Working on the Ford Assembly Line in 1976, St. Paul, Minnesota


Something that springboarded me into college, and wanting to have a white-color job, was working for a handful of Saturdays on an automotive assembly line when I was 18. It's brutally hard work. I was a very fit and energetic young man, but at night my body would just ache from the work. And in my sleep the cars would continue to roll by...

If you've worked on an automotive assembly line you know, and if you haven't, you may be under the impression that at its worst it's dull, maybe just putting a bumper on a car, over and over all day. But it was hard work, which required a whole series of tasks that had to be done both at your work station, and on the cars that relentlessly rolled by.

The year was 1976, and if you were there, or read about that time, you know that it was a huge shock for people in the U.S. who had been used to very cheap gas, and very big gas-guzzling cars. Actually the worst of it was 1973, when there were gas shortages, and people were waiting in line at gas stations, only to find when they got to the end of the line the gas was gone. I was just a kid so I have no memories of that, but it but have been scary. The price of gas skyrocketed, and became a major concern. So the car companies responded by designing and building cars that had smaller engines, and were smaller themselves, in order to attract buyers who were concerned about gas mileage.

Oddly enough the strategy backfired. No one at Ford could have predicted that with the rising price of gasoline that big, gas-guzzling cars would suddenly be in big demand, but they were. Looking back, the logic was people's concern that these types of cars, like the LTD, which the Ford plant in St. Paul assembled, would never, ever, be made again. Sales of these cars went through the roof, and the demand soared so high that the plant decided to add Saturdays to the schedule.

But time-and-a-half pay wasn't enough for some of the workers, who instead chose to take Saturdays off, so the word went out to get people in there fast. I was one of those people - and no, I wasn't a "scab", I was a union man. I paid my dues and was paid the same amount as any other person on the line. My dad, who was the Traffic Manager there, got me the job.

No, I had no experience at all. I was issued some overalls, someone spent a few minutes showing me what to do, and I was on the job. The cars rolled by. And even though I was just a dumb kid, at eighteen, I knew that this wasn't any way to produce quality cars. And they were terrible! Just thrown together, I saw it. And this was the sad end of proud decades of quality American cars.
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