Wheels Read online

  But at least today was Wednesday.

  First things first. He hit the intercom switch for the general office; his secretary wasn’t in yet. A timekeeper answered.

  “I want Parkland and the union committeeman,” the assistant plant manager commanded. “Get them in here fast.”

  Parkland was a foreman. And outside they would be well aware which union committeeman he meant because they would know about the red-tabbed memo on his desk. In a plant, bad news traveled like burning gasoline.

  The pile of papers—still untouched, though he would have to get to them soon—reminded Zaleski he had been thinking gloomily of the many causes which could halt an assembly line.

  Halting the line, stopping production for whatever reason, was like a sword in the side to Matt Zaleski. The function of his job, his personal raison d’être, was to keep the line moving, with finished cars being driven off the end at the rate of one car a minute, no matter how the trick was done or if, at times, he felt like a juggler with fifteen balls in the air at once. Senior management wasn’t interested in the juggling act, or excuses either. Results were what counted: quotas, daily production, manufacturing costs. But if the line stopped he heard about it soon enough. Each single minute of lost time meant that an entire car didn’t get produced, and the loss would never be made up. Thus, even a two- or three-minute stoppage cost thousands of dollars because, while an assembly line stood still, wages and other costs went rollicking on.

  But at least today was Wednesday.

  The intercom clicked. “They’re on their way, Mr. Zaleski.”

  He acknowledged curtly.

  The reason Matt Zaleski liked Wednesday was simple. Wednesday was two days removed from Monday, and Friday was two more days away.

  Mondays and Fridays in auto plants were management’s most harrowing days because of absenteeism. Each Monday, more hourly paid employees failed to report for work than on any other normal weekday; Friday ran a close second. It happened because after paychecks were handed out, usually on Thursday, many workers began a long boozy or drugged weekend, and afterward, Monday was a day for catching up on sleep or nursing hangovers.

  Thus, on Mondays and Fridays, other problems were eclipsed by one enormous problem of keeping production going despite a critical shortage of people. Men were moved around like marbles in a game of Chinese checkers. Some were removed from tasks they were accustomed to and given jobs they had never done before. A worker who normally tightened wheel nuts might find himself fitting front fenders, often with the briefest of instruction or sometimes none at all. Others, pulled in hastily from labor pools or less skilled duties—such as loading trucks or sweeping—would be put to work wherever gaps remained. Sometimes they caught on quickly in their temporary roles; at other times they might spend an entire shift installing heater hose clamps, or something similar—upside down.

  The result was inevitable. Many of Monday’s and Friday’s cars were shoddily put together, with built-in legacies of trouble for their owners, and those in the know avoided them like contaminated meat. A few big city dealers, aware of the problem and with influence at factories because of volume sales, insisted that cars for more valued customers be built on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and customers who knew the ropes sometimes went to big dealers with this objective. Cars for company executives and their friends were invariably scheduled for one of the midweek days.

  The door of the assistant plant manager’s office flung open abruptly. The foreman he had sent for, Parkland, strode in, not bothering to knock.

  Parkland was a broad-shouldered, big-boned man in his late thirties, about fifteen years younger than Matt Zaleski. He might have been a football fullback if he had gone to college, and, unlike many foremen nowadays, looked as if he could handle authority. He also looked, at the moment, as if he expected trouble and was prepared to meet it. The foreman’s face was glowering. There was a darkening bruise, Zaleski noted, beneath his right cheekbone.

  Ignoring the mode of entry, Zaleski motioned him to a chair. “Take the weight off your feet, then simmer down.”

  They faced each other across the desk.

  “I’m willing to hear your version of what happened,” the assistant plant chief said, “but don’t waste time because the way this reads”—he fingered the red-tabbed grievance report—“you’ve cooked us all a hot potato.”

  “The hell I cooked it!” Parkland glared at his superior; above the bruise his face flushed red. “I fired a guy because he slugged me. What’s more, I’m gonna make it stick, and if you’ve got any guts or justice you’d better back me up.”

  Matt Zaleski raised his voice to the bull roar he had learned on a factory floor. “Knock off that goddam nonsense, right now!” He had no intention of letting this get out of hand. More reasonably, he growled, “I said simmer down, and meant it. When the time comes I’ll decide who to back and why. And there’ll be no more crap from you about guts and justice. Understand?”

  Their eyes locked together. Parkland’s dropped first.

  “All right, Frank,” Matt said. “Let’s start over, and this time give it to me straight, from the beginning.”

  He had known Frank Parkland a long time. The foreman’s record was good and he was usually fair with men who worked under him. It had taken something exceptional to get him as riled as this.

  “There was a job out of position,” Parkland said. “It was steering column bolts, and there was this kid doing it; he’s new, I guess. He was crowding the next guy. I wanted the job put back.”

  Zaleski nodded. It happened often enough. A worker with a specific assignment took a few seconds longer than he should on each operation. As successive cars moved by on the assembly line, his position gradually changed, so that soon he was intruding on the area of the next operation. When a foreman saw it happen he made it his business to help the worker back to his correct, original place.

