A Peculiar Sort of Joe

The assembly-line worker, as Charlie Chaplin played him in Modern Times, turned screws with both hands and tightened bolts until he could hardly tell himself from a machine. In General Motors Corp.'s huge, sprawling plants, nobody works that hard. But many a G.M. employee, like mass-production workers everywhere, has long felt that his identity is lost in the vast impersonality of the machines.

Nobody was more aware of this than Harry Coen, G.M.'s vice president for employee relations. He knew the feeling; he had been a mass-production worker himself. He also knew it because the thousands of workers' suggestions dropped into boxes in G.M.'s plants are mostly gripes.

Coen decided to do something about it. He got G.M. to offer $500,000 in prizes (autos, stoves, refrigerators, etc.) for the best letters on "My Job and Why I Like It." In came 174,854 letters from G.M. employees.

By the time the 5,145 prizes were awarded last week, G.M. felt that it had got its money's worth. The contest had proved a smart publicity stunt. It had also given G.M. a closer appreciation than ever before of two basic emotions of good factory workers: a strong pride in their work, a deep love of precision machines. By giving those feelings a stronger, more individualistic outlet, G.M. felt, it could take some of the curse of monotony out of mass production.

Some of the letters were merely apple-polishing jobs. But others, like the letter of Thomas B. Anslow, 42, who won first prize (a Cadillac), had a ring as authentic as the clang of the drop-forge hammer he operates in Buick's Flint plant. Wrote Anslow, a veteran of 23 years: "A drop forge is a place . . . with giant steam-hammers, powerful forging presses, forging machines. . . . Pounding, pushing, squeezing white-hot steel. ... A forge . . . rattles the windows in buildings for blocks around. It is hot and dirty and it is noisy. It has a smell of heat and sweat and burning gases. . . . The rhythm of production you understand because you do it, you see it, you feel it. ...

"A drop-forge worker is a peculiar sort of Joe. ... He makes forgings, eight, nine or ten hours a shift. After work he makes them in the tavern, he makes them at the dinner table, in fact, he makes them wherever and whenever he can get anyone to listen--and he always makes them better than the other guy."

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