Word: belchere
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...eight hours every day, says Henry Belcher, a 40-year-old welder, "I am as much a machine as a punch press or a drill motor is." With that comment, he sums up a crucial reason for the autoworker militancy that led to the strike against General Motors. Most of the men on the assembly line hate their jobs-with a bitterness that can hardly be understood by anybody who performs interesting tasks in comfortable surroundings. At best, reports TIME'S Correspondent David DeVoss, the auto worker's routine is a daily voyage from tedium to apathy, dominated...
Less Than a Minute. One such factory is the 60-year-old Dodge plant in Hamtramck, Mich., where Belcher works. Promptly at 6 a.m., the assembly line begins sending cars past his work station, and from then on Belcher is a part of the line, like the well-oiled gears and bearings. The noise is deafening; Belcher could not talk to the men at the next stations three feet away even if there were time. There never is. Partially assembled cars move past him at the rate of 62 an hour; in less than one minute he is expected...
Then the line stops, and Belcher gets 30 unpaid minutes to eat. That is not long enough for him to walk down from his sixth-floor work station to the second-floor cafeteria, buy a hot meal and get back before the line starts again. So he munches a sandwich from a bag-often while standing at the back of one of the long lines of men waiting to use the urinals. The chance to visit the bathroom cannot be passed up, since Belcher can rarely leave the assembly line. Besides the lunch period, he gets breaks of eleven minutes...
Complaints like these have been heard almost from the days when the first assembly line started rolling. In fact, the conditions that so depress Belcher are not as bad as they once were. Under union pressure, companies have made some improvements. Shifts are a bit shorter now than the 3:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. stint that Walter Reuther worked at Ford in 1927. Over the years, the union has won regular relief breaks, the system of roving relief men, and doors on toilets. Some workers who do especially dirty jobs such as painting, now get company-paid special clothing...
Sandy, then and still, belches throughout rehearsals. "Gigantic belches," recalls Burton. "I mean enormous ones, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won for number and volume." Musing over Dennis the Retired Menace last week while shooting an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Milk Train in Sardinia, Richard and Elizabeth seemed about to replay Edward Albee's "Get the Guest." Then Liz turned to Richard and purred: "It's awful, dear, but I'm afraid we just can't find anything nasty to say about...