Excerpt from the Book

After connecting the rubber hose at the air outlet, Tom grinned slyly as he slashed the hose at its attachment point close to the nipple on the torque wrench. "This'll fix that damn conveyer good," he chuckled. Then he shoved the cut end of the hose, minus the air wrench, into the hopper containing passenger chassis body bolts and walked down the cluttered subfloor pit toward the main conveyer drive enclosure, carrying the wrench in his left hand.

The pit floor on which Tom Calder worked his eight to ten hours daily, five to six days a week, was littered with the usual debris of a workday on the passenger assembly line-nuts, bolts, washers, wire, cigar butts, candy and sandwich wrappers, coffee cups, and an empty whiskey pint bottle-all of which gave the pit floor the appearance of having been part of a wild orgy. In fact, it had just ended fifteen minutes previously when the three o'clock whistle had screeched the end of another workday for the first shift. As Tom kicked the empty bottle, he mused that Ernie, the alcoholic, had been careless in disposing of his daily pint.

Grease and oil stained his clothes as he walked through the fivefoot- wide walled pit where his coworkers strained their necks and backs daily. Parts cubicles honeycombed the walls on either side of the pit. Working on a car chassis as it traveled over each work station down the conveyer line required skill, to say nothing of stamina. Tom recalled his first day on the job. He had just returned from two years in the Marines and had chosen this work because it paid well-$2.64 per hour for an assembler-and the benefits were good. With no family responsibilities, he had it made! But that had been six months ago, and he had quickly found that this assembly-line work was a real backbreaker. All the more reason to try to get deeper into the union politics, which, he had observed, gave particular "rights" to committeemen that others didn't enjoy.

Tom remembered Joe's words at the bar a month ago: "If you can help us in this work-standards dispute, it'll make the union's position all the better come negotiations. Might even put you in line for a committeeman job."

"What do you mean, help? And what's this work-standard dispute?" he had asked Joe.

"By helping us blanket the passenger pit with work-standards grievances. If every worker writes a grievance, complaining of too much work on their job, the company will either have to slow the line down or take work off each job, making everyone's job easier. Then they'll have to hire more people to do the work, which means more members for the union, and easier jobs for the same pay." Joe went on, "See, there's a contract provision-Paragraph 70 in our national agreement- that says, 'Work production standards have to be set up by Management to be fair and to the abilities and capacities of normal working people,' and if the jobs aren't set up that way, we can protest by writing grievances. And if management doesn't settle these grievances like we want, we can strike for more manpower or less work, or both."

This all seemed logical to Tom, and the thought of getting off his job to operate as a committeeman was an exciting prospect-particularly because he'd get paid as though he were on the job, which, as also provided under the National Bargaining Agreement, allowed committeemen to receive their regular hourly rate of pay while performing union committeeman duties-so he had written his standards grievance and agreed to help Joe in his efforts. Little had Tom known that he would later be asked to perform the act in which he was currently involved. Nor had he realized that he was merely being used as a pawn in a management-union war that had been going on for years.

Even though his shift had ended and his coworkers had vacated the pit, Tom glanced around furtively to make certain he wasn't watched. Being especially careful to ensure the air wrench's placement and attachment to the conveyor drive chain, Tom wired it onto the chain. He had been able to slip the wrench through a small hole in the pit wall that was used for lubricating the chain. Tom made sure the wrench would not be immediately needed on the job by his counterpart on the second shift by checking the IBM tickets on eight consecutive jobs preceding his work station. The sheets indicated that none of the eight jobs required radio ground straps, which the wrench was used to tighten; therefore, the wrench would not be needed on the job until at least eight jobs had passed the workstation, making its absence unnoticed. By the time the second-shift employee needed the wrench, the wrench would have traveled on the drive chain to the end of the pit and, if all went as planned, into the conveyor drive mechanism, jamming the equipment and causing the planned breakdown. At that time, Tom would be across the street at the Wooden Ox with Joe and the boys, laughing over a cold beer.

It happened just as they had theorized. Several minutes into the second shift, the wrench had traveled the distance of the pit, attached to the chain. As it reached the conveyor drive wheel, it crunched between two cogs of the drive wheel and the chain, snapping off one of the cogs and breaking the chain. Twelve hundred employees from the main line and its feeder lines, as well as support employees in other departments in the plant, had to be sent home early.

Tom had completed his assignment. He had also lost his job.