Blue-Collar Saboteurs

One mile or so west of exit 15 on the Ohio Turnpike sits the General Motors plant at Lordstown, off the road about 400 yards with no connecting access and in startling contrast to the weathered old farmhouse, the barn topped by antique lightning rods and the idly grazing horses across the way. The plant is huge, occupying some 1000 acres, and painted a dull and faded color between orange and rust. The parking lot is full of recent-model automobiles and motorcycles with a few intermittent campers rising above them. At the east end of the plant, there are two Softball fields and a gate where trailer trucks loaded with new Chevrolet Vegas leave to plow eventually onto the turnpike and run through the range of gears as they negotiate the Appalachian foothills on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Beyond the plant and across the highway, there is a small, modern building: a union headquarters called Reuther Hall. Altogether, it is a scene of humming industrial efficiency.

The tranquillity is deceptive. Last March, Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers struck for three weeks. It was not a traditional labor dispute with men walking off the job for higher pay and more fringe benefits but a genuine rebellion, an eruption of grievances that had festered throughout the automobile industry for years. Until the Lordstown strike, the dissatisfaction took individual forms: absenteeism, drug use on the job and occasional acts of violence or sabotage. The conditions that lead to this behavior are not so much those of grim and dangerous sweatshops or wretched, tubercular mines--although some automobile plants are unpleasant in the extreme. What workers object to finally is the thing that is the automobile industry: the assembly line, Henry Ford's vision, with all its regimentation and monotony.

When it was first introduced, the assembly-line concept ideally suited a nation on the verge of large industrial breakthroughs, a nation just beginning to move away from its agrarian roots and to lose its frontier innocence. For refugees from the cities of Europe or the soil of the American South, the wage was good. And as the nation moved toward more and more industrialization, the pay, along with certain basic working conditions, got better. The union saw to that. But the line itself continued to reflect Henry Ford's austerity and puritanism, changing only superficially as machines became more efficient and could replace men at various jobs. Even at Lordstown, G. M.'s most modern plant, the basics of the system are unchanged. But the people who work the line are very much changed. Enough to strike over what they call "dehumanization" at Lordstown and to begin the strike by detaining G. M. executives in their offices, relenting only when sheriff's deputies had been called and were on the way.

The men and women who work at the Lordstown plant come from Akron, Youngstown, Warren and even Cleveland, an hour's drive away. There isn't any city of Lordstown, merely a small, rural township marked by a crossroads shopping center and a bank. Warren--the county seat of Trumbull County and a pleasant town grown slightly grim through hasty and unplanned expansion--is the closest community of size. Near the sturdy and imposing courthouse that marks its center, buildings decay and deteriorate. The roads leading to its suburbs are lined with shopping centers, carry-out food establishments, bowling alleys and car lots--all excessively announced by neon signs. The residential neighborhoods range from trailer parks to nondescript developments of inexpensive homes to a few quiet sections of formidable dwellings with spacious lawns.

Industry is Warren's wealth. In addition to the Lordstown plant, there are a Republic Steel mill and a Packard Electric plant. These three operations alone employ over 20,000 people. If industry has been good for the town, the people who live in Warren have responded by producing generations of workers who have been good for industry. Many of the young men who build cars at Lordstown come from fathers who work the steel mill and some have wives who work at Packard. But these young men are not in the mold of their fathers, who worked stubbornly for 30 years, missing only an occasional day, proud of their ability to do a hard job and, remembering the Depression, thankful for having it to do. "I don't understand these kids at all," a man working on a shot and a beer says to a friend in a nondescript bar. "They make good money at Lordstown. I've been at Republic for 28 years and haven't missed a week in all that time. These young guys make more than I do and you're lucky if you can get them there for a full week."

At The Scene West on Nevada Street, the conversation is different. Here, young men shoot pool, drink beer and talk about cars, motorcycles, trips to Miami Beach, drugs and drug busts. If they mention work at all, it is to complain about the boredom and the monotony or to argue about the success of the strike. A man called Stick because of his ability on the pool table says, "I'll tell you, I don't think we got nearly enough. Nothing changed except that we work harder than before. We used to go eight hours a day, six days a week. Now it's ten hours a day for five. A real victory for the workingman."

