the end is not yet

I sat in a chair chained to the line. There was a gap in the cars so nobody was doing anything. A man I'd never met before but who turned out to be the boss that had been on sick leave since the day I started came up to me.

"Do you know where the polish deck is?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Cuz that's where you're going after break," he said.

I raised an eyebrow and said okay.

He came back a few minutes later and said that while he was supposed to send me there today, he was going to keep me the rest of the day and I'd report there tomorrow. Then he showed me where it was. On the way he explained that he had too many summer students and needed to redistribute them. It was either that or fire one. This was last Tuesday.

Everyone I talked to the rest of the day said the polish deck is where the best jobs are. That's where the people with the highest seniority work. They never said that's where time stops.

I work in a booth full of flourescent lights with one other person.

What I do is walk around a car searching for defects in the paint. A defect might be a speck of dirt that was on the car before it was painted or that fell on the car before it dried. It might be a spot of the natural oil from someone's fingertip that prevented paint from fully bonding to the car. Unless it's an incredibly bad one, it will only be the size of a pin head. An incredibly bad one will be just a bit bigger. And they can only be seen from certain angles so you've got to walk around the car with your head bobbing and weaving to keep the angles changing.

When I find a defect, I leave my white cloth on the car with a corner pointing at the defect. I walk quickly over to the work table and grab a squirt bottle of water in my left hand and a mechanical sander in my right. I spray the defect and sand it. Where the sand paper twirls, a white foam forms. After the right amount of time, I wipe away the foam with the cloth. Where the foam was the paint job will be grey. If there is a tiny ring around where the defect was, I have to sand more. When the ring is gone, I walk back to the work table and drop off the water and sander and pick up a squirt bottle of liquid polish and a mechanical polisher. I squirt polish onto the foam pad of the polisher as I walk back to the car. Then I polish out the sander mark and wipe away the polish mark, leaving a gleaming paint job.

This is a line job, so the cars are constantly moving and I get about thirty seconds per car. I have to fix every defect I find. Generally, there's only one on a car, but sometimes there will be three or four. This is because I'm the last guy in the paint shop to see the cars before they go upstairs to trim. I'm also the last guy on the polish deck. In essence, I catch what everybody else missed.

I'm going to lose my mind. This job, more than any other, has demonstrated to me that clocks and calendars are measures of a concept that exists differently inside and outside the head and that can't be measured inside the head.

On the sealer deck, a shift would take forever, but the week would seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Here, each shift seems to last a week. And every morning I wake up thinking it's the last day of the week. I'm at the half way point of the week now, with three days worked and three days left to work. It feels like three weeks have passed since Sunday.

Time is fucked.

Auto workers don’t have a burning passion to make cars.

You can tell this by observing them at work, which is what I’ve been doing for the last month and a half. I watch them because I’m there and I’m an observer by nature, a sociologist by education and a journalist by training. My observations haven’t been systematic or scientific, but they are telling.

Here’s what you see. You see people counting the minutes until their next break, the hours until the shift ends and the days until their next vacation. You see people quietly rejoicing when the line stops or breaks down. You see people walking away from the line when the shift end buzzer sounds, even if their opposite from the next shift isn’t there yet. You see people on the job listening to MP3 players, talking on cell phones, zoning out or talking about things totally unrelated to work.

You see this and it’s obvious that people don’t work on the line in a car factory because they want to make cars. They do it because they want to make money.

Most of them started there young, just to make a few bucks and then go off and do what it was they really wanted to do in life. But the money was so good they were seduced into staying. There are many people on the line with university degrees who couldn’t find a job in their field that would pay them as much.

I hate to say it, but for many, the line is the death of potential. People trade their dreams for a pay cheque big enough to buy things they think they need for their families and themselves. In return, they help another corporation build another pyramid.