Working

by Studs Terkel

  Have you heard of Lordstown, where the Vega plant is?

  I like to read the Wall Street Journal. I’d like to invest some in Wall Street. I’d like to learn more about the stock market. Financially, I can’t do it yet—two small children . . . I read the entire Lordstown article they had in there. I think the union was unjustified. And I think management could have done a better job. A hundred cars an hour is quite excessive. But again, you’re building a small car and it’s easier to set a line up. But I understand there was some sabotage.

  I think the president of the union is only twenty-nine years old. I imagine he’s a real hardheaded type of individual. He’s headstrong and he wants his way. If I was working with him, we’d probably be bumpin’ heads quite a bit. I’ve been known to be hardheaded and hard-nosed and real stubborn if I have to be.

  “I won a scholarship at Mendel High School, but I couldn’t afford the books. At the time, my family was pretty hard up. So I went to Vocational High and it was the biggest mistake I ever made. I was used to a Catholic grammar school. I needed Catholic schooling to keep me in line ’cause I was a pretty hot-tempered type.”

  I’m the type of guy, sometimes you gotta chew me out to let me know you’re still around. If you didn’t, I might forget and relax. I don’t like to relax. I can’t afford it. I like to stay on my toes. I don’t want to get stagnant, because if I do, I’m not doing anybody any good.

  (He studies his watch. It has all the appurtenances: second, minute, hour, day, month, year . . .)

  I refer to my watch all the time. I check different items. About every hour I tour my line. About six thirty, I’ll tour labor relations to find out who is absent. At seven, I hit the end of the line. I’ll check paint, check my scratches and damage. Around ten I’ll start talking to all the foremen. I make sure they’re all awake, they’re in the area of their responsibility. So we can shut down the end of the line at two o‘clock and everything’s clean. Friday night everybody’ll get paid and they’ll want to get out of here as quickly as they can. I gotta keep ’em on the line. I can’t afford lettin’ ’em get out early.

  We can’t have no holes, no nothing.

  If a guy was hurt to the point where it would interfere with production, then it stops. We had a fella some years ago, he was trapped with body. The only way we could get him off was to shut the line off. Reverse the belt, in order to get his fingers out. We’re gonna shut the line to see that he don’t get hurt any more. A slight laceration or something like that, that’s an everyday occurrence. You have to handle ’em.

  What’s your feeling walking the floor?

  Like when I take the superintendent’s job, if he’s going on vacation for a week. They drive what they call an M-10 unit. Their license plate is always a numeral 2, with a letter afterwards: like 2-A, 2-D—which reflects the manager’s car. When he’s on vacation and I take his job, all his privileges become mine for a week. You’re thirty years old and you’re gonna be a manager at forty. I couldn’t ask for nothing better. When I take the car home for a week, I’m proud of that license plate. It says “Manufacturer” on it, and they know I work for Ford. It’s a good feeling.

  Tom Brand has returned. Wheeler Stanley rises from the chair in soldierlike fashion. Brand is jovial. “In traveling around plants, we’re fortunate if we have two or three like him, that are real comers. It isn’t gonna be too long that these fellas are gonna take our jobs. Always be kind to your sweeper, you never know when you’re going to be working for him.” (Laughs.) Wheeler Stanley smiles.

  GARY BRYNER

  He’s twenty-nine, going on thirty. He is president of Local 1112, UAW. Its members are employed at the General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. “It’s the most automated, fastest line in the world.” A strike had recently been settled “for a time.”

  He had just come from a long negotiating session. It was one of many for him during the past twenty months of his presidency. We’re in a restaurant along the highway. It’s part of a complex of motels and shopping centers, somewhere between Youngstown and Warren. The area is highly industrial: steel, auto, rubber. “Lordstown was a crossroads. People have migrated from cities around it . . . I live in Newton Falls, a little town of six thousand. Ten minutes from General Motors.”