Tom Yearms, a joint owner of the bar who spends his evenings keeping drugs and troublemakers out to protect his liquor license, smiles and says, "I can't get over some of these guys. When they went out on strike, I don't think most of them cared if they ever went back to work."

J. D. Smith, the treasurer of Local 1112 during the strike, puts it this way: "It's a different generation of workingmen. None of these guys came over from the old country poor and starving, grateful for any job they could get. None of them have been through a depression. They've been exposed--at least through television--to all the youth movements of the last ten years and they don't see the disgrace of being unemployed. They're just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment their fathers did. They're not afraid of management. That's a lot of what the strike was about. They want more than just a job for 30 years."

• • •

The trouble at Lordstown began in October of 1971. The plant had been turning out Vegas for over a year. It was originally built to produce the standard-body Chevrolet and the Pontiac Firebird. When G. M.--worried, like the rest of the automobile industry, about foreign competition that accounted for about one percent of the total U. S. market in 1957 and nearly 15 percent in 1970--decided to bring out the Vega, Lordstown was shut down for 13 weeks and retooled. The new assembly line was the most modern in the world, designed to produce at maximum efficiency and minimum cost. Competing with Toyota and Volkswagen--while still paying U.S. wages--required a high productivity ratio. To achieve it, those jobs that slowed the speed of assembly because of their complexity or their requirement for backbreaking exertion were taken over by machines.

The plant is imposing to a visitor unfamiliar with the technology of mass production, only dimly remembering the filmstrips of Industry on Parade, where everything seemed chaotic, bathed in heat and very dangerous. Cars move smoothly along the nearly two-mile assembly line. Forklifts maneuver around stacks of parts, transporting pallets according to some schedule of need. There are scattered break areas, with banks of vending machines, tables and chairs, where workers sit and read newspapers, apparently oblivious to the noise of the plant. Along the line, there are the new machines that effortlessly do the work of scores of men. Automatic welders called Unimates reach out with huge crooked arms to fuse steel bodies, sending up flurries of sparks. Hydraulic lifters raise engines, drive shafts and axles into place under suspended bodies. Computers check for quality along the line. Everything seems safe and efficient. It is not even especially hot or dirty. The plant's most unpleasant aspects are the constant rush of noise and a heavy, lingering odor like that of lead-based paint.

Impressive as all this is to the visitor, workers often loathe the plant's efficiency and automation. What a man does on the line, he does at the line's pace. Nothing of any complexity is required of anyone, because the cars roll past each man too rapidly--one every 36 seconds. The jobs may not be especially strenuous, but the pace is grueling; the repetition, maddening.

But when the plant began turning out Vegas in the summer of 1970, none of this was obvious. G. M.'s gamble that it could compete with the imports seemed likely to pay off. The Vega was certainly a quality machine, winning an award from Motor Trend as Car of the Year. Worker morale seemed high, in spite of the brisk pace of the line, and G. M. executives talked of the Lordstown experiment as revolutionizing the industry. At the beginning of 1971, management presented everyone in the plant with a gift: a mounted set of freshly minted 1971 coins worth 91 cents in face value but nearly three dollars as a collector's item. The message that accompanied the gift read:

As a mint set it was produced with zero defects, without error, mar or scratch. These coins are symbolic of the goal of the Lordstown assembly plant--that is to produce a product that ... will give pleasure and pride far beyond its basic purpose of transportation. This goal (continued on page 104)Blue-Collar Saboteurs(continued from page 98) can be reached by everyone of us taking the same pride in our workmanship as that which produced these coins.

Then, in October 1971, General Motors Assembly Division took over management of the plant from Chevrolet and Fisher Body divisions. A new division of the mammoth corporation, G. M. A. D. has a reputation throughout the industry for high efficiency and severe, if not ruthless, cost cutting. G. M. A. D. executives take pride in their record and feel they are the very best in the business of assembling high-quality automobiles at peak efficiency. Union men see them as tough, hard-nosed disciplinarians spoiling for a fight, and at Lordstown they made ready to fight back.