  Zaleski said impatiently, “Get on with it.”

  Before they could continue, the office door opened again and the union committeeman came in. He was a small, pink-faced man, with thick-lensed glasses and a fussy manner. His name was Illas and, until a union election a few months ago, had been an assembly line worker himself.

  “Good morning,” the union man said to Zaleski. He nodded curtly to Parkland, without speaking.

  Matt Zaleski waved the newcomer to a chair. “We’re just getting to the meat.”

  “You could save a lot of time,” Illas said, “if you read the grievance report.”

  “I’ve read it. But sometimes I like to hear the other side.” Zaleski motioned Parkland to go on.

  “All I did,” the foreman said, “was call another guy over and say, ‘Help me get this man’s job back in position.’”

  “And I say you’re a liar!” The union man hunched forward accusingly; now he swung toward Zaleski. “What he really said was ‘get this boy’s job back.’ And it so happened that the person he was speaking of, and calling ‘boy,’ was one of our black brothers to whom that word is a very offensive term.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Parkland’s voice combined anger with disgust. “D’you think I don’t know that? D’you think I haven’t been around here long enough to know better than to use that word that way?”

  “But you did use it, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe, just maybe, I did. I’m not saying yes, because I don’t remember, and that’s the truth. But if it happened, there was nothing meant. It was a slip, that’s all.”

  The union man shrugged. “That’s your story now.”

  “It’s no story, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  Illas stood up. “Mr. Zaleski, I’m here officially, representing the United Auto Workers. If that’s the kind of language …”

  “There’ll be no more of it,” the assistant plant manager said. “Sit down, please, and while we’re on the subject, I suggest you be less free yourself with the word ‘liar.’”

  Parkland slammed a beefy fist in frustrat
ion on the desk top. “I said it was no story, and it isn’t. What’s more, the guy I was talking about didn’t even give a thought to what I said, at least before all the fuss was made.”

  “That’s not the way he tells it,” Illas said.

  “Maybe not now.” Parkland appealed to Zaleski. “Listen, Matt, the guy who was out of position is just a kid. A black kid, maybe seventeen. I’ve got nothing against him; he’s slow, but he was doing his job. I’ve got a kid brother his age. I go home, I say, ‘Where’s the boy?’ Nobody thinks twice about it. That’s the way it was with this thing until this other guy, Newkirk, cut in.”

  Illas persisted, “But you’re admitting you used the word ‘boy.’”

  Matt Zaleski said wearily, “Okay, okay, he used it. Let’s all concede that.”

  Zaleski was holding himself in, as he always had to do when racial issues erupted in the plant. His own prejudices were deep-rooted and largely anti-black, and he had learned them in the heavily Polish suburb of Wyandotte where he was born. There, the families of Polish origin looked on Negroes with contempt, as shiftless and troublemakers. In return, the black people hated Poles, and even nowadays, throughout Detroit, the ancient enmities persisted. Zaleski, through necessity, had learned to curb his instincts; you couldn’t run a plant with as much black labor as this one and let your prejudices show, at least not often. Just now, after the last remark of Illas, Matt Zaleski had been tempted to inject: So what if he did call him “boy”? What the hell difference does it make? When a foreman tells him to, let the bastard get back to work. But Zaleski knew it would be repeated and maybe cause more trouble than before. Instead, he growled, “What matters is what came after.”

  “Well,” Parkland said, “I thought we’d never get to that. We almost had the job back in place, then this heavyweight, Newkirk, showed up.”

  “He’s another black brother,” Illas said.

  “Newkirk’d been working down the line. He didn’t even hear what happened; somebody else told him. He came up, called me a racist pig, and slugged me.” The foreman fingered his bruised face which had swollen even more since he came in.

  Zaleski asked sharply, “Did you hit him back?”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad you showed a little sense.”

  “I had sense, all right,” Parkland said. “I fired Newkirk. On the spot. Nobody slugs a foreman around here and gets away with it.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Illas said. “A lot depends on circumstances and provocation.”

  Matt Zaleski thrust a hand through his hair; there were days when he marveled that there was any left. This whole stinking situation was something which McKernon, the plant manager, should handle, but McKernon wasn’t here. He was ten miles away at staff headquarters, attending a conference about the new Orion, a super-secret car the plant would be producing soon. Sometimes it seemed to Matt Zaleski as if McKernon had already begun his retirement, officially six months away.

  Matt Zaleski was holding the baby now, as he had before, and it was a lousy deal. Zaleski wasn’t even going to succeed McKernon, and he knew it. He’d already been called in and shown the official assessment of himself, the assessment which appeared in a loose-leaf, leather-bound book which sat permanently on the desk of the Vice-president, Manufacturing. The book was there so that the vice-president could turn its pages whenever new appointments or promotions were considered. The entry for Matt Zaleski, along with his photo and other details, read: “This individual is well placed at his present level of management.”

  Everybody in the company who mattered knew that the formal, unctious statement was a “Kiss off.” What it really meant was: This man has gone as high as he’s going. He will probably serve his time out in his present spot, but will receive no more promotions.