  After graduating from high school in 1959, he “got a job where my father worked, in Republic Steel.” He was there four years—“dabbled with the union, was a steward. I was the most versatile guy there. (Laughs.) I started on the track gang, I went into the forging department, a blacksmith’s helper. Then, a millwright’s helper. Then a millwright until I was laid off in ’63.” He worked at another factory in Ravenna for three years. “That’s where I really got involved in the union.” In 1966 he “went to General Motors at Lordstown.”

  Someone said Lordstown is the Woodstock of the workingman. There are young people who have the mod look, long hair, big Afros, beads, young gals. The average age is around twenty-five—which makes a guy thirty over the hill. I’m a young union president but I’m an old man in my plant.

  Sixty-six, when they opened the complex for hiring, there was no Vega in mind. We built a B body, Impalas and Capris and wagons and whatnot—the big family car.

  I took on a foreman’s job, some six or seven weeks and decided that was not my cup of tea. The one thing they stressed: production first, people second. One thing sticks in my mind. They put us in an arbitration class in labor relations while we were training. It was a mock case, an umpire hearing. All the people mocking were company people. We had a guy who was the umpire. We had attorneys for management and union. The guy who was supposed to be discharged was there. We had to write down whether we thought the guy was innocent or guilty. I was the only guy of some thirty-odd foremen-to-be who thought the guy was innocent and should have been paid all his money. The others wanted to be pleasing in the eyes of the people that were watching. I took it seriously and really felt the guy was innocent. So I said, “Thank you, but no thank you.” I took off the shirt and tie. All foremen wear shirts and ties. They’ve become somewhat liberal now at General Motors. Foremen can wear colored shirts and any kind of tie.

  I went back as an assembly inspector—utility. I relieved six or seven guys. I was able to get around and talk to a lot of people. I was very dissatisfied the way things were going. People being pressured, being forced to run. If a guy didn’t do it they fired his butt. It was a mail-fisted approach by management because everybody was new. The way they treated us—management made more union people in 1966 and 1967 than the union could ever have thought of making.

  When the plant first opened, it wasn’t young people they drew from. It was people who had been in the community, who gave up jobs to come to GM because it was new. It was an attractive thing back in ’66 to be one of the first thousand hired. I was twenty-three. I thought of it as security. I’m the 136th in a plant of seventy-eight hundred. You got the best jobs. You had the most seniority. A lot of the tradesmen hired had ten years of it, maintenance men, pipe fitters, millwrights, plumbers.

  After so many hundreds were hired other people didn’t want to come in and work the second shift or take lesser paying jobs, because they had already established themselves somewhere else. So that’s when kids got hired right out of high school. This was in early ’67. There was a drastic turnover in our plant. A guy would come in and work a week or two on his vacation, quit, and go back to the job he had. Standing in line, repetitively doing a job, not being able to get away, this wasn’t for them. The young people were perfect—management thought. They were—boom!—dropped into it. But they wouldn’t put up with it either.

  That was ‘67. You go on to ’68, ’69, and they had sped up the line. They had started out at sixty cars an hour. Then they went on to a model 6, two models. We had a Pontiac, what is it called?—Firebird. And a B body on the same line. That presented difficulties. On top of it, ’72 is not ’66. There was a lot of employment then. Now there isn’t. The turnover is almost
nil. People get a job, they keep it, because there’s no place else.

  I don’t give a shit what anybody says, it was boring, monotonous work. I was an inspector and I didn’t actually shoot the screws or tighten the bolts or anything like that. A guy could be there eight hours and there was some other body doing the same job over and over, all day long, all week long, all year long. Years. If you thought about it, you’d go stir. People are unique animals. They are able to adjust. Jesus Christ! Can you imagine squeezing the trigger of a gun while it’s spotted so many times? You count the spots, the same count, the same job, job after job after job. It’s got to drive a guy nuts.