John Grix, PR man for the G. M. A. D. operation at Lordstown, describes the build-up of tension: "The change from Fisher Body / Chevrolet to G. M. A. D. wasn't announced to the employees until about the middle of September. It prompted some signs, and so forth. Employees wore an arm band that read Fight G. M. A. D. The idea, right away, was fight. So by the time the new management team had arrived, the concept of G. M. A. D. as bad news had pretty well gone through the plant. And a lot of rumors."

But according to Gary Bryner, president of Local 1112, "G. M. A. D. moved in and came on strong. Laying guys off and going in for a lot of discipline. They took extreme measures and the guys were willing to fight. And there was quality workmanship before they came in. Vega was one of the highest-quality cars G. M. was building. It required fewer repairs than any other G. M. car except the Nova. But G. M. A. D. came in and started crying about poor quality of workmanship."

One of G. M. A. D.'s first acts in its cost-cutting program, selective layoffs, provoked the most heated and lingering resentment felt by the workers. Throughout the dispute, union men claimed management had cut 800 men, over ten percent of the total work force at Lordstown. G. M. A. D. insisted the figure was less than half that. It's still difficult to establish exactly how many people were laid off. J. D. Smith said in May that his dues-paying rolls carried 800 fewer names than in October. Gary Bryner agrees with management that there are only 370 fewer men on the line but claims that G. M. A. D. has tightened the policy on leaves of absence, thus cutting total union membership by more than the reduction of on-line workers. Grix stands by a figure of "less than 400 men laid off."

Whatever the figure, the layoffs caused a storm. To G. M. A. D., the policy was simply good business: the kind of thing that's to be expected when production is streamlined and the kinks worked out of a new plant like Lordstown. "When a new car is introduced to an assembly line," says Andy O'Keefe, director of public relations for G. M. A. D., "you just have to add manpower that isn't going to be needed later on. When things are working well, you can pull back and eliminate some jobs."

But the workers weren't having any. What G. M. A. D. described as cost cutting, they called more work for the same pay. The cars were still rolling at 100 an hour, but now there weren't as many men to put them together. Speed-up, they called it, perhaps not choosing their words carefully enough.

"The cries of speed-up resulted from the changes in work assignments," says O'Keefe. "There were people who were not working anyplace near a full hour on the job. Let's say you have three people working 35 minutes each. You consolidate that job. It is a total of 105 minutes of work, so you can have two people working 52-1/2 minutes apiece. You save an employee. The speed-up gripe came from that man who was working 35 minutes and now has to work almost the full hour."

The arithmetic of it just made workers more angry. "Look," says Stick, trying to explain very carefully, "in my section there are a third less guys on the line doing the same job in the same amount of time. We sure as shit have to work faster. That's what I call speed-up."

To counter the speed-up, the union passed the word: Do what you were previously expected to do, and more if possible, but don't strain to keep up with added tasks. A man named Lee who works in the ancillary plant that produces Chevrolet panel trucks claims that he frequently missed vital welds. "Before the strike, I had to make 12 welds on each truck. I had a little over two minutes to do it and I could just make it. After the layoffs, I had five more welds to do in the same amount of time. I tried to get them, but a lot of the time I couldn't. So I'd just ship the damn thing--let it go on down the line, where the inspectors would send it to the repair lot. And those were all safety welds."

Some men simply didn't do any of the required work at all. At one point, truck engines were coming down the line as nothing more than a stack of parts. Nothing bolted or assembled, everything in a neat little pile. More and more vehicles failed inspections and piled up in the repair lots, an unacceptable expense in the case of the Vega, which is marketed on a slender profit margin in the first place. "We just can't build that car in the repair lot and make a profit on it," says Grix. "It's that simple."

