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...