Life on the Line: One Woman's Tale of Work, Sweat, and Survival - Hardcover

De Santis, Solange

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385489773 ISBN 13: 9780385489775

Publisher: Doubleday, 1999

Synopsis

Just when Solange De Santis had achieved success and security in the white-collar world of journalism, she decided to leave it all to work on the line during the final year and a half of a General Motors van plant in Scarborough, Ontario.

In Life on the Line, De Santis recounts in vivid detail just how and why she undertook this path of seemingly reverse ambition. What she found at the moribund GM plant was at turns surprising, monotonous, humorous, and grim. She encountered competent hard workers, raging alcoholics, mindless bureaucrats, and good friends.

Life on the Line is a penetrating look into a world that many of us shy from acknowledging, even as we accept the keys to our new cars. Completely candid, and as unexpectedly poignant as it is funny, this book will change the way you view blue-collar industry and the people who fuel its engine with their labour.

About this title

About the Author

Solange De Santis has been a reporter and writer for Reuters, Associated Press, and The Globe and Mail. She is currently a staff reporter for the Toronto office of the Wall Street Journal and lives in the Toronto area with her family.

From the Inside Flap

lange De Santis had achieved success and security in the white-collar world of journalism, she decided to leave it all to work on the line during the final year and a half of a General Motors van plant in Scarborough, Ontario.<br><br>In <i>Life on the Line</i>, De Santis recounts in vivid detail just how and why she undertook this path of seemingly reverse ambition. What she found at the moribund GM plant was at turns surprising, monotonous, humorous, and grim. She encountered competent hard workers, raging alcoholics, mindless bureaucrats, and good friends.<br><br><i>Life on the Line</i> is a penetrating look into a world that many of us shy from acknowledging, even as we accept the keys to our new cars. Completely candid, and as unexpectedly poignant as it is funny, this book will change the way you view blue-collar industry and the people who fuel its engine with their labour.

Reviews

Journalistic curiosity led De Santis, a business reporter and freelance writer, to leave her comfortable white-collar world to work for 18 months on an assembly line at a General Motors van plant in Scarborough, Ontario. This lively and absorbing account of her time at GM is based on the daily journal she kept. De Santis effectively conveys the dominant element of working on the line: relentless, backbreaking labor. Whether she was installing hazardous fiberglass insulation, lights or other parts, the work was always dirty, sweaty and physically draining. She came to understand why workers, sometimes including herself, used their breaks to gulp down a few beers in order to get through the final hours of the shift. De Santis documents some sexual harassment in a plant where 15% of the workers were women, but her overwhelming attitude towards her fellows, both men and women, was respect for their hard work. She made several friends at the plant (including her future husband), and came to despise the condescending attitude of her middle-class friends toward factory workers. She includes a lively description of union politics at the plant; the union, however, could not stop GM from shutting down the factory in 1993. In a sad coda, De Santis movingly describes how the people she had worked beside, many of whom had no other place to go, lost their jobs. Agent, Jan Whitford of Westwood Creative Artists.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An interesting tale of personal fulfillment, as a sedentary journalist proves she can hack it on the factory floor of a General Motors plant, but one that provides disappointingly little insight into the larger issues confronting workers in today's global economy. Wall Street Journal reporter De Santis had always covered business from the top down, writing about CEOs, earnings reports, mergers, and shareholder value. Raised in a privileged background, with an Ivy League education, she nonetheless longed to experience life on the factory floor. Hiding her journalism background, she applied for a factory job with GM and was eventually hired to work at a van manufacturing plant in Scarborough, Ontario. GM had already decided to close the Ontario plant 18 months in the future, thereby ``downsizing'' 2,700 workers (including the author). Unfortunately, De Santis isn't really interested in the larger issues: ``My interest wasn't political in nature,'' she admits; instead she focuses on ``the people on the factory floorwho they were, how they got there'' and what they'd do after losing their jobs. The work itself, from installing insulation panels to sweeping floors, proved physically exhausting; but De Santis comes across as tough, motivated, and genuinely concerned with her co-workers. She discovers the twin enemies of every factory worker: physical pain and mind-numbing monotony. Drugs and alcohol were the painkillers of choice among many of her co-workers. She meets a breathtaking diversity of people, from Chas the aspiring rock star to Lance the management wannabe to Gayle the avowed socialist. In one of her sharper insights, De Santis relates the patronizing attitude management often takes toward workers; when the factory achieved difficult production goals, management distributed free coffee, cheap baseball caps, and lots of ``consultant hogwash'' to ``reward'' the workers. While this is an absorbing and skillfully written personal account of one woman's life on the factory floor, it's doesn't provide much of a window into today's often-embattled workforce. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

De Santis quit working as a business reporter for Reuters in her late thirties to take a job on the line in the General Motors Scarborough Van plant in Ontario. She's at pains to tell readers why she did so: wanting to test herself physically; wanting to free herself from the "cubicled veal pens" of office work; and wanting to tell the story of the people who make cars. Readers will be mesmerized by the fiberglass beneath her fingers and the incredible noise; stunned by the intense physicality of lifting, heaving, bending, twisting; and caught by the vivid personalities of the people with whom she worked. She does indeed challenge assumptions about the kind of folk who work in factories, but mostly she spins a terrific story, meticulously describing what she did all day with vivid pictures of the women and men she did it with. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Always interested in the life of the blue-collar worker, De Santis, a business reporter, took a job on the line for the GM plant in Scarborough, Ontario. For more than a year, she worked in a variety of different areas, got to know the other employees, and watched them deal with various issues, including the closing of the plant. De Santis helps readers get to know her colleaguesAtheir fears, their joys, and their feelings about being GM employees. She also sees herself grow and develop, falling in love with and marrying a co-worker and dealing with the reactions of family and friends toward her blue-collar work. She also describes her new feelings about the white-collar world as a result of her experience on the line. Humorous, touching, and sad, this fascinating book will stay with you for a long time. For all libraries.ADanna C. Bell-Russel, Library of Congress
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385489773
• ISBN 13: 9780385489775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288