First break arrived and I accompanied Garrison down to the cafeteria. I had many questions I wanted to ask—foremost, what were a couple of young guys like us doing on the first shift? Garrison explained that the plant was bringing back several rehires to plug up some of the shit jobs that the old-timers wanted no part of. “They figure that a worker fresh off the streets is basically optionless,” Mark relayed. “He has to take whatever's thrown his way.”
“Come on.” I laughed. “There has to be plenty of family men on second shift willing to take these jobs over. They'd take anything to get off nights. I believe we're gettin’ shafted.”
“It wouldn't be the first time,” Garrison replied.
The rest of the week unwound as one unholy nightmare. Try as I might, I just couldn't get the hang of the rear axle hoist job. I continually misread my schedule. I ran several wrong pieces. I dropped axles on the floor. I busted the hoist cable. I got shit so out of sequence that they had to shut down the entire line to straighten things out.
Something was missing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew it revolved around the unloading of the axle onto the carrier arms. I asked Garrison to handle the job while I stood back in the aisle and observed. From this vantage point, the problem was apparent. It had nothing to do with brawn or style or technique. I WAS TOO FUCKING SHORT FOR THIS JOB! Where Garrison was long and lanky and could get eyeball-to-eyeball with the insertion process of the carrier arms, I was dwarfin’ in at five feet six and a half and constantly depending on blind chance when sliding in the axle.
I approached the boss to tell him of my discovery. He was gabbin’ to someone on the phone, so I slouched at the picnic bench and lit up a smoke. I felt better than I had in days. Wrong man, wrong job. It was that simple.
Hurley slammed down the phone and ran toward me. “Hamper, that was the General Foreman on the line. According to him, you've run three wrong axles in the past hour. God-damnit, I'm writin’ your ass up NOW!”
Now I was hot. “I don't give a shit how many times you try to write me up. The whole problem is that I am too fucking short to see what the hell I'm doin’ on that job. How can I hit the carrier arms when I can't even SEE the bastards?”
“Don't try to peddle me that line of bullshit. I've had short people run that job before.”
This was getting us nowhere. A different mode of attack was necessary. I had another trump card that I'd been saving and it was time to use it. “I want my committee man down here—NOW!” Hurley raced back to the phone and called down to the union office. He really was convinced that he had me. He didn't know shit.
The committee man arrived. We conferred while Hurley glared at us and stewed at his desk. The issue we were talking over had nothing to do with my height or lack thereof. I was informing my committee man about the propaganda Hurley had been passing me about my request to be transferred onto the night shift. According to Hurley, a transfer was impossible due to my low seniority. In truth, he was lyin’ out his ass just so that he could cover an unwanted job.
My committee man motioned for Hurley to join us. Oh, this was gonna be sweet. “Is it true that you have told this worker that he would be unable to transfer to the second shift because he lacked the proper amount of seniority to do so?”
Hurley was caught totally off guard. He was expecting an argument dealing with the height issue. He swallowed and attempted to smile. “Um, I suppose I did. The bottom line is that I have jobs down here that need to be filled.”
“I'll give you the bottom line,” my committee man growled. “There are a hundred workers with more seniority than Mr. Hamper who are struggling to be transferred onto the day shift. He has no business down here other than the fact that you have purposely deceived him into believing that he has no other recourse. I am prepared to write up a grievance on behalf of Mr. Hamper regarding this matter.”
“Let him slide,” I said. “All I want is to get the hell outta here.”
“He's free to go at the end of today's shift,” Hurley replied. Then he glared at me. “However, until then, he better not even think about walkin’ out on me.”
It was funny. I hadn't even entertained the thought of sneakin’ out early until Hurley had brought it up. As soon as first break arrived, I grabbed my coat and hit the door. I went back home and hit the bed just about the time most sane people were fallin’ out of theirs.
The next day I headed into the plant and wandered over to the Rivet Line. I had decided to see if there were any openings available on the night shift for a short, homesick ex-riveter. Through phone conversations I'd had with David Steel, I'd learned that Gino Donlan was now the supervisor in charge of the Rivet Line. Dave and I had both worked briefly under Gino the last time around and found him to be extremely fair and honest with his workers.