  So what happened? A guy faced up to the facts. If he was going into the service, he didn’t give a damn what was going on. He was gonna leave anyway. If he were young and married, he had to do one thing: protect his pace. He had to have some time. The best way is to slow down the pace. He might want to open up a book, he might want to smoke a cigarette, or he might want to walk two or three steps away to get a drink of water. He might want to talk to the guy next to him. So he started fighting like hell to get the work off of him. He thought he wasn’t obligated to do more than his normal share. All of a sudden it mattered to him what was fair.

  Fathers used to show their manliness by being able to work hard and have big, strong muscles and that kind of bullshitting story. The young guy now, he doesn’t get a kick out of saying how hard he can work. I think his kick would be just the opposite: “You said I had to do that much, and I only have to do that much. I’m man enough to stand up and fight for what I say I have to do.” It isn’t being manly to do more than you should. That’s the difference between the son and his dad.

  Father felt patriotic about it. They felt obligated to that guy that gave him a job, to do his dirty work. Whereas the young guy believes he has something to say about what he does. He doesn’t believe that when the foreman says it’s right that it’s right. Hell, he may be ten times more intelligent as this foreman. If he believes he’s working too hard, he stands up and says so. He doesn’t ask for more money. He says, “I’ll work at a normal pace, so I don’t go home tired and sore, a physical wreck. I want to keep my job and keep my senses.”

  My dad was a foreman in a plant. His job was to push people, to produce.

  He quit that job and went back into a steel mill. He worked on the incentive. The harder you work, the more he made. So his knowledge of work was work hard, make money. Maybe my father taught me something without even knowing it. My father wasn’t a strong union advocate. He didn’t talk management, he was just a workingman. He was there to make money.

  The almighty dollar is not the only thing in my estimation. There’s more to it—how I’m treated. What I have to say about what I do, how I do it. It’s more important than the almighty dollar. The reason might be that the dollar’s here now. It wasn’t in my father’s young days. I can concentrate on the social aspects, my rights. And I feel good all around when I’m able to stand up and speak up for another guy’s rights. That’s how I got involved in this whole stinkin’ mess. Fighting every day of my life. And I enjoy it.

  Guys in plants nowadays, their incentive is not to work harder. It’s to stop the job to the point where they can have lax time. Maybe to think. We got guys now that open a paper, maybe read a paragraph, do his job, come back, and do something else. Keeping himself occupied other than being just that robot that they’ve scheduled him to be.

  When General Motors Assembly Division came to Lordstown, you might not believe it, but they tried to take the newspapers off the line.33 The GMAD controls about seventy-five percent of the assembly of cars produced for the corporation. There’s eighteen assembly plants. We’re the newest. Their idea is to cut costs, be more efficient, take the waste out of working, and all that kind of jazz. To make another dollar. That’s why the guys labeled GMAD: Gotta Make Another Dollar. (Laughs.)

  In ’70 came the Vega. They were fighting foreign imports. They were going to make a small compact that gets good milage. In the B body you had a much roomier car to work on. Guys could get in and out of it easily. Some guys could almost stand inside, stoop. With the Vega, a much smaller car, they were going from sixty an hour to a hundred an hour. They picked up an additional two thousand people.

  When they started up with Vega, we had what we call Paragraph 78 disputes. Management says, On every job you should do this much. And the guy and the union say, That’s too much work for me in that amount of time. Finally, we establish work standards. Prior to October, when GMAD came down, we had established an agreement: the guy who was on the job had something to say. When GMAD came in, they said, He’s long overdue for extra work. He’s featherbedding.

  Instead of having the guy bend over to pick something up, it’s right at his waist level. This is something Ford did in the thirties. Try to take every movement out of the guy’s day, so he could conserve seconds in time, to make him more efficient, more productive, like a robot. Save a second on every guy’s effort, they would, over a year, make a million dollars.

