The Brooklyn Rail

These stories are excerpted from a longer work, We Wanted to Change Everything, an account of the author’s years as an activist and member of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) from the early 1970s to 1983.

1976 was the year when STO shifted its focus away from the factories, because we perceived a lull—a temporary pause—in the sort of workplace struggles that had defined our early years, such as the national Independent Truckers Strike and the Farah garment workers strike in El Paso. None of us realized that we were on the cusp of the massive deindustrialization that would move those industries away for good and cut the heart from a project based on workers “united, disciplined, and organized by the mechanism of capitalist labor.” (Karl Marx) We turned our attention to providing support to national liberation, especially the Puerto Rican independence movement, then engaged in militant and effervescent struggles in Chicago, which appeared to offer more promise. That is another story.

I did not need to get a factory job. Before 1976, I had been working as a secretary and paralegal for a series of progressive lawyers affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild and its Labor and Immigration Committees. I would have been happy to participate in opportunities to organize, but none presented themselves. In the last place I worked, Stewart-Warner, STO did have a presence and produced a clandestine newsletter that attacked both management and the hopelessly corrupted union local. When La Migra showed up, STO members helped to hide their fellow workers. At one time, STO successfully challenged a wage classification that confined women, nearly all Black and Latina, to a lower rank than men doing similar work. This was typical of STO’s approach, to focus on issues of discrimination and not on those that impacted all workers. None of these projects were ongoing when I worked there.

I did not go into the factories to organize but to learn. I had the recent experience of working with Mexican women who had been laid off by a runaway shop, Gateway Industries, in South Chicago.¹ Their unity and discipline opened my eyes to new possibilities. I did not want to do anything but continue that battle, side-by-side with them. I went into the factories to experience a world that had been concealed all my life.

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In 1976, when I was twenty-six years old, I moved from Chicago to Davenport, Iowa where the Sojourner Truth Organization had a branch. The branch called themselves Haymarket, for Haymarket Square in Chicago. In 1886, a bomb had exploded at a rally of workers striking for the eight-hour day, police charged the crowd, and eight anarchists were accused of conspiracy. Four were hanged after singing the Marseillaise.

In Davenport, some of us lived in a square-built wooden house, with an alcove off the living room for the offset press, a big kitchen, and slanting floors. A number of comrades—I think there were twelve of us—worked in local farm equipment plants, John Deere and International Harvester. I practiced drill press moves and tried for an industrial job; it would be my first. The big plants were not hiring, so I got on at the cookie factory, no questions asked.

As I followed a supervisor into that cavernous space, full of the clamor of the line and the mixer above, I almost danced. One day I had realized that everything in the world came from industrial production, from workers bound to their tasks, day in and day out, their rhythm set by machines. My whole life was based on exploitation, on people doing something hateful—there was an underground army toiling to provide me with lipstick and shoes and automobiles and grinding the flour so I could make bread. Entering that factory, I was thrilled to finally be part of it, to join the other side.

The place was enormous, with vast clanging machinery. The cookies were mixed and baked up above and sent down to us for packing in cellophane trays. There was an art to picking them off the line, four at a time, four rows to a package. It was hot in the summer. There were coconut cookies, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies. Even straight from the ovens, they smelled stale and tasted of chemicals.

We had two ten-minute breaks and twenty minutes for lunch; we had no union. In the lunchroom, the Mexican and Black women sat apart from each other, sharing food among themselves. There were no other white women. I sat with the Mexicans, greeting them in broken Spanish. They ignored me. There were vending machines, but we all brought food from home. The line was all women, twenty of us. The bakers and mechanics were men; they had their own break room. Those jobs were considered to be more skilled. The bakers had to sling heavy bags of flour and other ingredients, while the mechanics were called on to troubleshoot and could set their own pace doing maintenance.

When I went home, my feet burned from eight hours standing on the line. I sat on the porch with my legs stretched out and my feet up for the rest of the day and evening.

I worked on cookies for one month. The next place I worked was the Sara Lee cake factory, washing eggs on a belt lit from below. I looked for eggs that were cracked and tossed them into buckets at my feet. There were half a dozen belts; the noise was deafening. We ended up covered in raw egg, despite wearing big clumsy aprons and rubber boots. The lunchroom was a bit less gloomy and separate from the locker room. There was a huge sign high on the wall that recorded how many days had passed since an accident. One day, there was a sudden scream and the line stopped. Someone got her hand stuck underneath, and the next day the sign was flipped back to zero. When I took the bus home in the afternoon, people moved away from the stench of spoiling eggs. I stayed there two weeks.

My third job in Davenport was at a garment factory in a huge loft with immense windows; it was clean. They gave me a dexterity test and assigned me to darts: the folds used in tailoring. We were making uniforms for McDonald’s. The supervisor was Dominican; I tried my broken Spanish on him and he told me jokes about the rivalry between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. He sharpened a pair of children’s school scissors so I could use them to snip threads; I use them today. It took me a long time to get the darts right, and it hurt my neck to bend over all day.

My first jobs as a teenager had been waitressing. There the stress was in remembering orders, which I could do, and getting along with customers, which was a challenge. I was never good at deflecting banter—I find it hard to hide my disdain, and I thought being fast and efficient should be enough. I was fired from every waitressing job I ever had. Most of my life I worked in offices, where being punctual, efficient, and good with details made up for deficiencies in my attitude. I would not socialize outside of work time, but I liked dressing up.

