The Grueling Life on the Line

FOR eight hours every day, says Henry Belcher, a 40-year-old welder, "I am as much a machine as a punch press or a drill motor is." With that comment, he sums up a crucial reason for the autoworker militancy that led to the strike against General Motors. Most of the men on the assembly line hate their jobs--with a bitterness that can hardly be understood by anybody who performs interesting tasks in comfortable surroundings. At best, reports TIME'S Correspondent David DeVoss, the auto worker's routine is a daily voyage from tedium to apathy, dominated by the feeling that he sheds his identity when he punches the time clock. At worst, in the industry's older plants, his life is one of physical discomfort as well.

Less Than a Minute. One such factory is the 60-year-old Dodge plant in Hamtramck, Mich., where Belcher works. Promptly at 6 a.m., the assembly line begins sending cars past his work station, and from then on Belcher is a part of the line, like the well-oiled gears and bearings. The noise is deafening; Belcher could not talk to the men at the next stations three feet away even if there were time. There never is. Partially assembled cars move past him at the rate of 62 an hour; in less than one minute he is expected to look over each auto, pound out a dent in a fender or reweld an improperly joined seam. Cars that cannot be fixed that quickly are taken off the line. In the winter, drafts from ill-caulked windows chill Belcher's chest, while hot air blasts from rust-proofing ovens 30 feet away singe his back. After two hours of standing on the concrete floor his legs ache, but the whistle does not blow for lunch until 10 a.m.

Then the line stops, and Belcher gets 30 unpaid minutes to eat. That is not long enough for him to walk down from his sixth-floor work station to the second-floor cafeteria, buy a hot meal and get back before the line starts again. So he munches a sandwich from a bag--often while standing at the back of one of the long lines of men waiting to use the urinals. The chance to visit the bathroom cannot be passed up, since Belcher can rarely leave the assembly line. Besides the lunch period, he gets breaks of eleven minutes in the morning and twelve minutes in the afternoon. After the lunch break, the whistle blows again at 10:30 a.m., and the men put in four more hours of work until the shift changes at 2:30. Says Belcher, who makes $3.82 an hour: "Everything is regulated. No time to stop and think about what you are doing; your life is geared to the assembly line. I have lost my freedom."

Complaints like these have been heard almost from the days when the first assembly line started rolling. In fact, the conditions that so depress Belcher are not as bad as they once were. Under union pressure, companies have made some improvements. Shifts are a bit shorter now than the 3:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. stint that Walter Reuther worked at Ford in 1927. Over the years, the union has won regular relief breaks, the system of roving relief men, and doors on toilets. Some workers who do especially dirty jobs such as painting, now get company-paid special clothing. Many plants now have enclaves away from the line where men on their breaks can sit down, smoke or get a cup of coffee from a vending machine.

For the workers, that is not enough. The amenities are greatest in the industry's newer plants, but a large proportion of union members labor in aged factories. The very nature of the work remains the worst problem. Auto managers concede that most assembly jobs are hard and boring, but they figure that little can be done about it. Managers commonly complain about shoddy workmanship. Union members vehemently retort that the line moves too fast for them to do as good a job as they would like to.

Welcome Old Age. For many workers, the only escape is retirement on a pension. Old age is not unwelcome in the auto plants; it is common to hear young men talk longingly of retirement. That is why the union's demand that workers be allowed to retire after 30 years, regardless of age, on minimum pensions of $500 a month, has become a key issue in the G.M. strike. Says Pete Tipton, 34, a welder for Cadillac: "All I have to look forward to is '30 and out!' I only have a ninth-grade education, so I can't do anything else, but my children are going to stay in school so that they will not have to be subjected to this kind of life."

Some men, of course, work up to jobs that are free of much of the tough labor. Al Powarowski, 32, has advanced from loading boxcars for Ford to driving completed autos off the assembly line, at $3.72 an hour. Like many Ford workers, he believes that the company is more understanding than G.M. or Chrysler. But Powarowski feels insecure because of the unsteadiness of the work. He has spent 14 months of his seven years at Ford waiting out eight separate layoffs; the first, lasting one week, started on the 89th day of his 90-day probationary period as a new employee. "In the years when you are making money, you don't have time to spend it, and when sales go down and layoffs come, no one has any money at all," says Powarowski. His own annual income has dropped from $12,000 to $7,000 because his hours have been sharply reduced during this year's auto-sales slump. Besides, he finds the job maddeningly dull, if not physically taxing. "The only fun I have," he says, "is getting a few cold beers after work."

Richard Jankowski, 29, is happier--but only because he will soon realize the auto worker's dream of leaving the line for good. During the last three of his eleven years at G.M.'s Fisher Body plant in Ypsilanti, he went to night school, and this fall he will become a high school teacher. "I almost cry when I see kids coming into the shop today," he says. "Working in a factory is nothing to be ashamed of, but you look at men who are 35 and look 50 and you say, is that going to be me?"

As the nation's labor force becomes better educated, the automakers may run into trouble finding enough new men willing to enter the plants. Even before the strike, the once long queues outside plant hiring offices had disappeared, and for the first time in years in some factories, supervisors had begun hiring women for the line.

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