The defects were countered by a stiffening of discipline, and the cycle increased the tension, the general feeling of rancor. It was a perfect model of resistance meeting repression: that situation where, as they say in small Ohio towns, "You're between a hard place and a rock." Frustrated and angry, some workers began vandalizing the cars and the machinery used to assemble them. G. M. A. D. made the sabotage public, and the screw tightened a little further.

Many workers still wonder why G. M. A. D. chose to announce the sabotage. "Man, if you were trying to sell cars, would you go on 60 Minutes and tell the world that the dudes in your plant were busting them up?" asks one. Others thought it was a cheap shot. "They just wanted people to think a bunch of us crazy long-haired freaks were responsible for all the defects. Actually, most of the trouble was caused by the speed-up, but they never mentioned that."

Ray Callihan, who has been active in the union since he started at the plant in 1966, believes "the company exaggerated the whole thing." But Callihan is not really typical of the men who work at Lordstown. He was a chef for 13 years and he worked briefly in the steel mill before starting at Lordstown. While this is the best of many jobs for him, it is the only job most of his younger counterparts have ever had. To him, the money is good enough--$4.60 an hour, plus fringe benefits that bring it up to about seven dollars--that he will accept certain restraints. Working within the union structure, for one. When he was a committeeman--a union official elected by each section to handle its grievances but who still puts in nearly a full day on the line--he stayed at the plant every night doing his paperwork and handling workers' problems long after the shift had ended and they had gone home. When a man was injured or sick, he would drive by the hospital or his home to visit and see what he could do to help out. He believes in the union and its work. Callihan believes the men in the plant get respect only by fighting for it; that G. M. A. D. would grind them right down if the union didn't stand up for them. And respect is what he demands more than anything else. Proud of his work, he is not combative nor belligerent. He thinks some of the younger men go too far and that they should recognize certain responsibilities to the company--like showing up for work on time and regularly. But most of the difficulties, he believes, the company brings on itself. "You know that coin set we got in '71. Well, the men were proud of that. They figured they'd earned some thanks and the company had given it to them. Well, last Christmas we got a letter from G. M. A. D. It said they were very sorry they couldn't wish us a Merry Christmas but that we'd been doing such bad work (continued on page 250)Blue-Collar Saboteurs(continued from page 104) that they just couldn't do it. How do you think that makes a man feel?"

So if the company starts laying people off, in Callihan's view, it is the duty of the union to fight back. When the cars weren't being finished on the line, the company had simply asked for it. It was fair play. The sabotage claim was just so much crying. A union man wouldn't do anything like that except under unusual pressure. "There's always some of that going on. A guy gets mad at his foreman and takes a tool to the paint job. Things like that. A lot of what they were calling sabotage was people not being able to do the work they were supposed to be able to do. There just wasn't time. The rest of it wasn't anything more than what you normally have."

But a young inspector at the plant who stops in The Scene West to drink beer doesn't see it that way. "Oh, man, you should have seen some of those cars. No way that wasn't sabotage. Things were cut and scratched--you know, brake lines, gas lines, upholstery, windshields. Dashboards smashed up. Some engines had bolts driven through the block. They were just tearing those cars up." There's no way of being sure that isn't a lot of brave talk for the consumption of gullible journalists. The young inspector isn't especially verbal. He doesn't volunteer much except on the sabotage. Otherwise, it is just a shrug of the shoulders and a "You know, man, it's not anything special. Just a job."

The inspector's friends are more circumspect about the sabotage but ready to talk. Everyone knows at least one story. This thing a guy in his section did to one car. Or something he heard from a buddy who works down the line. They all agree there was sabotage, more than usual, and, hell, he should know. He's an inspector.

They are better on the things a man can do to get back without destroying any property, the spontaneous insubordination that goes on when men work together and that merely offends dignity and creates confusion. The soldiers information, for example, who bray like sheep when the sergeant's back is turned. A favorite trick at Lordstown is locking the keys inside a car as it nears the end of the line, ready to be gassed and driven off to the lot. "It doesn't really hurt anything," one man says. "The foreman just has to run like a scalded dog to get a master key before they shut the line down. And no foreman wants the line shut down on account of him."

