Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (36 page)

About the blood poisoning. It came from the inside of a hood rubbin’ against me. It caused quite a bit of pain. I went down to the medics. They said it was a boil. Got to my doctor that night. He said blood poisoning. Running fever and all this. Now I’ve smartened up.

They have a department of medics. It’s basically first aid. There’s no doctor on our shift, just two or three nurses, that’s it. They’ve got a door with a sign on it that says Lab. Another door with a sign on it: Major Surgery. But my own personal opinion, I’m afraid of ‘em. I’m afraid if I were to get hurt, I’d get nothin’ but back talk. I got hit square in the chest one day with a bar from a rack and it cut me down this side. They didn’t take x-rays or nothing. Sent me back on the job. I missed three and a half days two weeks ago. I had bronchitis. They told me I was all right. I didn’t have a fever. I went home and my doctor told me I couldn’t go back to work for two weeks. I really needed the money, so I had to go back the next day. I woke up still sick, so I took off the rest of the week.

I pulled a muscle on my neck, straining. This gun, when you grab this thing from the ceiling, cable, weight, I mean you’re pulling everything. Your neck, your shoulders, and your back. I’m very surprised more accidents don’t happen. You have to lean over, at the same time holding down the gun. This whole edge here is sharp. I go through a shirt every two weeks, it just goes right through. My coveralls catch on fire. I’ve had gloves catch on fire. (Indicates arms) See them little holes? That’s what sparks do. I’ve got burns across here from last night.

I know I could find better places to work. But where could I get the money I’m making? Let’s face it, $4.32 an hour. That’s real good money now. Funny thing is, I don’t mind working at body construction. To a great degree, I enjoy it. I love using my hands—more than I do my mind. I love to be able to put things together and see something in the long run. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve got the easiest job on the line. But I’m against this thing where I’m being held back. I’ll work like a dog until I get what I want. The job I really want is utility.

It’s where I can stand and say I can do any job in this department, and nobody has to worry about me. As it is now, out of say, sixty jobs, I can do almost half of ’em. I want to get away from standing in one spot. Utility can do a different job every day. Instead of working right there for eight hours I could work over there for eight, I could work the other place for eight. Every day it would change. I would be around more people. I go out on my lunch break and work on the fork truck for a half-hour —to get the experience. As soon as I got it down pretty good, the foreman in charge says he’ll take me. I don’t want the other guys to see me. When I hit that fork lift, you just stop your thinking and you concentrate. Something right there in front of you, not in the past, not in the future. This is real healthy.

I don’t eat lunch at work. I may grab a candy bar, that’s enough. I wouldn’t be able to hold it down. The tension your body is put under by the speed of the line . . . When you hit them brakes, you just can’t stop. There’s a certain momentum that carries you forward. I could hold the food, but it wouldn’t set right.

Proud of my work? How can I feel pride in a job where I call a foreman’s attention to a mistake, a bad piece of equipment, and he’ll ignore it. Pretty soon you get the idea they don’t care. You keep doing this and finally you’re titled a troublemaker. So you just go about your work. You
have
to have pride. So you throw it off to something else. And that’s my stamp collection.

I’d break both my legs to get into social work. I see all over so many kids really gettin’ a raw deal. I think I’d go into juvenile. I tell kids on the line, “Man, go out there and get that college.” Because it’s too late for me now.

When you go into Ford, first thing they try to do is break your spirit. I seen them bring a tall guy where they needed a short guy. I seen them bring a short guy where you have to stand on two guys’ backs to do something. Last night, they brought a fifty-eight-year-old man to do the job I was on. That man’s my father’s age. I know damn well my father couldn’t do it. To me, this is humanely wrong. A job should be a job, not a death sentence.

The younger worker, when he gets uptight, he talks back. But you take an old fellow, he’s got a year, two years, maybe three years to go. If it was me, I wouldn’t say a word, I wouldn’t care what they did. ’Cause, baby, for another two years I can stick it out. I can’t blame this man. I respect him because he had enough will power to stick it out for thirty years.

It’s gonna change. There’s a trend. We’re getting younger and younger men. We got this new Thirty and Out. Thirty years seniority and out. The whole idea is to give a man more time, more time to slow down and live. While he’s still in his fifties, he can settle down in a camper and go out and fish. I’ve sat down and thought about it. I’ve got twenty-seven years to go. (Laughs.) That’s why I don’t go around causin’ trouble or lookin’ for a cause.

The only time I get involved is when it affects me or it affects a man on the line in a condition that could be me. I don’t believe in lost causes, but when it all happened . . . (He pauses, appears bewildered.)

The foreman was riding the guy. The guy either told him to go away or pushed him, grabbed him . . . You can’t blame the guy—Jim Grayson. I don’t want nobody stickin’ their finger in my face. I’d’ve probably hit him beside the head. The whole thing was: Damn it, it’s about time we took a stand. Let’s stick up for the guy. We stopped the line. (He pauses, grins.) Ford lost about twenty units. I’d figure about five grand a unit—whattaya got? (Laughs.)

I said, “Let’s all go home.” When the line’s down like that, you can go up to one man and say, “You gonna work?” If he says no, they can fire him. See what I mean? But if nobody was there, who the hell were they gonna walk up to and say, “Are you gonna work?” Man, there woulda been nobody there! If it were up to me, we’d gone home.

