Bodies for Sale: The Inhuman Face of Industrialism

“You are worth about $5.50,” gloats the sta­tistic-monger. “If you were cremated, the chemi­cals in your body wouldn’t be worth as much as a ticket to a first-class concert.”

“Four dollars an hour,” says my boss, equally pleased.

I do just enough unskilled factory work (for Manpower) to cover my room and board. The money itself doesn’t affront me, as if I had gotten a low bid at the auction block. But what does af­front me is the suggestion that the money could in any way compensate me for my body, my life, my time, myself.

Raw materials went into the factory and came out ennobled and man went in and came out de­graded (Pope Pius XI).

Here’s my machine: a plastic injection molder. It’s not a tool, since it is in no way an extension of me or my skills. It isn’t a co-worker, since there is no communication between it and myself.

When the mold snaps open and shut, and the plastic parts drop into the tray below, I spring into action: scoop up the parts, throw away the plastic connecting “gate,” put four parts on the cooling bars, take four other parts off and smooth their edges with a metal file.

One edge has the tiny letters AMP impressed on it, about one millimeter high. I am not to smooth off the letters AMP.

Anyway, the snapping open and shut of that mold is what springs me into action, like a reflex. The machine is, in a sense, my brain. I am its arms. I am its tool.

My function completed, it takes a few seconds before the mold opens up again. During those few seconds, my mind is free. It’s long enough for 3/4 of a Hail Mary.

But trying to pray while watching for the mold to open is like trying to make love while waiting for a bus. It lacks a certain Presence.

Besides, the clang of the factory crowds into your skull, forcing out any half-formed thoughts. Pallets crash to the floor. Percussions of metal on metal punctuate the constant gravelly roar of scraps being run through the plastic grinders.

There are buzzers, gongs, and bells whose sig­nificance is unknown to me. Maybe somebody’s machine is down. Maybe that was a warning whis­tle. It’s possible there’s a fire in the plant, or the girl next to me is possessed by the Devil. Nobody ever told me what the bells and whistles are for.

At any rate, the whole mental process results in miscarriage: it’s impossible to carry a thought to term.

My machine has detailed instruction plates bolted to its side, under the words DANGER and CAUTION and 480 VOLTS. I have never read the instructions. It only took the foreman 60 seconds to explain to me the four parts, the cooling bar, the metal file — and leave.

The control panel — it’s on “semi-aut” — has a bank of red, yellow, and white lights. I wonder what the red one is on for. I don’t know.

I don’t know what the parts are, or where they’re going. I wonder if the part’s name is AMP. Or maybe that’s the company we’re making it for. Or maybe it’s short for “ampere,” which I vaguely remember is a measure of electricity, like a volt.

Four hundred and eighty volts. I am not to smooth off the letters AMP.

I can’t pray, since prayer is an activity of a thinking creature and I can’t think. But the prob­lem remains: how to occupy that 3/4-of-a-Hail-Mary’s-worth of time between the completion of my little function and the beginning of the next cycle?

Standing on this concrete makes my legs stiff. I should jog in place!

What constitutes the alienation of labor? First, that the work is not part of his nature, and conse­quently that he does not fulfill himself in his work, but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not freely develop his mental or physical energies but is physically depleted and mentally debased (Karl Marx).

The foreman makes it clear that my jogging in place is — let us put it delicately — not appreciated. “I suggest you just stick with your work!”

He has a wonderful, resonant voice. Sinus pas­sages like Carnegie Hall.

So I try isometrics. I grasp my right hand with my left and pull (the mold opens and closes and I do my thing) — then, I put my palms together and push. Or I stand on my right foot for one mold cy­cle, and on my left for the next. This is much better.

As for the other women at the machines, I no­tice that none of them seems to do isometric exer­cises. How many of them have worked here for 15 or 20 years, taking long drags on their cigarettes and staring until the machine triggers them again?

I wonder vaguely, “Is this possibly a bomb factory?” The box I’m tossing parts into is printed with Oriental writing: are these parts going to Ja­pan? Taiwan? South Korea? How vaguely disquiet­ing if I’m making parts for a Trident submarine, or a suction abortion machine!

Or maybe it’s a life-saving device for an inten­sive-care nursery. Or maybe I’m making parts for a machine that makes parts for another machine.

“WHOO-EEEee!” hoots Dorothy on my right. “WHOO-EEee, JEE-zus!” Break time.

Sitting in the lunch room, I see Mrs. Cho at the vending machine with its spray-on barbecue-flavor potato chips, Pepsis, Twinkies, and other wholly-owned subsidiaries of ITT, XYZ, FBI, and AMP. I feel glad to be eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my own recycled brown paper bag.

The luncheon conversation today revolves around recipes and pregnancies. Dorothy tells a story concerning her husband and the bedsprings. It is howlingly funny.

The worker feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas while working he feels homeless. We arrive at the result that the worker feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions — eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment — while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal (Karl Marx).

The curse of this work is not its monotony. I’ve spent a day making furrows with a hoe and planting corn, but at least I could talk with Tom­my and his father, Mr. Woodard. “Gal, you works like a mule!” said Mr. Woodard — but I was not re­duced to an animal: I was elevated to a friend and an object of affection.

And God knows that folding 5,000 leaflets, chopping everlasting vegetables for a soup kitchen, or even walking a picket line do not constitute skilled craftsmanship or stimulating labor; but there is the possibility for either true sociability (singing and talking) or quiet and true solitude. Assembly-line work has neither sociability nor solitude, nei­ther body-gratifying activity nor space for the ima­gination.

The worker is reduced to a subhuman condi­tion of intellectual irresponsibility (Eric Gill, 1985).

E.F. Schumacher said that if a man-made sys­tem proved to destroy the initiative and rot the brains of millions of birds, humanitarians would form Wildlife Defense Leagues to save the poor creatures. But if the system is destroying the initia­tive and rotting the brains of millions of workers, people “sigh and nod — and move on.”

What Schumacher advocates is not a retreat into primitivism, but new, human-scale producing methods, “technology with a human face,” to re­place the gigantism of industry which reduces the human being to a spiritual dwarf.

But industry everywhere, East or West, wheth­er controlled by a state bureaucracy or driven by market forces, has no veneration for the Presence of the Godhead in the soul of the worker. This Presence can be rubbed out, scraped away, erased by daily attrition. It is of less consequence than the letters AMP.

Meanwhile, I do as little factory work as pos­sible, keeping my days as free as possible and my income as low as possible. But such voluntary pov­erty is the luxury of a single person comfortably ensconced in a supportive religious community. As for Dorothy and Mrs. Cho, they will probably go on for deadening weeks, months, and years: getting $4 for their bodies, and nothing for their souls.