If you've ever read the description for this blog, you may
have noticed the quote from Aldous Huxley's Brave
New World. "All our science is just a cookery book," proclaims World
Controller Mustapha Mond, "with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's
allowed to question".
What you may not have noticed is that the blog's owner (yours
truly) read Huxley's book while killing time as a temp at GM Truck and Bus.
That was 15 years ago, but General Motors has been on my mind a lot lately. As the
carmaker seeks to survive bankruptcy, I wonder about the engineers, managers,
office staff, and autoworkers that I knew.
Many are retired by now, but their stories (or, more
precisely, my memories of their stories) will live on in with what I'm about to tell
you. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence for GM's demise here, but I'll leave
it to the auto industry experts to draw the larger conclusions. For now, let's take a trip down
memory lane to the Pontiac Assembly Center
on South Opdyke Road
in Pontiac, Michigan.
The year was 1993.
Not a Model Shop
My first assignment at GM was an assistant to a secretary
who was losing her high school intern. I'm not sure why General Motors needed to procure unnecessary office services from Manpower, Inc., but I doubt that the placement firm
was complaining about the money it was making. Because of the high cost of
heath care, companies like GM were reluctant to hire full-time workers – especially office
staff who contributed to overhead costs. Still, the fact that I was paid $10 an
hour to read a book all day was mind boggling, especially since my college-bound
predecessor had worked for free.
When the high school intern left, I helped the secretary
answer phones in the Model Shop (as the prototyping facility was known) and
would page engineers and autoworkers on the factory floor. Yes, at this point
in my life, I wondered if going to college had been worth it. So if
you're reading this blog entry and are out of work, please take heart. Life
gets better.
The engineers whose messages I took and whose names I paged knew
this bit of wisdom already. They worked 7 days a week for months at a time. So you couldn't
blame them if they talked a lot about retirement, when life really would get
better - preferably on a beach in Florida.
Some engineers, even the line managers, wondered why they
needed to be at the Pontiac
plant so often. It's tough to work 12-hour shifts, but also difficult to deal
with boredom. Imagine showing up at for work at 7 AM on a Sunday morning
because you were told to be there by a manager who didn't understand that you
really didn't need be there at all. You'd rather be fishing "up North", but GM engineers had to work hard - even if they were hardly working.
Editor's Note: Part 2 of this series will be available after 5 PM EST today.
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