  The rules said that whoever received that deadly summation on his docket had to be told; he was entitled to that much, and it was the reason Matt Zaleski had known for the past several months that he would never rise beyond his present role of assistant manager. Initially the news had been a bitter disappointment, but now that he had grown used to the idea, he also knew why: He was old shoe, the hind end of a disappearing breed which management and boards of directors didn’t want any more in the top critical posts. Zaleski had risen by a route which few senior plant people followed nowadays—factory worker, inspector, foreman, superintendent, assistant plant manager. He hadn’t had an engineering degree to start, having been a high school dropout before World War II. But after the war he had armed himself with a degree, using night school and GI credits, and after that had started climbing, being ambitious, as most of his generation were who had survived Festung Europa and other perils. But, as Zaleski recognized later, he had lost too much time; his real start came too late. The strong comers, the top echelon material of the auto companies—then as now—were the bright youngsters who arrived fresh and eager through the direct college-to-front office route.

  But that was no reason why McKernon, who was still plant boss, should sidestep this entire situation, even if unintentionally. The assistant manager hesitated. He would be within his rights to send for McKernon and could do it here and now by picking up a phone.

  Two things stopped him. One, he admitted to himself, was pride; Zaleski knew he could handle this as well as McKernon, if not better. The other: His instinct told him there simply wasn’t time.

  Abruptly, Zaleski asked Illas, “What’s the union asking?”

  “Well, I’ve talked with the president of our local …”

  “Let’s save all that,” Zaleski said. “We both know we have to start somewhere, so what is it you want?”

  “Very well,” the committeeman said. “We insist on three things. First, immediate reinstatement of Brother Newkirk, with compensation for time lost. Second, an apology to both men involved. Third, Parkland to be removed from his post as foreman.”

  Parkland, who had slumped back in his chair, shot upright. “By Christ! You don’t want much.” He inquired sarcastically, “As a matter of interest, am I supposed to apologize before I’m fired, or after?”

  “The apology would be an official one from the company,” Illas answered. “Whether you had the decency to add your own would be up to you.”

  “I’ll say it’d be up to me. Just don’t anyone hold their breath waiting.”

  Matt Zaleski snapped, “If you’d held your own breath a little longer, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’ll go along with all that?” The foreman motioned angrily to Illas.

  “I’m not telling anybody anything yet. I’m trying to think, and I need more information than has come from you two.” Zaleski reached behind him for a telephone. Interposing his body between the phone and the other two, he dialed a number and waited.

  When the man he wanted answered, Zaleski asked simply, “How are things down there?”

  The voice at the other end spoke softly. “Matt?”

  “Yeah.”

  In the background behind the other’s guarded response, Zaleski could hear a cacophony of noise from the factory floor. He always marveled how men could live with that noise every day of their working lives. Even in the years he had worked on an assembly line himself, before removal to an office shielded him from most of the din, he had never grown used to it.

  His informant said, “The situation’s real bad, Matt.”

  “How bad?”

  “The hopheads are in the saddle. Don’t quote me.”

  “I never do,” the assistant plant manager said. “You know that.”

  He had swung partially around and was aware of the other two in the office watching his face. They might guess, but couldn’t know, that he was speaking to a black foreman, Stan Lathruppe, one of the half dozen men in the plant whom Matt Zaleski respected most. It was a strange, even paradoxical, relationship because, away from the plant, Lathruppe was an active militant who had once been a follower of Malcolm X. But here he took his respon
sibility seriously, believing that in the auto world he could achieve more for his race through reason than by anarchy. It was this second attitude which Zaleski—originally hostile to Lathruppe—had eventually come to respect.

  Unfortunately for the company, in the present state of race relations, it had comparatively few black foremen or managers. There ought to be more, many more, and everybody knew it, but right now many of the black workers didn’t want responsibility, or were afraid of it because of young militants in their ranks, or simply weren’t ready. Sometimes Matt Zaleski, in his less prejudiced moments, thought that if the industry’s top brass had looked ahead a few years, the way senior executives were supposed to do, and had launched a meaningful training program for black workers in the 1940s and ’50s, there would be more Stan Lathruppes now. It was everybody’s loss that there were not.

  Zaleski asked, “What’s being planned?”

  “I think, a walkout.”

  “When?”

  “Probably at break time. It could be before, but I don’t believe so.”

  The black foreman’s voice was so low Zaleski had to strain to hear. He knew the other man’s problem, added to by the fact that the telephone he was using was alongside the assembly line where others were working. Lathruppe was already labeled a “white nigger” by some fellow blacks who resented even their own race when in authority, and it made no difference that the charge was untrue. Except for a couple more questions, Zaleski had no intention of making Stan Lathruppe’s life more difficult.

  He asked, “Is there any reason for the delay?”

  “Yes. The hopheads want to take the whole plant out.”

  “Is word going around?”

  “So fast you’d think we still used jungle drums.”

  “Has anyone pointed out the whole thing’s illegal?”

  “You got any more jokes like that?” Lathruppe said.