Rivethead - Ben Hamper [62]
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