Life on the Line

May 3, 1999
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.