confront me, but I’ve seen it happen in a lot of cases. Oh sure, they holler at people. They don’t curse, cursing is not permitted.

  They’ll do anything to get production. Foremen aren’t supposed to work on the line. If he works, he’s taking away a job from a union man. The union tries to enforce it, but they do anything they want. Then they complain, “Why didn’t you get your people to come to work every day?”

  There’s quite a bit of absentees, especially on Mondays. Some guys just can’t do that type of work every day. They bring phony doctors’ excuses. A lot of time, they get the wife or girlfriend to call in: “Junior just broke his leg.” (Laughs.) “Your mother-in-law’s cousin died and you have to rush home.” They don’t send you home unless it’s an emergency. So lotta guys, they make up their own lies. Monday’s the biggest day. You’ll have three days off right in a row.

  The company is always hiring. They have a huge turnover. I worked at Harvester for five years before I started college. You would find guys there, fifteen years service, twenty, twenty-five. You meet an old-timer here, you ask, “How long you been here?” “About three years.” (Laughs.) I’m twenty-nine and one of the oldest guys around here. (Laughs.)

  Auto workers are becoming increasingly young and increasingly black. Most of the older workers are a lot more—shall we say, conservative. Most of the older men have seniority, so they don’t have to do the work I do. They put ’em on something easy. Old men can’t do the work I do. They had one about a year ago, and he had three heart attacks. And they finally gave him a broom. He was about forty. Yeah, forty, that’s an old man around here.

  I read how bad things were before the union. I was telling some of our officials, don’t become complacent. There’s much more work to be done, believe me. One night a guy hit his head on a welding gun. He went to his knees. He was bleeding like a pig, blood was oozing out. So I stopped the line for a second and ran over to help him. The foreman turned the line on again, he almost stepped on the guy. That’s the first thing they always do. They didn’t even call an ambulance. The guy walked to the medic department—that’s about half a mile—he had about five stitches put in his head.

  The foreman didn’t say anything. He just turned the line on. You’re nothing to any of them. That’s why I hate the place. (Laughs.)

  The Green House, that’s where the difference of opinion is aired out. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the company comes out winning. If I have a problem, I go to the Green House about it. They might decide against me. They say, “This is it, period.” I have to take the time off. Then I can write a grievance. It could be three weeks, three months, three years from now, they could say, “Back in 1971 you were right.” So if a union doesn’t want to push your particular grievance, you’re at the mercy of the company.

  They had a wildcat, a sit-down related to me. This particular foreman . . . I think it’s jealousy more than anything. They don’t like to see, you know—I’m going to school every day. I would bring my books and I’d read during the break. They’d sneak around to see what I’m reading. I seldom miss a day’s work and I do my work well. But this guy’s been riding me about any little thing. One night he said the wrong thing.

  I was going on my break. You’re supposed to wear your safety glasses all the time. They don’t enforce these things. I took mine off just to wipe my forehead. He said, “Get your glasses on!” It’s these nagging little things building up all the time. Always on my back. So I grabbed him, shook him up a little bit. And I went on to lunch. I came back and they were waiting for me. I was supposed to have been fired. I got the rest of the night and two days off.

  These guys that worked with me, they didn’t like it. So they sat down for a while. I’d already gone. They refused to work for about twenty minutes or so. Now this takes a lot of nerve for the guys to . . . good guys. But oh, I definitely have to get away from this. (Chuckles, suddenly remembering.) One night, there was something wrong with the merry-go-round. We call it that ’cause it goes round and round. They had to call maintenance right away. About six guys came, white shirt, tie, everything. You shoulda seen these guys. On their hands and knees, crawling all over this line, trying to straighten it out. They wouldn’t stop it.

  Now I couldn’t see myself—what kind of status would I have, with my white shirt and tie, crawling on my hands and knees with a crowbar, with grease all over . . . ? It was pretty funny. Some of these guys who’ve been on a farm all their life, they say, “This is great, the best thing ever happened to me.”

  Phil Stallings said his ambition is to be a utility man. More variation to the job.

  Well, that’s a hell of an ambition. That’s like the difference between the gravedigger and the one who brings the coffin down. So (laughs), he can have it. My ambition is higher than Phil’s.

  There’s no time for the human side in this work. I have other aims. It would be different in an office, in a bank. Any type of job where people would proceed at their own pace.

  Once I get into industrial relations—I got corporate law planned—then it won’t be a job any more ’cause I will enjoy what I’m doing. It’s the difference between a job and a career. This is not a career.

  HOBART FOOTE

  It’s a trailer, off the highway along the Illinois-Indiana border. The quarters are cramped. He lives with his wife and two children: a boy fourteen and a girl thirteen. The dog wanders in and out aimlessly. The Holy Bible, old and scuffed, on a shelf, is the one visible book.

  The clangor of trains, Gary-to-Chicago-bound, freights off the sidings of the nearby steel mills, switching and coupling cars; it’s pervasive, it trembles the trailer.

