After getting my admission to Osgoode Hall earlier this year, I began thinking a bit about what area of law to go into.
Then, strapped for cash, I took a job at an automobile assembly plant over the summer. The factory was sprawling, about the size of York’s Keele Campus, and inside was a winding assembly line, which was several kilometers in length. When the line ran smoothly, which it did on most days, the plant could churn out one car every forty-eight seconds, or roughly 450 cars over an eight-hour shift. These are what the management referred to as “good days,” and on good days, the supervisors could be seen smiling.
But sometimes the line would malfunction, halting production for several minutes at a time, and turning the supervisors’ smiles into frowns. These are what the workers called “good days,” and on the whole, you could tell for whom a day was good based on how well the assembly line ran. This is part of what Marx had in mind when he wrote about the contradiction between capital and labour.
Anyway, one of my jobs at this plant was to unload large bins off of tractor-trailers and deliver them to various points along the line. From there, other workers could reach inside them for the parts they needed to build the cars.
Now, the bins were supposed to be made of hard plastic, but because hard plastic was expensive and cardboard slightly less so, the company decided to behave like a company and made the substitution. The only difference, other than cost, was that these cardboard bins couldn’t be opened without cutting them, and, as you might have guessed, I was told it was now part of my job to do that as well.
Fair enough, I said to my supervisor, but could I get a knife?
“Oh yeah, the knife. Yeah, yeah. I’ll get you one in a minute.”
Forty-five of those intervals later, I remained knife-less and grew uneasy. The cardboard boxes I had been delivering in the meantime were fully sealed, which bothered the workers on the line because it now fell on them to hack through the industrial-grade cardboard, no easy task, while keeping up with the rest of their work. Their frustration sounded something like this:
“Cut the fucking cardboard already, kid.”
“Ah shit, sorry. I asked for a knife…Uh, it’s coming. Give me some time.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
(These are good people, I insist.)
When I found my supervisor, idle yet feigning the opposite, I reminded her of the knife.
“I told you I’d get you one, relax!”
Relax? Relax. Right. Will do.
Five minutes later I was bestowed with a knife, blunt-edged and encased in flimsy plastic, with a blade that looked a quarter-inch shorter than the thickness of the cardboard I had to cut through. I hesitated before accepting it, but that hesitation was trumped by a more acute sense of the perils that would surely greet a request for something better.
So off I went to the line, poorly equipped, with looks of exasperation greeting me at every turn. I tugged and tore through this box, then another, then the next. By the time I hacked through a dozen, with another dozen to go, I realized I was falling behind on the unloading part of my job. A faster pace demanded itself: this box, that box, the one beside it, the one a few feet down, then the next one, then…shit!
My thumb.
The gash went right to the bone, about an inch long, and it was leaking profusely; I bled all the way to the medical office. When I saw my supervisor along the way, she motioned for me to stop, glanced at the red mess on my hand, did some inferring, grimaced, suppressed her grimace, and then asked with genuine concern:
“What job were you on?”
“19A” was my reflex, not even a reply.
And then, as I stood bleeding at attention, she spoke into her walkie-talkie:
“I bled all the way to the medical office.”
“Victor, come in Victor. Yeah, we need Mike on 19A, Mike on 19A. No, no, Tom’s already covering somebody. Mike knows the job, he can do it. I don’t know where the fuck he is. Maybe the cafeteria? You figure it out, I gotta go.” Then to me: “Ugh, gross, go see the nurse right away. What are you waiting for? Go!”
I stared at her blankly, knowing we were of different classes but wondering if we shared a common genus. Undecided, I began walking again, and arrived a short while later at a hostile-looking door marked MEDICAL.
The company nurse and company doctor on the other side were affable, competent and efficient. They washed off the blood, put three stitches into my thumb, bantered and made light jokes, wrote up a report, told me if the cut had been a half-inch lower I would’ve lost the ability to bend my thumb for good, chuckled at my good fortune, and then sent me back to the shop floor in under an hour.
My supervisor, having already received news of the prompt repair, was waiting nearby, and as I drew closer she let out an exaggerated breath of air.
Then, “Victor, come in Victor. Yeah, tell Mike he can go back to wherever you found him, the kid’s fine.”
And then to me, “You’re good, right? Yeah, happens all the time. Shrug it off, you’ll be fine, yeah.” I did, but I wasn’t.
It was only when the union intervened later that day that I learned about the multiple violations committed by the company the whole way through. Cardboard boxes are banned in that part of the plant; no one without knife training, that’s me, is allowed to wield a knife; anyone who wields a knife must receive Kevlar gloves; additional tasks can’t be added to a job without a commensurate reduction; an injured worker is not to be sent back to the floor without speaking to their union rep. The list goes on a little longer, all of it explicitly laid out in the much more obtusely-worded Collective Agreement.
So, it was in a single eight-hour shift that the company broke a legally binding contract in half a dozen ways, injuring at least one worker in the process, almost permanently. It also produced 450 cars and at least seven figures in future profit for the owners and shareholders. That’s what really matters, and it happens every day of the work week.
I think I want to go into labour law.