Jim Grayson, the guy I work next to, he’s colored. Absolutely. That’s the first time I’ve seen unity on that line. Now it’s happened once, it’ll happen again. Because everybody just sat down. Believe you me. (Laughs.) It stopped at eight and it didn’t start till twenty after eight. Everybody and his brother were down there. It was really nice to see, it really was.

“My alarm clock goes off in the mornings when I go to school. I come back home, take my shirt and tie off, put my brief case down, put on some other suitable clothing.
(Laughs.)
I go to Ford and spend the night there . . .”
(
Laughs
.)

As, on this late Sunday afternoon, he half-watches the ball game on TV
,
turned down low, his tone is one of an amused detachment. His phrases, at times, trail off . . .

 

Oh, anything away from the plant is good. Being on the assembly line, my leisure time is very precious. It’s something to be treasured. I don’t have much time to talk to the family. I have to be a father, a student, and an assembly line worker. It’s just good to get away.

On our shift we have lunch about seven thirty. A lot of times I just read. Sometimes I just go outside to get away from . . . I don’t know if you’ve heard of plant pollution. It’s really terrible. Especially where I work, you have the sparks and smoke. You have these fans blowing on us. If you don’t turn the fans down, the smoke’ll come right up.

They don’t use battery trucks. They should. They use gasoline. Lots of times during lunch I never stay on the floor. I usually go outside to get a breath of fresh air. The further you are from the front door, the worse it is. You can cut the heat with a knife, especially when it gets up in the nineties. You get them carbon monoxide fumes, it’s just hell.

Ford keeps its overhead down. If I had to go a few feet to get some stock, that would be the time I’m not working. So Ford has everything set up. If you run out, the truck’ll come blowin’ carbon monoxide all over your face. But it’s making sure you’ll never run out of work. I mean you’re
really
tied down to the job. (Laughs.) You stand on your feet and you run on your feet. (Laughs.)

We get forty-eight minutes of break—thirty minutes in the morning and the other eighteen in the evening. You always go to the bathroom first. (Laughs.) It’s three flights up. You come down, you walk to another part of the plant, and you walk up another three flights to get a bite to eat. On the line, you don’t go to the washroom when you have to go. You learn to adjust your physical . . . (Laughs.) For new workers this is quite hard. I haven’t gotten used to it yet. I’ve been here since 1968.

The part of the automobile I work on is before it gets all the pretties. There’s no paint. The basic car. There’s a conveyorlike . . . Mr. Ford’s given credit for inventing this little . . . (Laughs.) There is no letup, the line is always running. It’s not like . . . if you lift something, carry it for a little while, lay it down, and go back—while you’re going back, you’re actually catching a breather. Ford has a better idea. (Laughs.) You hear the slogan: They have a better idea. They have better ideas of getting all the work possible out of your worn body for eight hours.

You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name. One thing, you’re too busy to talk. Can’t hear. (Laughs.) You have to holler in his ear. They got these little guys comin’ around in white shirts and if they see you runnin’ your mouth, they say, “This guy needs more work.” Man, he’s got no time to talk.

A lot of guys who’ve been in jail, they say you don’t work as hard in jail. (Laughs.) They say, “Man, jail ain’t never been this bad.” (Laughs.) That’s the way I feel. I’m serving a sentence till I graduate from college. So I got six more months in jail. Then I’ll do something else, probably at a reduction in pay.

If it was up to these ignorant foremen, they’d never get a car out. But they have these professional people, engineering time study. They’re always sneakin’ around with their little cameras. I can smell ’em a mile away. These people stay awake nights thinking of ways to get more work out of you.

Last night I heard one of the guys say we did 391 cars. How many welds are we supposed to put in a car? They have governmental regulations for consumer protection. We just put what we think ought to be in there and then let it go. (Laughs.) There are specifications, which we pay very little attention to.

You have inspectors who are supposed to check every kind of defect. All of us know these things don’t get corrected. I was saying about buying a car, not too long ago, “I hope this buggy lasts till I get out of college.” I can just look at a car and see all kinds of things wrong with it. You can’t do that because you didn’t see how it was made. I can look at a car underneath the paint. It’s like x-ray vision. They put that trim in, they call it. The paint and all those little pretties that you pay for. Whenever we make a mistake, we always say, “Don’t worry about it, some dingaling’ll buy it.” (Laughs.)

Everyone has a station. You’re supposed to get your work completed within a certain area, usually around ten, maybe fifteen feet. If you get behind, you’re in the hole. When you get in the hole, you’re bumping into the next worker. Man, sometimes you get in the hole and you run down. The next worker up from you, he can’t do his job until you get finished. If you’re slowin’ up, that starts a chain reaction all the way up the line.

Ford is a great believer in the specialization of labor, brings about more efficiency. Actually, I can be thinking about economics, politics, anything while I’m doing this work. Lotta times my mind is on schoolwork. There’s no way I could do that job and think about what I’m doin’, ’cause it’s just impossible for me. The work is just too boring. Especially someone like myself, who is going to school and has a lot of other things on my mind.

 

“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.