  He is a utility man at the auto plant on the day shift. He has been there seventeen years. He is thirty-seven and looks older.

  “l’m from Alabama, my wife and kids are Hoosiers. I was gonna work a few years and buy me a new car and head back south. Well, I met the wife now and that kinda changed my plans.

  “I might’ve been working in some small factory down south or I might have gone to Detroit where I worked before or I might have gone to Kalamazoo where I worked before. Or else I mighta stuck on a farm somewheres, just grubbing off a farm somewhere. You never know what you woulda did. You can’t plan too far in advance, ‘cause there’s always a stumblin’ block.”

  From the word go, the clock radio goes off. About four thirty. First thing comes to my mind is shut my eyes just a few minutes. Yet I know I can’t shut ‘em for too long, I know I gotta get up. I hate that clock. We lay there and maybe listen to them play a few records. And she gets up about five minutes till. Of course, I say, “Get up! Get up! It’s day, get up!” I tell you, after goin’ on seventeen years, I don’t want to be late. You’re one minute late clockin’ in, they dock you six.

  I get up when the news comes on. Sometimes it’s five to five, sometimes it’s five o‘clock. The assembly line starts at six. I go to the washroom, comb my hair. That’s routine with me. I have to get every hair in place. Drink maybe a cup of coffee or half a cup
of coffee. Maybe a whole piece of toast and sometimes I might eat two pieces of toast—depends on how I feel. In the meantime, I’m watchin’ that clock. I say, “I gotta go, it’s eight minutes after, it’s nine minutes after. At twelve minutes after, I gotta leave here.” You get in the car. You tell your wife, of course, you’ll see her tonight. It’s routine.

  We do have a train problem, goin’ from here to the assembly plant. I cross one set of tracks twice, then two other sets of tracks once each. Long freight trains, going from Chicago to Gary. I have waited as high as ten, twelve minutes. Then you’re late.

  If I see a train crossing, I keep going. It’s a game you’re playing. Watch the stop light, catch this light at a certain time and you got the next light. But if there’s a train there, I take off down Cicero Avenue, watching the crossings. Then if I make her okay, you got a train just over at Burnham line, you got a train there you gotta watch for. But it’s generally fast. (Takes a deep breath.) Well, these tensions . . . It don’t bother me, really. It’s routine.

  So we enter the plant. I generally clock in about five twenty-eight to five thirty. You start seeing people you know. Pay starts at five thirty, but my boss don’t say anything. Then I walk up the line and I got a bad habit of checking the log book. That’s what the night foreman left for the day foreman: what happened the night before. I check what job is in the hole, what small part has to be put on. We work those jobs out of the hole. Maybe we put in a master cylinder or a headlight. If it needs any small parts, screws, clips, bolts—you know, routine.

  Then I go into the locker room. Pull off my shoes, pull my pants and shirt off, put on my coveralls. Put my tools in: pliers, screw driver, trim knife. Then I come back up the line, routine every morning. Then I start checking the jobs. I’m what you call a trouble shooter in the crash pad area. Your general utility, which I am, get $4.49½. We got seventeen operations in the section and I can do all of it.

  My routine in the morning’s the same. I clean up cardboard. I tag up defective stock, put the damaged in the vendor. If my foreman tells me to take it over there, I take it over there. Of course, I don’t take no hurry. After seventeen years, you learn to sort of pace yourself.

  I like to work. Now two days this week have been kinda rough on me. I guess I come home grouchy. Absenteeism. When the men don’t come to work, the utility men get stuck. One of us has got to cover his job until they bring a new man in there. Then we’ve got to show him the job.

  I think one reason for our absenteeism over here right now is the second shift. We got this young generation in here. Lot of ‘em single, and a lot of’em . . . They’re not settled yet, and they just live from day to day. When they settle down, they do like myself. They get up and they have a routine. They go to work every day. I go to work here and I didn’t feel like going to work, I shoulda stayed home. But I felt if I go to work, I’ll feel better after a while. And I do.

  I think a lot of it is in your mind. You get like what’s his name that works in the body shop—Phil Stallings. He’s grown to hate the company. Not me. The company puts bread and butter on the table. I feed the family and with two teen-aged kids, there’s a lot of wants. And we’re payin’ for two cars. And I have brought home a forty-hour paycheck for Lord knows how long.

  And that’s why I work. And those other people when they settle down one of these days, they’ll be what we call old-timers. He’ll want to work. Number one: the pay’s good. Number two: the benefits are good. When I’m off work I draw $105 a week. And you don’t get that everywhere.

  The more settled a fellow gets, he quiets down. He’ll set a pace. See, I set a pace. You just work so fast and you do just so much work. Because the more you do, the more they’ll want you to do. If you start running, they’d expect you to do a little bit more. If they catch you readin’ the paper or some kind of old book or if he picks up some kind of wild magazine he comes into, they’ll figure out how to break up this man’s operation.