I waited for Gino in his office. He seemed surprised to see me hangin’ around. “Steel told me that you were workin’ the day shift back on the Axle Line.”
“Ancient history,” I replied. “Listen, Gino, you wouldn't happen to have any open jobs available by chance?”
“Are you shittin’ me? I've got a whole list of ‘em. In fact, your old pinup job is open. I can't find anyone who wants to cover that bitch.”
“You have now,” I smiled.
Gino laughed and extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, my dear friend.”
Gino Donlan probably thought I was completely mad. Perhaps I was. All I knew was that there was something about those rivets that had gotten into my blood. I loved the way they looked jammed into those old rusty bins. I loved the way they felt rollin’ around my palm like dice. I loved to see their little round heads squashed beneath the incredible force of the rivet guns. I loved everything about those gray metal mushrooms. I was quite possibly a very sick man.
Things once again returned to a tolerable norm. Once again, I employed my pitiful collection of fantasies to help move the minute hand forward. I also began to take notes, scrawling down some of the more peculiar aspects of assembly life on napkins, stock tags, envelopes, anything I could find. When I returned home after the shift, I would try to decipher the resultant mess and work them into pieces for my new
Flint Voice
column “Revenge of the Rivethead.”
Dave Steel was once again across the line from me, this time down to my left on the rail-pull job. We fell back into our old routine of gripin’ and groanin’ about every vestige of assembly labor. It really amounted to nothing more than moany protectionism. We belonged here, we knew it. We just couldn't confide that deep inside we were comfortable within the dim-sighted womb of a voyage so dull. We would sit in Dave's car at break and curse the entire maze, all the while conveniently dodging the fact that we were humble mercenaries like all the rest.
We also had difficulty conceiving the fact that we still had almost twenty-five years to go before we qualified for full retirement. It made us uncomfortable watching all those drowsy-lookin’ goats roamin’ around the plant thirstin’ for that thirty-year mark. They looked hopelessly drained. Beer-bellied and gored-out, driftin’ along like yesterday's news, floatin’ along to the finish line where so many would inevitably check out of the shop and croak. It happened too frequently. Some old-timer would retire on a Tuesday clutching his gold watch and, two weeks from the day, you'd hear about how he keeled over in a radish patch before he could cash his first pension check just like it was part of the national agreement.
There were other things that gnawed at us. For instance, I remember one night they stuck this old woman down on the Rivet Line. It was ridiculous, just another example of GM's total aimless approach in evaluating the capabilities and limitations of a given worker. The Rivet Line was simply no place for such an old gal. The guns were heavy and very temperamental. The sensible thing to do would have been to place the old woman up in Trim or the Final Line.
On her second day down on the chain-hitch job, the old woman walloped her head on a rivet gun, knocking herself senseless and straight to the floor. She lay there sprawled beneath the crawl of the carriages like a rag doll. Immediately, one of the guys ran over and pushed the stop button and shut down the line.
Uh-oh. The red alert. If for whatever reason you wanted to mobilize a frantic bunch of white-collar power thugs in the direction of your area, nothing worked as well as pushing that sacred stop button. They'd come swoopin’ outta the rafters like hawks on a bunny. Within thirty seconds, every tie within a 300-yard radius was on the scene—demanding answers, squawkin’ into walkie-talkies, huffin’ and puffin’ like the universe had flipped over on their windpipes.
What a pathetic display of compassion this turned out to be. While this little old woman lay crumpled beneath the crawling frame carriers, all these nervous pricks wanted to know was WHO IN THE HELL TURNED THIS LINE OFF! The General Foreman, a real Nazi who we called Penguin, reached up and pulled out the stop button. The line jerked back into motion.
“Goddamnit,” I yelled. “What about the old lady?”
“Don't worry,” some bosshead offered, “we'll pull her out of there. Everybody else just get back to work and KEEP THIS LINE RUNNING!”
Meanwhile, the old woman was coming to. With the assistance of a couple supervisors, they got her up on her feet and sat her down at her bench. She began to cry—partly terrorized, partly humiliated. Jesus Christ, this was probably somebody's grandmother. It was awful. I thought about my own grandmother slumped on that oily woodblock floor. I thought about all the banners and coffee cups urging SAFETY FIRST and similar lies.
