Other states, other lives, other souls

Factory Girl: Prologue gives a rundown on this novel social/business experiment by William Norris, founder of Control Data Corporation. If you haven’t read it, the Magnetic Peripherals Inner City computer manufacturing plant brought together folks from various backgrounds with spotty work and education histories. Control Data’s goal was to make money by using these folks to assemble computer peripherals. The much-touted social benefit was that the workers could earn GEDs by using Control Data’s Plato online learning program in the plant basement, while making a living wage.

As a labor organizer, it’s important to understand and empathize with the people you are organizing.  If you are a “local”, this is easier.  But I was a traveler, from a very different environment, so the process took more attention and time to build relationships and trust.

My little community, the production line on the second floor, comprised a fascinating mix. Rodell was from Kankakee, IL, up from the streets in search for a better life. He came with a partner and a new little baby. He always came to work in nicely pressed and creased jeans that he ironed himself. (Hey, it was the Seventies and Jordache jeans were all the rage.) Smitty was from Chicago and seemed to have a recent gang-related history. I know this because we visited him in the hospital after he had jumped out a second story window, escaping a hail of bullets. He looked like a cartoon patient with everything covered in bandages and leg hanging from a trapeze.  He seemed in good spirits, happy to be alive.

The visit to see Smitty was organized by a plant HR guy who served as the community social worker, Norm Overby, a middle-aged African-American man with both a good and a bad heart.  He supported the inexperienced workforce, helping to solve problems that inevitably arose, and to socialize these street guys and other challenged folk into the expectations of factory work. He was well liked by the workers for his good heart. But his (physically) bad heart was causing him to miss a lot of work. The company decided to fire him for excess sick time. I quickly wrote up a petition demanding that he be kept on because he did a great job and his heart problems were not of his doing. Most everyone signed it. We handed it in to corporate HR and they decided not to fire him. Sadly, not long after, Norm died of heart failure. Most of our line went to the funeral at a tiny church he had attended in the Seward neighborhood.

Gary was a little wiry African-American guy from an old north Minneapolis family. He was full of beans and found any excuse to turn a conversation with a woman into some kind of sexualized encounter. This was his first factory job and he didn’t get the rules. When he had car trouble, he thought nothing of extending his break time, doing his mechanic work under the car in the plant parking lot.  A job for Norm!

Two of many ironies I experienced happened later. In a plant where over 50% of the workers were people of color, not one was a line leader— that better-paying job seemed reserved for white males.  Another chance to test and build labor unity and activism!  I wrote up a petition pointing out this example of systemic racism.  The majority of workers on both floors signed it, including the white workers. Fair is fair.  Off to HR. Can you guess who their first proposed new line leader was? A white woman. We weren’t falling for it, including the white woman nominated. The next appointee was Gary, the break time mechanic. Norm’s interventions had worked — he took his new responsibility very seriously, leading us on our zero defect mission for the next year.

Another workmate, let’s call him Jim, was a 30-something Native American guy who had traveled with the carnival since he was a young teen.  He was mild mannered and held a tinge of sadness. He told me that his mother had once chased him around the table with a kitchen knife. He was a good and reliable worker.

There were four women besides me in our production line. Two were young Filipina immigrants. They seemed to know each other very well and were full of life. They sported long, immaculately manicured nails. I could not imagine how they managed to keep them flawless on that factory line. Nancy was the quality inspector, a middle-aged well-groomed, unflappable white woman. A year or so after our line had moved to another plant in Bloomington, Smitty came back from lunch lit up. Something I said had pissed him off. He had taken to calling me nosey Peterson from time to time.  Since I was 9 months pregnant, his muttered vague threats made me feel very vulnerable.  I got a little teary and moved away from him, down the line.  Nancy stood up her full six foot height and said sternly to Smitty; “If your mother could see you now. You should be ashamed of yourself!” Smitty shut right up and I went back to my seat for the rest of the afternoon.

And finally there was Taja. She was a beautiful young African-American whose sister, Cynthia, briefly topped the charts with the hit Funkytown.  Once I went to visit her at her Cedar Riverside apartment. When I arrived she and a boyfriend were at the kitchen table, heads down, intently focused on a game of chess. Next to the chess board was a mirror with a line of cocaine.  “How sophisticated!” I thought. She later left the plant, finished her degree, and took a job as a chemist at 3M.

The whole plant was an incredible mélange of humanity. Down on the first floor were a couple of prisoners on work release from Stillwater prison, actual dangerous bad-asses who didn’t have a lot to lose.  Also a couple of women with more-or-less controlled schizophrenia, an East Indian engineer, whom we ran into 30 years later driving for Airport Taxi, and a handsome Vietnam vet who wore fatigues every day. Everyone called him crazy James; I had a mad crush on him. They all mixed in with a smattering of suburban white folks who were transferred into the Inner City plant from larger Control Data factories in Bloomington.

What amazes me to this day is how well everyone got along, how seriously everyone took their work and how interesting the breakroom conversations were.   This mix of camaraderie and diversity set the stage for several more successful workplace actions, which are stories for another post.