One day at the garment factory a young woman refused to come out of the bathroom. She sat in a stall and cried hysterically, while her friends tried to talk her down. She was one of the accomplished ones, whose hands flew over the material while stacks grew on each side of her. I never knew if it was news from home or the work itself that got to her—maybe both.

In early 1977, back in Chicago, I got on at Stewart-Warner, where four thousand workers manufactured automotive gear. My friend José David had worked there years before while they were making parts for the B-52 bombers that rained death on Vietnam. Years later, in 1989, Stewart-Warner was downsized and the remnants moved to Ciudad Juárez. The buildings burned and were replaced by high-end condominiums.

I flunked the typing test to avoid the front office. I wanted a manufacturing job, or at least one in the manufacturing area. There must have been thousands of us in the 1970s, lying about our years in college, joining the working class to promote revolution. When asked for my work history, I said I’d been taking care of my ailing mother, who just died. I was sent to work in a small office on the shop floor, with three young Puerto Rican women, each of us on a small computer terminal. The supervisor, a middle-aged man more gray than white, sat next to us in a glass cubicle. Two STO comrades worked at Stewart-Warner at the same time, but we never crossed paths. They worked in other parts of the plant and did not encourage me to visit, to avoid speculation about who I was. One of them had also lied on his work application and, years later, was fired for it. He was reinstated when some authority ruled that understating his qualifications was not grounds for dismissal, although overstating them would have been.

My coworkers in that small space were Lydia, who was our immediate supervisor, her sister Iris, and Ana. At twenty-seven, I was the oldest. Lydia and Ana had babies who lived with their mothers; they saw them after work. Lydia was divorcing a green-eyed Puerto Rican whom she still loved, and dating a supervisor, an Anglo, whom she laughed at behind his back. Iris had been working in a clothing shop, where she took one of every shirt, “even the ugly ones.” Ana’s baby daddy would show up in the middle of the night and accuse her of having a lover. One night he stuck his hand on her crotch and found it damp. “I had just been to the toilet,” she wailed, coming to work with bruises on her face.

Iris had a friend who brought her coffee every day from the canteen on his way to a drill press on the third floor. One day after work she met someone, and they had liked each other, but he made the mistake of taking off with his buddies after telling Iris they would get something to eat. To appease her, but having just met her and not knowing what she liked, he went to every fast food place in the neighborhood and got her something from each: a Whopper, a Big Mac, the Taco Bell bestseller, etc., and showed up at her mom’s house, hoping he’d brought her favorite.

Lydia was our leader; she could let loose torrents of talk and overwhelm anyone in her way. We watched her through the glass, talking to the little gray man and opposing some management plan. Maybe they wanted to take one of our terminals and leave only two of us?

When we arrived in the morning, we waited in line to punch a time-clock, and again when we left. The time-clock was a mechanical device invented in 1888 to discipline labor; it has long since been supplanted by various devices. We had to crowd together because there were dozens of us, and if we punched in more than five minutes late, we would lose a half-day’s pay, and it would go on our permanent record.

All day we got stacks of greasy slips of paper in various colors, called up different screens, and recorded three or four handwritten numbers that represented the movement of manufacturing parts throughout the factory. That was all we did. I worked as slowly as I could, but we never fell behind. We had morning and afternoon breaks and a half-hour for lunch. Sometimes we bought sandwiches in a small shop down the block; sometimes we ate in the immense plant cafeteria. We never brought food from home, because we were earning not very much—just over minimum wage—but enough to pay for lunch.

We smoked immense amounts of marijuana on first break, lunch, and second break. The plant was in a residential neighborhood, and we sat on someone’s front steps. I used to wonder about the homeowners as we tossed roaches into the shrubbery. If one of us had had a car, we’d have been in it. I don’t remember who supplied us. I certainly didn’t, since marijuana was anathema to my comrades. Some of them had moral objections—they thought it would make us lazy or frivolous—and others abstained because it was illegal and not worth the risk. Some of us smoked anyway, discreetly, and never at big gatherings. One day, Ana came back to work and left a roach on her keyboard, and the boss, that gray little man, ignored it. He was fired one day: we watched him emptying his desk, then he was replaced by someone younger.

We were stoned all the time and talked about babies and men and clothes.

That factory ran on the sexual energy of our flirtations. Everyone was dating someone at the factory, married or unmarried, even if they never met outside. We all needed someone to make us smile. Lydia glided through those vast halls stinking of machine oil as if they were a nightclub, swinging her arms from side to side. She was delighted when I finally took up with Wemmington, a Black man, junior management, whose office was across the floor from ours. There was a young Black woman working under him. One day—this was months before I started even talking with Wemmingon—the gray manager asked me if I would fill in for her on vacation, and I said “No,” because I resisted any plan from management automatically, and I wanted to stay with my friends. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll find someone else.” I realized too late that he interpreted my refusal as meaning I would not work with a Black man. That was a knife in my gut but I said nothing, to my shame; I did not know how to back out of it.

After a year at Stewart-Warner I went back to working at law firms, temping until I found a place I could tolerate. Clerical work downtown was cleaner and paid better, but I didn’t have as much fun with my workmates. A year later, I located Lydia. We were both working in downtown skyscrapers; she was supervising data entry clerks at an insurance company, and I had found a boutique law firm. She was back with her husband; they were remarried and still paying for the second wedding. Their daughter was six and lived with them; she showed me a photo where the child was bursting out of a paper pumpkin with Lydia’s blunt force. She took me out to Grant Park overlooking the lake—this was back when you could be alone downtown—and we smoked so much weed I barely made it back to work. I wonder where she is now.