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Money alone will not do it. The young workers are revolting against the job itself, or at least the way it is organized. They reject the principle enunciated in 1922 by Henry Ford I: "The average worker wants a job in which he does not have to put much physical effort. Above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think." The job that has no meaning must often be performed in factories that seem bereft of human feeling. Auto plants are often old, dirty and so noisy that conversation is impossible. "That's why so many young people just go from shop to shop," says Eugene Brook, director of labor education at Detroit's Wayne State University. "They can't believe that it's this bad. A young guy will start working at Dodge, and after a week he'll be so shocked at how dull the job is and how unpleasant the working conditions are that he'll figure it has to be better somewhere else. So he goes to G.M. for three days, and then to Ford—and then he sees it's all the same. The young guy asks: 'Is this all there is to America?' They're not buying the myth any more."
The worker is also blamed by management for product defects, and there is much truth to the bosses' charge that craftsmanship is a thing of the past on the assembly line. Sabotage is not uncommon; upholstery is slashed or a tool welded inside a fender compartment to cause eternal rattles. But there is also some justice in the workers' countercharge that they are not given time to do their jobs properly. Says Raymond Galore, 51, president of U.A.W. Local 664 in Tarrytown, N.Y.: "Sure, we read how the workingman today has ho pride in his work, and it's true. But what you don't read is how the company has broken down the work into smaller and smaller units, so that no man can feel pride in what he's doing. If they'd just let us build a car occasionally. Just one." Manhattan Psychologist Harold Greenwald sees union grievances—frequently a long list of niggling complaints—as representing "a cry for recognition that the complainer is a man and not a machine."
Revolt of the Counter Culture
The worker is also trapped between the technology of the past and of the future. In return for hard and automaton-like work on the assembly lines, the technology of the past promised to provide leisure and plenty for all—and has not fully delivered. Future technology still holds out that promise, at a cost of making many blue collar workers obsolete by replacing them with machines. Thus the worker has paid one high price for yesterday's technology and will have to pay another for tomorrow's; meanwhile, he has received a short measure of the promised benefits. Under those circumstances, he can hardly be blamed for wanting out of the trap.