A SAVAGE FACTORY

AuthorHouse

Contents

Prologue.......................................................ixOne The Sharonville Jungle.....................................1Two Roger And The Wop..........................................19Three War On The Floor.........................................39Four Bad Turbines And Cocktail Hour............................55Five Nightmares Begin At Midnight..............................73Six The Coffee Pot War.........................................87Seven The Downturn: Opec Pulls The Plug........................101Eight Rollmans.................................................115Nine The Upturn................................................129Ten An Equal Opportunity Employer..............................141Eleven Quality Is Job One......................................157Twelve Your Safety Is My Business..............................173Thirteen Foreign Devils........................................187Fourteen The End Of The Sharonville Comedy.....................199Epilogue.......................................................213

Chapter One

As I pulled off Sharon Road and passed through a mound of earth and barbed wire fencing that looked more like a prison than a factory, I felt a surge of excitement. I had just quit a management position at Procter & Gamble to take a job as a first line foreman at Ford Motor Company's Sharonville Transmission Plant. It was a step down in status, a big step up in salary, and it was going to be my last job in corporate America. When I saved enough money, I would kiss corporate life goodbye and strike out on my own.

I slipped into a parking space in the lot designated as Management Parking Only, pocketed my keys, and got out. I was still about 100 yards from the guard shack, and the immensity of the Sharonville Transmission Plant struck me. There it was, at the end of a lot built to accommodate nearly 6,000 cars. The gray cinder block walls of a two million square foot industrial plant that occupied hundreds of acres of land. An endless expanse of concrete with dirty, 20-foot-high windows, and a loading dock capable of feeding an entire fleet of eighteen wheelers. Steam or smoke, I could not tell which, punctuated a blustery sky above the plant's flat roof and partially obscured the overbearing letters on the immense white sign that spelled a single word: FORD.

I wasn't the only new kid on the block that day at Sharonville. Two other aspiring managers, dressed appropriately for an interview, sat beside me in the Salaried Personnel Office. We were just striking up a conversation when a man roughly the size and shape of a Sherman tank burst through the door.

He did not look like a manager, yet the clerk stiffened in her seat as he came in. He gave us a disgusted side glance, spat a stream of tobacco juice at a corner waste can and missed, then said, "Which one of you guys worked at P&G?"

I volunteered that I had just quit my job at Procter & Gamble. He sneered at me, looked at the clerk, and said, "I'll take this here one on out to Zone 3."

The clerk nodded and said, "Okay, Ed. I will forward his paperwork to Roger." The tank spun around, without saying anything to me, and I made the assumption that I was supposed to follow him.

Ed rumbled from the office without a backward glance, and I scrambled after him as we made our way through a maze of corridors in the salaried personnel complex, and then turned toward a set of double doors that opened into the factory. I followed Ed into a different world, the likes of which I had never seen.

What had been the distant muttering of a tenor volcano when heard from the heavily insulated front offices was now an infernal roar. Machines, some nearly the size of a house, were lined up end to end as far as the eye could see. They whirled, clanked, churned, and groaned. Some spit fire and sparks; others shot hot metal shavings into the air. Still others spat streams of what appeared to be dirty, diluted milk that fl owed into metal enclosures, and then disappeared back into the machines.

Clouds of blue-gray mist, laced with millions of minute metal particles hung in the air and brought to mind a movie about poison gas attacks in World War I. Fork trucks darted between machines and down endless aisles without regard for the workers who jumped out of the way as they approached with horns blaring.

The factory floor was made of rectangular wood blocks, about the size of street bricks, saturated with filthy black oil that gave the plant an odor of sour rot as if the entire Industrial Revolution had died and was decaying right here in Sharonville.

As we threaded our way through the warren of aisles, Ed, or at least I assumed his name was Ed because that is what the clerk called him, never spoke to me, extended his hand, asked my name, or acknowledged my presence. The feeling that I had somehow stumbled into Hell was confirmed by the faces of the damned that tended the monstrous machines.

They were hard, resentful faces; unhappy, miserable faces; dulled, stunned faces. Above all, hostile faces. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man glaring at me, and I could read his cursing lips. It was impossible to hear what he was saying above the deafening roar of the machines, but I wondered why he hated me. He did not even know me. I speculated that my clothing, which was typical attire at P&G, but stood out as an anomaly amongst the filthy, oily confines of Sharonville, might have been offensive to him. Someone dressed like me had no business in the hellish realm of the hourly.

Ed turned and shouted, but the noise was so intense I could not hear him. He moved his head so it was six inches from my face, and the smell of tobacco juice and body odor overcame the aroma of rotting oil.

He pulled a pair of safety glasses from his back pocket and snarled, "Put these on. You don't never come out on the floor without no safety glasses. How the hell you supposed to write a man up for not wearing no safety glasses when you ain't got no safety glasses on your own self? The UAW would laugh you right out of the hearing room."

After a long trek through the roar of the machines and the clouds of haze, we arrived at a filthy cement block structure built like a battlefield bunker. I soon learned that this was the General Foremen's office. As soon as we went inside the decibels were subdued, and it was obvious that the structure was soundproofed so that people inside could communicate without shouting in each other's ear.

Inside there were four dirty, dented gray metal desks. Ed herded me to the desk occupied by a man who looked like a fully clothed skeleton. His face was a mass of wrinkles, and his right eye was obviously false. A yellowish liquid like Elmer's Glue, or the snot under a three-year-old's nose, seeped from the fake eye, which was turned to the right even though his good eye was looking to the left.

The skeleton was aware that Ed and I were standing in front of his desk, yet he ignored us. Ed acted like being ignored was normal etiquette at Ford Motor Company, and risked a long shot at the corner waste can. The tobacco juice fell short and ran down the side of the trash can over ageless stains of previous near misses.

After an uncomfortable minute or two, the skeleton looked up and examined me with his good eye like a customer in a...