  They use time, stopwatches. They say, It takes so many seconds or hundreds of seconds to walk from here to there. We know it takes so many seconds to shoot a screw. We know the gun turns so fast, the screw’s so long, the hole’s so deep. Our argument has always been: That’s mechanical; that’s not human.

  The workers said, We perspire, we sweat, we have hangovers, we have upset stomachs, we have feelings and emotions, and we’re not about to be placed in a category of a machine. When you talk about that watch, you talk about it for a minute. We talk about a lifetime. We’re gonna do what’s normal and we’re gonna tell you what’s normal. We’ll negotiate from there. We’re not gonna start on a watch-time basis that has no feelings.

  When they took the unimates on, we were building sixty an hour. When we came back to work, with the unimates, we were building a hundred cars an hour. A unimate is a welding robot. It looks just like a praying mantis. It goes from spot to spot to spot. It releases that thing and it jumps back into position, ready for the next car. They go by them about 110 an hour. They never tire, they never sweat, they never complain, they never miss work. Of course, they don’t buy cars. I guess General Motors doesn’t understand that argument.

  There’s twenty-two, eleven on each side of the line. They do the work of about two hundred men—so there was a reduction of men. Those people were absorbed into other departments. There’s some places they can’t use ’em. There’s some thinking about assembling cars. There still has to be human beings.

  If the guys didn’t stand up and fight, they’d become robots too. They’re interested in being able to smoke a cigarette, bullshit a little bit with the guy next to ’em, open a book, look at something, just daydream if nothing else. You can’t do that if you become a machine.

  Thirty-five, thirty-six seconds to do your job—that includes the walking, the picking up of the parts, the assembly. Go to the next job, with never a letup, never a second to stand and think. The guys at our plant fought like hell to keep that right.

  There was a strike. It came after about four or five months of agitation by management. When GMAD took over the plant, we had about a hundred grievances. They moved in, and where we had settled a grievance, they violated ‘em. They took and laid off people. They said they didn’t need ’em. We had over fourteen hundred grievances under procedure prior to the strike. It’s a two-shift operation, same job, so you’re talking about twenty-eight hundred people with fourteen hundred grievances. What happened was, the guys—as the cars came by ’em—did what’s normal, what they had agreed to prior to GMAD. I don’t think GM visualized this kind of a rebellion.

  The strike issue? We demanded the reinstitution of our work pace as it was prior to the onslaught by General Motors Assembly Division. The only way they could do it was to replace the people laid off.

  In that little book of quotes I have: “The workingman has but one thing to sell, his labor. Once he loses control of that,
he loses everything.” I think a lot of these young kids understand this. There’s some manliness in being able to stand up to the giant. Their fathers’ was in working hard. There’s a substantial number of people that are Vietnam war vets. They don’t come back home wanting to take bullshit from foremen who haven’t seen as much of the world as he has, who hasn’t seen the hardships.

  Assembly workers are the lowest on the totem pole when it comes to job fulfillment. They don’t think they have any skill. Some corporate guy said, “A monkey could do the job.” They have no enthusiasm about pride in workmanship. They could care less if the screw goes in the wrong place. Sometimes it helps break the monotony if the screw strips. The corporation could set up ways to check it so when the product goes to the consumer it should be whole, clean, and right. But they’ve laid off inspectors. ’Cause they could give a shit less. Inspectors are like parasites—they don’t produce, they don’t add something. They only find error. That error costs money to fix, so . . . they laid off, I don’t know how many inspectors per shift. They want quantity.

  When they got in the fight with us, there was an enormous amount of repairs to be done because the people refused to do the extra work. That was one thing that shocked the hell out of General Motors Assembly Division. Management was shipping defective parts, safety as well as trim and show items, paint, chrome, and that kind of stuff. Our guys were taking down serial numbers on every job they could get their hands on. Where they knew the product was defective, we made records of it. We constantly badgered the international union to blast the hell out of them. We did, vocally, across the bargaining table. They finally had to let up on the thing.