Lordstown: Disruption on the Assembly Line

Every day I come out of there I feel ripped off. I'm gettin' the shit kicked out of me and I'm helpless to stop it. A good day's work is being tired but not exhausted. Out there all I feel is glad when it's over.

I don't even feel useful now. They could replace me; I don't even feel necessary.... They could always find somebody stupider than me to do the job."

—Lordstown assembly line worker, twenty years old

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The Lordstown complex of the General Motors Company sprawls along a huge, flat cornfield alongside Route 45 near Warren, Ohio. The facility is called a "complex" because it includes several plants doing different things. The older plants—the Fisher Body shop making subassemblies such as fenders for Chevrolet cars, and the smaller truck plant—are no different from the many similar factories operated by the company in other complexes throughout the United States. The big news is the new Chevrolet assembly plant which rolls out 800 Vega passenger cars a day. This plant is important to the company for two reasons. The Vega is the car counted on to regain GM's slipping position in car sales. Most of the losses have been to small-sized foreign models which, until the devalution of the U.S. dollar in early 1972, cut deeply into the sales and profits of U.S. car manufacturers. The second reason is equally powerful. This factory has become the most productive assembly plant in the world. Its average hourly production of 100 cars or more is at least 40 percent higher than the vast majority of assembly plants of its competitors or within the company itself.

The new plant began to hire workers in 1966, but there was no sign that there was to be anything unusual about the work until the model changeover in the late summer and autumn of 1971. Until then, the 7000 assembly line workers turned out slightly more than 60 cars an hour. In the late summer GM introduced its new production methods and, at the same time, brought in a new management, the GM Assembly Division. A few automatic robot machines were brought into the body shop to replace human labor in welding operations, the number of moving parts in the car was reduced to permit one car to be assembled every 36 seconds, and the parts were made smaller for easier handling.

The General Motors Assembly Division is a tough, no-nonsense outfit charged with the responsibility "of being able to meet foreign competition." GMAD "adopted 'get tough' tactics to cope with increased worker absenteeism and boost productivity." According to Business Week, the new division was set up in 1965 to tighten and revamp assembly operations. "The need for GMAD's belt-tightening role was underscored during the late 1960s when GM's profit margin dropped from 10 percent to 7 percent."

At Lordstown, efficiency became the watchword. At 60 cars an hour, the pace of work had not been exactly leisurely, but after GMAD came in the number of cars produced almost doubled. Making one car a minute had been no picnic, especially on a constantly moving line. Assembly work fits the worker to the pace of the machine. Each work station is no more than 6 to 8 feet long. For example, within a minute on the line, a worker in the trim department had to walk about 20 feet to a conveyor belt transporting parts to the line, pick up a front seat weighing 30 pounds, carry it back to his work station, place the seat on the chassis, and put in four bolts to fasten it down by first hand-starting the bolts and then using an air gun to tighten them according to standard. It was steady work when the line moved at 60 cars an hour. When it increased to more than 100 cars an hour, the number of operations on this job were not reduced and the pace became almost maddening. In 36 seconds the worker had to perform at least eight different operations, including, walking, lifting, hauling, lifting the carpet, bending to fasten the bolts by hand, fastening them by air gun, replacing the carpet, and putting a sticker on the hood. Sometimes the bolts fail to fit into the holes; the gun refuses to function at the required torque; the seats are defective or the threads are bare on the bolt. But the line does not stop. Under these circumstances the workers often find themselves "in the hole," which means that they have fallen behind the line.

"You really have to run like hell to catch up, if you're gonna do the whole job right," one operator named Jerry told me when I interviewed him in the summer of 1972. "They had the wrong-sized bolt on the job for a whole year. A lot of times we just miss a bolt to keep up with the line."

In all plants workers try to make the work a little easier for themselves. At Lordstown, as in other automobile plants, there are many methods for making the work tolerable. Despite the already accelerated pace, workers still attempt to use the traditional relief mechanism of "doubling up." This method consists of two workers deciding that they will learn each other's operation. One worker performs both jobs while the other worker is spelled. At Lordstown, a half-hour "on" and a half-hour "off" is a fairly normal pattern. The worker who is on is obliged to do both jobs by superhuman effort. But workers would rather race to keep up with the line than work steadily—in anticipation of a half-hour off to read, lie down, go to the toilet, or roam the plant to talk to a buddy. Not all jobs lend themselves to this arrangement, especially those where a specific part like a front seat must be placed on all models; here the work is time consuming, and full of hassles. But there are many operations where doubling up is feasible, particularly light jobs which have few different movements. Fastening seat belts and putting on windshield wipers are examples.

"The only chance to keep from goin' nuts," said one worker, "is to double up on the job. It's the only way to survive in the plant...."

