Abstract

"No Loitering: Get Out Production"

The author gives an account of a typical day of job search in his days of unemployment. After about a week of such wandering around Detroit After about a week of such wandering around Detroit, Michigan the author picked up a job at the Packard Motor Car Co. as a ventilator assembler. While waiting to be hired he had plenty of leisure to note that the older men were being turned away just as they are still being turned away at Packard, Ford, Hudson and all the other auto factories. Here was the author, who had never, been inside a factory, hired, as a worker on the line while men whose hair had whitened in the service of the motor kings were turned away with a shrug. "No Loitering. Get out Production." This sign on the general foreman's desk symbolizes the whole system. The job was to put ventilators into bodies as they came along on the "line." They had to work swiftly, for if a body went through unassembled there was trouble and plenty of it.