Stick says that occasionally a man will weld an oily rag or glove to the body of a car, then light it. "It causes all kinds of smoke and confusion, but there's nothing anybody can do except let it burn out. Everybody starts shouting when they see a smoking car moving down the line. That's just a way of letting off steam. If guys didn't do things like that, they'd go crazy." Even John Grix, who is a thoughtful and articulate defender of G. M. A. D., allows himself a smile when this sort of thing comes up. He worked the line for one year back in 1959, when he first joined G. M. as an executive trainee. And most men remember the "us against them" fellowship of basic training, the construction gang or the assembly line.

But when Grix is asked about the claim made by some union men and workers that everyone dismissed for sabotage has been rehired with full back pay--an action that would be a complete capitulation by management on the sabotage issue--he is stern: "There are still men on the street who were fired for sabotage. And they'll stay on the street."

There were days when everyone was on the street. As the situation deteriorated and vehicles piled up in the repair lots, the plant was shut down early and the men sent home because of "poor quality of workmanship." This further exacerbated the situation. Some older men, married and worried about their bills, were willing to try to live with G. M. A. D.'s way of doing things, but they joined the cause when the work week fell below 40 hours. "I started taking home pay stubs for 30 hours," says Lee, the welder. "Then for 24. One week, I put in 17 hours. That was really a big bitch before the strike, almost as big as the speed-up."

Finally, the union membership, in a remarkable turnout of nearly 90 percent, voted to walk. The pro-strike vote was the largest in any local election in U. A. W.'s history. They stayed out three weeks while negotiators drew up a new local contract to replace the two that had been in effect with Chevrolet and Fisher Body. Concessions were made and tempers soothed. When the workers returned to the line, there was some residual tension, but most of the hot anger had cooled. Union men who are happy with the settlement claim that enough men have been returned to the line to ease the speed-up and that discipline has been relaxed. Many young workers claim nothing was accomplished, that the union lost. Grix points out that the repair lots are nearly empty and seems happy, at least, for that. It is, after all, a victory for G. M. A. D.

But if the Vegas are making it to the dealers without a detour to the repair lot, G. M. A. D.'s problems are far from over. When the strike was settled, so many orders had accumulated that the company began working overtime on every shift. Instead of eight hours a day, each shift ran ten or eleven. Absenteeism, especially among the younger workers, was high. Fridays and Mondays were full of special headaches for foremen, who had to juggle their relief men and sometimes borrow men from other sections or from the sweeper force to keep the line running. The overtime was paid, of course, but the time and a half just wasn't enough to keep some men at the plant. And among those who did stay, there was resentment. "They hire me to work eight hours a day. But when they decide to up production and work ten, I don't have any choice," complains Stick. "It's forced overtime, and if I don't want to work it, I don't see why I should have to. But see what happens if I try to leave at the end of my eight hours."

There is one story, often repeated and possibly apocryphal, about a worker who constantly showed up four days a week. His absence the remaining day was virtually certain. After this had gone on for a number of weeks, his foreman approached him:

"Look. I've been noticing that you only show up four days out of the week. Do you want to tell me why you're only working the four days?"

"Because, man, I can't make enough money in three."

"Oh, yeah," Stick says, "I haven't heard that one, but I can believe it. I've seen guys go out of their way to get a D. L. O. [disciplinary layoff, usually for three days or a week] just to get some time off. They don't care about the money or their work record. They just want out of the plant."

Grix studies the problem of absenteeism both in his capacity as a G. M. executive and as a teacher of industrial psychology at Youngstown State University. "I've done some research on the problem and it's clearly the young man with no family, or with a wife and no children, who's not showing up. He doesn't have as much reason to. It makes sense. And I know from talking to these guys in class that the boredom of the job keeps people away. But while we understand that and are working on some solutions, we take the position that a man is hired to come in here and be on the line when it starts running. We don't draft him. And no court puts him here. We agree to pay him and he agrees to come in and do the work. But I know the whole work ethic is changing and we're going to have to find some new way of motivating people."