The company claims that doubling up reduces quality. The method engenders a tendency for workers to miss operations, especially when they fall behind, according to one general foreman. Some workers believe that the company blames workers for doubling up as an excuse to explain its own quality control failures. There is a widespread feeling among the line workers that the doubling-up "issue" has more to do with the company's program of harrassment than the problem of quality control.

The tenure of the previous management at the Chevrolet division of GM, was characterized by a plethora of shop floor agreements between foremen and line workers on work rules. These agreements were not written down, but were passed from worker to worker as part of the lore of the job. As in many workplaces, a new line supervisor meant that these deals had to be "renegotiated."

When GMAD took over at Lordstown, management imposed new, universally applicable rules, which in fact, were applied selectively. On Mondays, "when there are not many people on the line," the company tolerates lateness. On Tuesdays, when young workers come back from their long weekends, "they throw you out the door" for the rest of the shift for coming in fifteen minutes or a half-hour late. "When the company gets a bug up its ass to improve quality, they come down on you for every little mistake. But then things start goin' good on the cars, so they start to work on other areas. Then you are not allowed to lay down—not allowed to read on the job; no talkin' (you can't talk anyway the noise is so terrific); no doubling up."

Efficiency meant imposing on workers the absolute power of management to control production. GMAD instituted a policy of compulsory overtime at the time of the model changeover. The "normal" shift became ten hours a day and there were no exceptions to the rule. Absenteeism and lateness became the objects of veritable holy crusades for the new management. Nurses refused to grant permission for workers to go home sick. The company began to consider a worker a voluntary quit if he stayed off for three days and failed to bring a doctor's note certifying his illness. Doctors were actually sent to workers' homes to check up on "phony" illnesses in an effort to curb absenteeism.

The average hourly rate for production line workers was $4.56 an hour in mid-1972. In addition, annual cost of living increases geared to the consumer price index had been incorporated into the contract. Gross base weekly earnings for ten hours a day were more than $195. With overtime, some workers had made more than $13,000 a year. Besides, GM workers have among the best pension, health insurance, and unemployment benefits programs in American industry. Certainly, there is no job in the Warren area whose terms compare with the high wages and benefits enjoyed by the GM workers. Equally significant, GM is among the few places in the area still hiring a large number of employees. The steel mills, electrical plants, and retail trades offer lower wages to unskilled workers and less steady employment to low-seniority people. For some, General Motors is "big mother." Many workers echo the sentiment of Joe, a forty-five-year-old assembly line worker who said that GM offered better wages and working conditions than he had ever enjoyed in his life—"I don't know how anybody who works for a living can do better than GM." Compared to the steel mill where he did heavy and dirty jobs, GM was "not near as hard."

Of course Joe has had differences with company policies. The job was "too confining." He didn't like to do the same thing every day. He objected to the company harrassment of the men and had actually voted for a strike to correct some of the injustices in the plant. But, like many others, Joe had "married the job" because he didn't know where else he could get a retirement plan which would give him substantial benefits after thirty years of service, full hospital benefits, and real job security.

GMAD likes workers like Joe too. They know Joe isn't going anywhere. They believe him when he says he is sick and, if he misses installing parts on a car he can "chalk it up." In such cases, he simply tells the foreman about the missing operation and the "repairmen will take care of it."

Yet high wages and substantial fringe benefits have not been sufficient to allay discontent among the young people working on the line. If other area employers paid wages competitive with GM wages, GM would have serious difficulty attracting a labor force. The wages are a tremendous initial attraction for workers and explain why many are reluctant to leave the shop. But even the substantial unemployment in the Warren and Youngstown areas has not succeeded in tempering the spirit of rebellion among young workers or preventing the persistence of turnover among them. The promise of high earnings has not reduced the absentee rate in the plant. One young worker, married with a child, earned a gross income of $10,900 in 1971, a year when overtime was offered regularly to employees. This was a gross pay at least $2,000 below his possible earnings. He had taken at least one day off a week and refused several offers of Saturday work.

GM acknowledges that absenteeism, particularly on Mondays and Fridays, constitutes its most distressing discipline problem. Workers report line shutdowns "for as much as a half hour" on Mondays because there are simply not enough people to perform the operations. But many young people are prepared to sacrifice higher earnings for a respite from the hassles of assembly line work, even for one day.