More than anything, I thought of how much I hated some of these dispassionate bastards in the white shirts. Here an old woman had come dangerously close to bein’ crushed and all they cared about was their precious production quota. I could see Henry Jackson huddling on the fringe jackin’ and jivin’ like it was all a joke. I wondered what approach he might have taken had it been his own grandmother konked silly and heaped on the Rivet Line floor.
It was all so typical of General Motors. Their priorities were often scary. It was perfectly fine for a foreman to stop the line and chew on your ass about some minor detail, but it was practically an act of treason for a worker to stop the line in order to extricate an unconscious old lady out of harm's way. Safety and Production—sometimes the two just didn't mesh.
It was around this time that we began hearing a strange new entry into the GM vocabulary. The word was “Quality.” The term itself was like some new intoxicating utterance that General Motors had pried outta the ass end of a golden goose. Quality, quality, quality. Suddenly, you couldn't raise your head without having your lobes pummeled with slogans and exhortations hailing this new buzzword. Up until this time, the maxim had always been Quantity. Quantity and Quota. Herd them trucks out the door. Quick, quick…QUICKER!
Evidently, GM was finally sniffin’ the wind. Americans didn't give a shit about how fast and how many units you could zoom out the back door. They just wanted a vehicle that didn't begin to disintegrate the moment it rolled off the showroom floor. If they couldn't find something that held together here, there was always the option of purchasing one of those generic-lookin’ imports that got about 500 miles per gallon and stuck together as firm as Stonehenge.
Quality represented buyers. Buyers meant sales. Sales meant fat tummies and a fat solid bonus. Quality would loosen those bony fingers off the purse strings. Quality could change the tune and serenade a buyer out of a buck. For living proof, all one had to do was glimpse over at Lee Iacocca, the born-again pom-pom boy of Quality High who was currently splattering himself all over medialand with galvanic jabber along the lines of “WE BUILD THEM RIGHT OR WE ALL EAT DOGFOOD!” We gotcha, Lee. Quality was the answer to the illin’.
The GM Truck & Bus plant began fiddling with various Quality-minded plots as a means to enthuse the work force. These concepts ranged from the “Build It Like You Owned It” guilt trip to the voodoo scare tactics of “Here Come the Japs to Foreclose Your Mortgage” to the gimmicky “Reward the Good Rodent With a Key Chain” theory. Some of these game plans were so utterly farcical, one would have been tempted to guffaw if it weren't for the fact that it was
your brain
that these follies were bein’ foisted upon.
Case in point: the management at the Truck Plant decided what the Quality concept really needed was a mascot. Conceived in a moment of sheer visionary enlightenment, the plan was to dress up the mascot as a large cat. Fittingly, this rat-in-cat's clothing was to be called Quality Cat. Somewhere along the line, an even more brilliant mind upstairs decided that Quality Cat was sort of a dull title. Therefore, a contest was organized in an attempt to give the Quality Cat a more vital name.
Hundreds of crafty welders, screw jockeys and assorted shoprats immediately began clunking their heads in an effort to christen the hallowed cat. Management announced that they would reward the most creative of these entries with a week's use of a company truck. Hot damn! The eventual winner of the contest was a worker who stumbled upon the inspired moniker Howie Makem. Sadly, my intriguing entry, Wanda Kwit, finished way the hell down the list somewhere right between Roger's Pussy and Tuna Meowt.
Howie Makem was to become the messianic embodiment of the Company's new Quality drive. A livin’, breathin’ propaganda vessel assigned to spur on the troops. Go ahead and laugh, I know I did. Just for a moment, imagine the probing skull session that took place in some high-level think tank the day Howie was first brought to mention.
“You know, slogans on coffee cups just ain't gettin’ it, Bill.”
“You're absolutely right, Ted. We need something more dynamic. More upbeat.”
“Hey, why don't we give the men their own kitty cat!”
“Kitty cat? Hmmm, I like it! A large kitty cat! Ted, you're a genius!”
Howie Makem stood five feet nine. He had light brown fur, long synthetic whiskers and a head the size of a Datsun. He wore a long red cape emblazoned with the letter Q for Quality. A very magical cat, Howie walked everywhere on his hind paws. Cruelly, Howie was not entrusted with a dick.