Many of the older men in the work force sympathize with management on the problem of absenteeism. "I'll have to give it to the company," says one, "the absenteeism is terrible. I've only missed one week in the last two and a half years. But there are so many guys not showing that it's tough on all of us. When I'm sick, I have to bring in a note from my doctor that says I was too sick to work. Even if I get the flu, I have to haul my ass out of bed and go down to the doctor's office so he can tell me I shouldn't be out of bed and to take two aspirin when I get back in. I feel like I'm still in school."

According to Grix, the requirement of a doctor's note depends on a man's work record. Foremen are given discretionary powers in the matter. If a worker is chronic in his absence, the foreman can require a note. Otherwise, a man should be trusted.

But the workers believe the presumption is in favor of their guilt and general irresponsibility. Always. "You can't go into that infirmary in the plant and get any answer from those nurses except 'You're all right, go back to work.' " says one man. "There was a guy who went in there once with stomach pains--so bad he could barely stand up. One of the nurses looked him over and gave him some antacid pills and told him to go back to work. He did and about an hour later just keeled over from an ulcer. I know they see an awful lot of guys who're just dogging it, but. Jesus, you practically have to show them blood before they'll take you off the line."

Everyone understands that if the line is to continue running, men must be on the job. But the checks become punitive at some point. And degrading. "You're supposed to get permission before you can go to the bathroom," says one sander. "It's so the foreman can get a relief man to replace you. Well, a lot of them like to make you wait, and some guys just stand there holding it in. There's no way I'm going to take that. I just leave."

While the workers think they get a bad shake from the company, G. M. believes it is the one being cheated. Former chairman of the board James Roche said in a speech celebrating the corporation's 50th year: "Management and the public have lately been shortchanged. We have a right to more than we have been receiving. We must receive the fair day's work for which we pay the fair day's pay."

Roche is also impatient with the talk of monotony on the line. "Hell, I can write a story about my own job that could be a real tearjerker," he said in a Wall Street Journal interview. "You know, if all you want to do is talk about the problems and the pressures and the monotony and the reading of all the reports you have to go through--but it's a long way from being the facts of the case."

And the head of G. M. A. D., Joseph Godfrey, isn't so sure that monotony is a bad thing. He said, in Automotive News, "The workers may complain about monotony, but years spent in the factories leads me to believe that they like to do their jobs automatically. If you interject new things, you spoil the rhythm of the job, and work gets fouled up."

The assembly line is based on the principle of simple, repetitive work. The idea is not to have people trained to do many jobs but to do one. And with an assembly line that moves 100 cars an hour, the jobs are simple and, by their nature, monotonous. According to Grix and other people in the industry, building a car any other way would be prohibitively expensive. "We could start building Vegas on some kind of team concept," he says, "where the man works on the whole car--sees it through from start to finish. But we'd be selling those cars for about $12,000. It's just not economically feasible. Our competitive position isn't that strong as it is. Imagine what it would be if we abandoned the assembly-line concept."

"I don't know what the final solution is," says Bryner. "But there are some stopgap measures that the company could lake. Of course, they'd cost money. Right away, they could cut down on the number of hours we have to work. We're supposed to work 40 hours a week, but it's usually more like 50. Then they could take steps to make the plant more human instead of more efficient. Simple things like music and air conditioning would help. But those are just temporary solutions."

Bryner, a tall 30-year-old with the features of a good-natured rural pastor, is concerned with humanizing working conditions. Aggressive and bright, he testified about blue-collar workers and their grievances last June before the Democratic Party's platform committee. The old system, he believes, must go. In its place, there should be a means of production that challenges the worker, replaces monotony with variety, stresses individual satisfaction rather than efficiency. And, above all, doesn't require that a man spend the better part of his life on an assembly line. "Just try working in that plant for about two weeks. You'll see why we have all the problems with drugs, alcohol and divorce. That place drives people to it."