At Lordstown and other plants where youth constitute either a majority or significant minority of the work force there is concrete evidence that the inducements to hard work have weakened. Older workers in the plant as well as a minority of the youth admit that they have never seen this kind of money in their lives. But the young people are seeking something more from their labor than high wages, pensions, and job security. At Lordstown, they are looking for "a chance to use my brain" and a job "where my high school education counts for something." Even though workers resent the demanding pace of the line, no line job takes more than a half-hour to learn. Most workers achieve sufficient speed in their operation to keep up with the line in about a half a shift. The minute rationalization of assembly line operations to a few simple movements has been perfected by GMAD. One operator whose job was to put two clips on a hose all day long said, "I never think about my job. In fact, I try to do everything I can to forget it. If I concentrated on thinking about it, I'd go crazy. The trouble is I have to look at what I'm doing or else I'd fuck up every time." This worker spent some of his time figuring out ways to get off the line, especially ways to take days off. "I always try to get doctor's slips to take three days if I can." Another worker reported provoking a foreman to give him a disciplinary layoff (DLO) just to avoid the monotony of his tasks.

The drama of Lordstown is the conflict between the old goals of decent income and job security, which have lost their force but are by no means dead, and the new needs voiced by young people for more than mindless labor. The company and the union represent the promise that the old needs can be met on a scale never before imagined for many of the people on the line. The youth are saying that these benefits are not enough.

The picture is complicated by the fact that not all young people share the same attitudes. Even though the overwhelming majority of workers in the shop are between twenty and thirty years old, they are not all cut from the same cloth. The most disaffected group in the plant are the youth who were raised in the Warren-Youngstown area. Their fathers and mothers were industrial workers, or at least had been part of an urban environment for most of their lives. Since the area has had a long industrial tradition (it lies in the heart of the Ohio valley), high wages and traditional union protections and benefits are part of the taken-for-granted world of a generation brought up in the shadows of the steel mills and rubber factories. These workers share the same upbringing, went to the same schools, frequented the same neighborhood social centers, and speak the same symbolic languages. When they came to General Motors, they brought with them a set of unspoken expectations about their work and their future. Many were high school graduates, a smaller, but significant number were attending college. Although it cannot be denied that the "good money" paid by GM was an important inducement for these young people to choose to work there, few of them considered steady work and good wages sufficient to satisfy a life's ambition.

Another group of young white workers came to Lordstown with entirely different motives. These are the migrants from the coal mining communities of West Virginia and southeastern Kentucky. Twenty-five years ago, bituminous miners were the proud vanguard of the American working class. Their militant traditions were the envy and the beacon of industrial unionists throughout the country. Miners had learned over the years to be self-reliant. In the southern Appalachians, picket lines were formed at rifle point and neither sheriff nor U.S. marshal was inclined to oppose the miners when they shut the pits down.

After 1950 things changed radically in the mining industry. In that year John L. Lewis signed a pact with the coal operators to permit technological innovation in coal production in return for very high wage scales and funds to establish a jointly administered welfare program that included pensions and a number of union-run hospitals which became showplaces for industrial medicine in the 1950s. But as coal prices fell, many of the largest operators began closing the larger mines in union strongholds such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and others went out of business or moved into more highly mechanized strip mining. Layoffs in the coal industry reached disastrous proportions in the 1950s and early 1960s. By 1958, nearly the entire coal region of the northern and southern Appalachians was designated a "depressed area" by the federal government in the midst of a fairly high level of economic activity in the country as a whole. In 1964, the union announced the closing of five of its hospitals because of lack of contributions from coal operators who were obliged under the contract to contribute forty cents for each ton of mined coal to the welfare fund, but were avoiding their agreement by ordering coal from nonunion subcontractors.

The hospitals were finally taken over by the Presbyterian Church but not before wildcat strikes forced nearly all mining in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky to a halt in 1964–65. Coal remained a sick industry and the union's power steadily diminished. By the late 1950s youth became the leading export commodity of the coal regions. People began to migrate to industrial centers such as New Jersey, Michigan, Northern Illinois, and the Ohio Valley.

Workers came to Lordstown from the coal regions and hill country with one powerful urge—to find steady work at high wages to support themselves and their families. The natives of the Ohio Valley called them "hillbillies," a pejorative expression which came to mean the same as the names given to previous immigrant groups who had arrived in the area. The hillbillies were the new "honkies," "wops," and "niggers" of the Ohio Valley. They were stereotyped by the natives as people willing to work hard, take all the overtime they could get, and remain on the good side of the company in order to protect their jobs. Socially, they were labeled hard-fighting, hard-drinking fools who hated "hippies" and Blacks with equal venom.

Although it is frequently denied by young Lordstown workers, there has been considerable physical confrontation between white Southerners and white natives at Lordstown. The Southerners have often become the safety valve for the release of frustrations generated by the work situation. They have often found it difficult to get housing except in areas which may be designated "hillbilly" ghettos, especially when they first arrive in the plant. Hillbilly children are snubbed by the native kids in school or are constantly fighting with them.