Undercover Reporter at GM Plant Never Shifts Out of First Gear

As a financial reporter for Reuters in Canada, Solange De Santis was bored with her work--to the point of sneaking coded baseball information into her articles. Eager to write a business story “from the bottom up,” she found a job at General Motors Corp.’s van assembly plant in Scarborough, Canada, which was already scheduled to close. She hoped to chronicle the last months of the Ontario factory and how the closing affected the workers.

De Santis was also eager “to step over the line between white collar and blue collar.” She confesses: “I knew what life was like among the smooth-skinned, the clear-eyed, the educated, the comfortable. I longed to push my chair back from the captain’s table and go below to eat with the seaman.”

Although De Santis fretted that someone in the Scarborough plant would discover that she was researching a book, a reporter posing as a worker to get the “inside story” is hardly a novelty. Nellie Bly, one of the first female reporters, built a career writing sensational insider stories for the New York World in the 1880s.

The most interesting chapters of “On the Line” deal with the difficulties of assembly labor, beginning with an agonizing learning curve: how to use the specialized tools, how to wrestle the unwieldy parts into place, how to manipulate perversely tiny screws into their holes--in the two minutes a van spent at each workstation.

De Santis’ first weeks were punctuated with bruises, aching muscles, sore feet and fingers so stiff they would neither bend nor straighten completely. Once she acquired the necessary skills and physical strength, she faced the stultifying monotony of repeating the same motions hundreds of times a day.

Although she insists she wanted to share their experiences, De Santis carefully separates herself from her co-workers. She continually reminds the reader that, unlike them, she has two degrees from Ivy League schools, held a series of white-collar jobs and came from an upper-middle-class family.

When she strikes up a friendship with Maria, a long-suffering worker forced to live apart from her husband and children, De Santis comments: “We were such different people, yet we were forming a most unlikely friendship: the highly educated professional from New York City and the high school dropout from Windsor; the single woman yearning to find a long, solid relationship again and finally ready for babies and the long-married woman with four sons.”

When she and Maria hit the local beer-and-sandwich hangout, the tone becomes even more patronizing, and De Santis sounds like an upper-class Victorian touring the colonies to see quaint native customs: “As I chatted with Maria, I continued to glance around furtively to see if anything colorful was happening--knife fights, punches flying, a woman throwing a drink in a man’s face. I was disappointed.”

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One of the few times De Santis really connects with her co-workers is when GM recognizes them for keeping the number of defects in their vans at the targeted percentage. Their reward: “Fluorescent lime-green caps made of some light synthetic fabric with GM SCARBOROUGH on the front.” She is dismayed to discover that the low-level manager handing out the hats can’t understand why people who are about to lose their jobs regard the crummy cap as an insult. One worker snorts: “Take the hat, hold it out in the street, and ask people for a handout.”

De Santis fails to come to grips with what the closing of the aging Scarborough plant really means to the workers. She wanders through the van plant, but rarely sees below its surface: The people she describes in her rambling narrative never emerge as human beings with needs and fears and aspirations--not even the taciturn Newfoundlander she later married.

The factory jobs that were once the bastion of the North American middle class are rapidly disappearing and are not likely to return in an era of mergers, downsizing and outsourcing.

Calculating the human costs of the shift to a service- and information-based economy is a daunting task, but “Life on the Line” is no “Roger & Me.”