  You get used to a job and you take short cuts. When you learn these short cuts, all of a sudden time standards: he’s gonna come around and he’s gonna time your job. They’ll say you’re working fifty six minutes out of the hour. I told foremen I won’t do it all day and keep it up, ’cause it’s too much of a strain. I mean, it’s hard on a man, but the company says the man has time to do it.

  “When I first started work, I was hangin’ doors. That’s the first time I got cut at the plant. I would say a man average gettin’ cut, a minor cut, twice a week. At ‘54, I went over to drillin’ doors for chrome. They have air drills now. Back then it was the big electric drills. Your hand swell up from holdin’ the big drill.

  “Then I got laid off. So I took off back south. I was called back to work at Ford’s. I got a telegram. I worked ten nights puttin’ off cars in boxcars and then they said you’re laid off again. So it was a bunch of us came up here five and six hundred miles, just to work ten nights. So we went in to talk to the man from labor relations and the union rep, and I was put on the assembly line.

  “We had the Depression in ‘58, I was laid off again. I got a job in a warehouse liftin’ bags from sixty to a hundred pounds. Me and my partner were working at liftin’ from twenty-two hundred to twenty-four hundred bags a day. I lost twenty-five pounds in two weeks. Then I got my second call back to the Ford Motor Company.”

  I refused to do a job one time and I was fired. The window riser was in two pieces. You had to take a piece in each hand and stick it in the two holes in the door and hook it up inside. When you wasn’t used to the job, you was cut in the arms. So I just told the foreman I wasn’t gonna do it and I cussed him a little bit.

  They took me up and said, “We don’t need you any more.” They say, “You’re fired.” Make you feel like you’re through. Then the union rep, he starts talkin’. “What about this man’s family? He’s a good worker.” And the foreman says, “Yeah, he’s a good worker.” They talk backwards and forward. Then they said, “We’re gonna give you another chance.” They tear a man down and threaten ’im and then they’re gonna give him another chance. I guess they just want to make you feel bad.

  I had a record, of different little things I’d done. You get disgusted, you get a little bored, you want to do somethin’. It was what you call horseplay. Or maybe you come in late. You build a record up. And when they take you in there for something, they pull this record out.

  They felt I was gonna beg for my job. To which there has been people who have cried in labor relation. The company’s gonna put ‘em back to work, after they give ’em the day off. They dock you, what they call R and W, a reminder and warning. There’s been people, they just sit there and they just fall apart—rather than fly back and cuss the foreman out.

  I don’t get mad like I used to. I used to call ‘im, “Buddy, you SOB,” in no uncertain terms. But now I’m settled down. After a long time, you learn to calm yourself down. My wife’s shakin’ her head. I do come home grouchy sometimes. But when you get mad, you only hurt yourself, you excite yourself. In the long run, you may say something the company may use against you.

  My day goes pretty good on the average. Used to they didn’t, but now I have a pace. Who I joke with, who I tease about did they have to sleep in a car that night. Just something to keep your day going. I’m always jokin’. We even go so far as to throw water on the fan. Something to break the monotony. Of course, you know who to do it to.

  It’s the same routine. But I can rotate mine just a little bit, just enough to break the monotony. But when it catches up with ya and all of a sudden it’s real quiet, nobody says nothing—that makes the day go real long. I’ll look at the watch pin on my coverall and see what time . . . you would look at your watch and it would be nine twenty. And you look at your watch again and it’s twenty-five minutes of ten. It seems like you worked forever. And it’s been only roughly fifteen minutes. You want quittin’ time so bad.

  I can be off a day and the colored guy that works here, he’ll say to this on
e lady works over there, “Millie, sure was quiet over here.” ‘Cause I’m always teasin’, keeping something goin’. We’re teasin’ one guy ‘cause he’s real short and his wife left him. And then they’ll get off on the way some guy looks. Some guy looks a little funny and they’ll wonder what happened to him. How did the other guy look? Maybe they’ll tease ’im just because his nose is crooked. Or else the way he got his hair cut. It’s just routine.

  They have had no black and white fighting on the day shift. On the night shift they used to have it. I passed words with one not too long ago. It got pretty wild. I told him just what I thought. We kinda had to get something straightened out pretty fast. But there’s no contact being made, because men’s too smart for that. As they get older, they don’t want no physical contacts. Because it’s too easy to fall off the shelf, you could get hurt pretty bad.

  What’s most of the talk about?

  Somebody’s old lady. I’ll be real honest about it, they’re teasin’ this guy about his old lady. All of a sudden, they’re on you about your old lady. And the routine. Nothing serious. We make jokes with different black people. Like Jesse Jackson this, Jesse Jackson that. The black man makes jokes about George Wallace. But any other time, there’s baseball, it’s hockey, it’s football.

  We got drugs in the plant real bad. ‘Specially on the night shift. They’re smokin’ or they’re poppin’ pills. When they’re high, they got their sunglasses on. We been havin’ a candy sale for Little League. One colored guy was buyin’ a lot of candy from me. When they need all that dope, they can take somethin’ sweet and it’ll hold them over. This guy was buyin’ that big eight-ounce milk chocolate bar from me.