Not many of the workers at Lordstown can articulate the problem as well as Bryner, but they know what he's talking about. "I'll tell you," says one, "you may only have one job to do all day long. Say your job is to shoot one little pissant bolt into every car. Well, after you've shot about 400 bolts, you start looking at the guy who's welding or sanding, wishing you could do his job. You'd rather do anything than shoot that bolt."

Everyone has his own way of breaking the monotony. On subassembly jobs, where parts are built before they go up to the line, a man can work fast and get ahead of schedule, then relax, if the foreman is loose. On the line, there are more stringent work rules and some foremen enforce them with a vengeance.

"When I was a committeeman, one of the guys in my section got a reprimand for singing," says Callihan. "I went to talk to the foreman about it and you know what he told me? 'Ray, I don't mind if the guy whistles, but he can't sing.' I couldn't believe it at first. I finally got the reprimand thrown out."

Grix says the foremen are told simply to enforce work rules that are designed to maintain good order and reduce distractions. Harassment is not condoned or encouraged by management. "We understand that a guy has to do something to relieve the boredom and we're sympathetic to that. What we can't put up with are disruptions, catcalls, people chanting obscenities.

"We try to spot foremen who use discipline excessively and counsel them. Some of the men who are older and rely too heavily on punishment are taken aside and given extra training. We have sensitivity sessions, where we'll get foremen off someplace and talk about the problems they have and try to find solutions that don't involve discipline. But sometimes a man has no choice. When he gives an order and the man refuses, then something has to be done. There's no choice; it's part of the job."

Work rules and discipline are constant irritants. The average age of the members of Local 1112 is about 29, as opposed to a national average of 42. Like their counterparts in the Service and in the universities, the young workers at Lordstown resist authority, especially when it seems arbitrary or enforced strictly for its own sake. "I do my job, and if I'm doing it, I want to be left alone," says Lee.

During the strike and its long prelude, journalists and business school Ph.D. candidates studied Lordstown for clues about the new generation of bluecollar workers, trying to discover just how these men differ from their fathers, from those immigrants whose culture is typified by boilermakers, tattooed forearms and Merle Haggard on the jukebox. Everyone, it seems, would like to know if we're stuck with Archie Bunker for the duration or can look for better days. Worse days, some might say.

The temptation is to deal in updated stereotypes. One publication called Lordstown an "industrial Woodstock," which is superficially appealing. You do see a striking number of long-hairs on the line. The seeming incongruity of a muscled freak in safety glasses leaning into a shower of welding sparks stops you for a second or two. And it's momentarily unsettling to listen to such a worker describe the monotony of his work as a "stone drag," his foreman as "uptight" and the disciplinary procedures as "hassling." But the clothes and the jargon of the counterculture have become public domain. No one should expect these younger workers to have crewcuts and listen to Montovani.

But beneath the superficialities, they are pretty much what you would expect. A lot of them smoke dope, but beer still sells. Most of them grew up within 100 miles of where they now live. Some married after high school or when they got back from Vietnam and now they are buying a house with a VA mortgage or living in a trailer to save on payments so they can have a week in Vegas or Miami. Others, not married yet, are paying for a new car, a GTO or a Z28, and taking off on long weekends for Virginia Beach. The money is nice and what they want now from the company is some time to spend it.

What does distinguish them from their fathers is a worldliness and cynicism that are the marks of the entire generation. They believe the Government lied about Vietnam, so "You can bet your sweet ass that G. M. lies through its teeth about rising costs." The foreman--the chairman of the board, for that matter--is, in their eyes, just another man who puts his pants on one leg at a time. "The main trouble with these guys," says one foreman, "is not so much that they don't want to work. It's that they just don't want to take orders. They don't believe in any kind of authority."

Hardly anyone who works on the line will say that he'd accept a job as foreman. "There's more pressure on those guys than anyone; I couldn't take it. And they're always losing their jobs and getting put back on the line. Usually they get transferred to another section so they won't have to work with the same guys they've been in charge of. It's more money, but it's not worth it."

