Wheels (Page 3)

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 goddamn 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 thicklensed 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 frustration 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.