One man who did think it was worth it cut his hair and shaved his beard to get the job. "Yeah," he smiles, "when my committeeman told them I wanted the job and he thought I could do it, they told him, 'No way, with that hair and that beard.' He told them I'd get a haircut and they said they'd consider it."

He likes the job and the money. He leaves the line early to attend classes where leadership techniques are taught and company spirit is stressed. When he talks about it, he sounds like a young man just promoted to sergeant and certain that he'll be able to lead by example and persuasion. "What a lot of these older foremen don't understand is that you can accomplish more by talking to a man than by yelling at him or giving him a reprimand. I try to get to know my men and find out if they have any problems I can help them with. I had one guy who kept screwing up and I finally took him off the line and talked to him. He has a problem with his wife. Separated, you know. Well, I understand how that is, because I was separated from my wife for a while about a year ago. He's doing better now. But some of these guys just don't care and you have to be hard on them. We've got a lot of problems. Absenteeism. Drugs. I'd bet half the guys out there take some kind of speed. And a lot of them smoke dope. They've got to understand that their jobs depend on producing that car without defects. You know, last year 41 percent of the cars sold in California were foreign cars. If these guys don't show up, we won't be able to compete and we'll all be out of a job."

Management has tried, largely without success, to drive that message home. If the workers can be convinced that they're all in this together, the thinking goes, then the company can cut down on absenteeism, defects, disciplinary problems. Every employee sees a movie called The Bug and the Beetle, which praises the Volkswagen and Toyota as superbly built cars and challenges workers to strive for the same high quality in the Vega. Periodically, each section of the line is held at the plant at the end of its shift and paid overtime for the purpose of attending a "number-one team" meeting. Gripes are aired and motivational lectures are delivered in the hope of making workers feel they're important. But most of the employees dismiss these efforts as ineffective propaganda. The idea of G. M. threatened seems, to most, preposterous. "Look," says one young man, an inspector, "if G. M. is in all that trouble, why are they building so goddamned many cars? Somebody must be buying Vegas, or we wouldn't be putting in all this overtime. And they wouldn't be talking about building a new Vega plain in Canada."

G. M., the consensus goes, is fat. Never mind the reduced profits and the foreign competition; it has more money than most countries. Already workers are speculating about the issues in next year's bargaining for a new industrywide contract. What interests them most is the "30 for 40" concept--namely, that auto workers should work a 30-hour week for 40 hours' pay. That is a dream that truly excites the workers at Lordstown. "Well, I don't get hung up on the numbers," Bryner says, "but I think we've got to have more time out of the plant. That's one of the most important changes we'll be working for."

Of course, the industry--plagued by Government action on pollution, slumping profits and foreign competition--sees the short work week as one more threat to its existence. But things may be getting a little better. Those Vegas that are rolling out of Lordstown have, along with Ford's Pinto and American's Gremlin, begun to challenge foreign control of the market for economy cars. Aided by Nixon's economic package--particularly his removal of the seven percent excise tax--sales of the American compacts are up significantly. This fall, G. M. will probably increase production of the Vega by nearly 30 percent.

The G. M. gamble paid off, but with a heavily ironic twist. The Vega is competitive and may have stemmed the foreign tide, but the technology that made it possible could be its doom. In pushing cost efficiency to the limit and beyond, G. M. may have made the assembly line obsolete. If the workers continue to resist, something must give--and it might well be the high-speed line.

But it's unlikely that G. M. will abandon either the Vega or Lordstown, to see that 1000-acre site returned to scrubby hardwood forest, cornfields or cattle pasture. Some people in the industry insist that the Vega was never competitive in the first place. G. M., they say, sells the car at a loss simply because it is unwilling to abandon any large chunk of the automobile market. It is, obviously, crucially important to the great corporation that young Americans go on starting their car-buying lives with a G. M. product.

But even if G. M. does give up the Vega--profitable or not--it's not likely to abandon the land. The rumor is that a vast reservoir of natural gas has been discovered on that land. No doubt some G. M. A. D. executives wish now that it had been tapped and sent off in long pipelines. Then the G. M. operation at Lordstown would be employee-, if not defect-, free.