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UNSCREWING THE SCREWS:
A Few Lessons in Humanizing Resistance to Work

Kingsley Widmer

Work-place sabotage is frequently appropriate. The first time that I recall loosening screws on a mechanism so it would malfunction was as the operator of a steam-powered corn canning filler in a plant in Waseca, Minnesota. The new high-speed monster was known on the production line as the killer-filler. I was fighting back.
     Granted, I had rather stupidly asked for the job, not realizing until later that it was part of the same harsh company for which I had for some weeks been a field hand, weeding carrots on my knees and hilling beans with a hoe, at age twelve. Though reportedly bright in the nine public and parochial schools I had attended -- as an orphan farmed out to various relatives -- and though I had been working on non-neighborhood jobs for years, I was a bit retarded in learning work resistance, perhaps because so imbued with the spirit of the Protestant work ethic and the Great Depression necessities of obedient hard labor.
     The canning plant had hired me -- I was fifteen but lied about my age and presented a document attesting that I was a licensed rural truck driver and experienced yardman for a farm building lumber and construction company -- as a warehouseman. Heavy but bearable. After a few days of sorting/loading, I heard that a filler-operator was out sick. Since the job paid a whole five cents an hour more, plus twelve hour shifts (straight pay, farm harvest exemption), I asked for it, and surprisingly got it. Then I learned why such big-machine-happy work was to be had, and that I had been had.
     The corn-cob face foreman spurted out a few kernels of instruction, saying I'd have to pick up the rest as I went along. The operator stood high up on a small sticky steel platform, with the ambient temperature frequently over a hundred, beside a clanking double-row conveyer of empty cans, overseeing a near-hypnotized girl who checked the proper loading. The filler operator was also to watch a series of dials which he corrected from going into the red by turning various wheels. He also watched to see that the two spouts were shooting a glop of cream-style corn into each can, with a ready hand for the conveyor and spout levers. He also watched the slamming noisy machine below which put on covers and sealed the cans, with a hand on the stop levers for when that jammed. I was a few hands short.
     I was also a few eyes short. For in addition to watching the filler and can loader, I must check the two checker women, weird looking in coverall rubber aprons, high rubber gloves, and paper-hood hats, as they grabbed hot cans missing covers or bent, and tossed then into relect bins to the side. And I also was to keep an eye on the two men at the end of the table who with three foot straps circled ten-twelve cans and rhythmically swung them off into steel mesh baskets another man briefly held along a trolley line. If anyone fell behind, the cans would jam the machines and start flying. I needed shouts to get the attention in the din of the seven people who were part of the machine.
     At one of the five minute breaks, called by the foreman's whistle almost every hour and a half, one of the strappers came up to me as I sucked a cigarette into an inch-long ember: You dumb bastard! Nobody can keep up with that speed filler. Yer gonna kilt those ladies. We all have cans up the kazoo! Slow it down!
     I soon figured out how not only to space the machine runs but even get real breaks for all of us by covertly loosening the screws and lag bolts so that the conveyer would tilt, which set off an alarm and brought the foreman and a mechanic running while I pulled stop levers and spun pressure wheels. But after a few repetitions of that, the cursing foreman brought a welder with him who torched the screws so they couldn't easily come loose. So I tried variations, jamming the conveyor, or working a pressure hose loose, or twisting a lever off -- never the same malfunction twice in a row. Then I'd hit the emergency buzzer. The raging foreman was slow to believe that I would get myself splattered with hot cream-style corn just to get a break. But he began to sneak around behind to watch me, and ordered me to stay, instead of going outside for a smoke, and to watch repairs so I would "know the machine better." By then I had studied the posted health and safety rules, so I varied the resistance, such as pulling a full but un-covered can in which a Bull Durham sack was visible, stopping the conveyor and filler and demanding an inspection of the cans all the way back. To make a big deal about trash in the creamed corn was thought sort of funny, even by me though I was now out of tobacco.
     Like most battles, my killer-filler job ended in exhaustion. I took to the road looking for another job. But I had acquired, as they would now say, some useful job skills, such as resistance and subversion. Mastery of a steam filler, soon to be outmoded, as with many of the machines I worked for, is not an enduring skill. But I still gag if I am served cream-style corn.
     Certainly my job lessons took some variety, depending on the factory, office, merchant ship, jail, army outfit, etc. A couple from that last might be exemplary, in a rather good soldier Schweik way. A little one: my training C.O. gave me the schooling opportunity of learning to be a "demolitions specialist." New orders were that each combat infantry company had to have one, but no one wanted the spurious job and rumored dangerous training. I was ordered to volunteer, or be courts martialed. I said that I hadn't done anything yet for another courts martial. Right, said the Captain, you haven't done anything but screwing off and arguing with me. And you're out of proper uniform again! That's your insubordination. So I requested to learn how to put together various field charges, attach fuses, set them, and run. Only two guys in the class got blown up, minor injuries. But somehow I couldn't pass the written test at the end. Just too dumb to qualify as a demolitions specialist. But I didn't have to take the course over again because, unlike when I flunked the firing tests as a heavy machine gunner, repeatedly, there wasn't a record of my having been an expert with other weapons. I had slowly learned complex countering-job skills.
     When the outfit was in combat in Europe, the C. 0., always wanting to get rid of me for talking and smiling in the wrong ways, did me a high honor. During a supposed rest period in rotation from the line, he signed up me, only, as an exceptionally qualified volunteer for a high-priority special assault unit, the battalion rangers. We got a couple of days training with new automatic weapons before the battalion went back on line (the Ruhr Pocket temporary debacle). And we got a manic harangue from the new first lieutenant in charge, with promises of brave hand-to-hand combat and other heroic opportunities. The guy was a psycho case! Two days later the rangers made a frontal assaul tup a hill against an entrenched position. The casualties were so heavy -- even for once the commanding officer got killed -- that the supposedly elite unit ceased to officially exist. All of which I learned second-hand because, with a new buddy, I had somehow gotten lost the night before while scouting.
     MPs returned me to my old outfit, and to a chagrined C.O. hoping to find new honors for me. One, because I was such a good story teller, he said, was the extra-duty of writing-up battlefield dtations, such as medals for heroism. The former leader of the rangers didn't get his posthumous Silver Star, but I did get a medal for a naive hill kid from West Virginia, a replacement who lost a leg to a shell fragment, perhaps one of our own short 105 rounds (later called "friendly fire") his first day in combat. Then, in the army of occupation, I got repeated punishments, such as punitive guard duty, lonely vigil over surplus army material, which somehow disappeared. But not much was made of it since I furnished a lot of local beer for the whole guard detail.
     Such war stories can be endless, as this one almost was, but may be summed in that I had been combat as well as factory trained to resistingly sabotage all sorts of situations and authorities. Back in college on the GI Bill, I no longer had to work more than forty hours a week as a student prior to the army -- night dock walloper, clean-up shift sausage packer, and the like. But I did have to work some stretches at times, such as night clerk in a skidrow hotel, where I was fired for getting caught giving almost free rooms after midnight. Then there was a chance job for a couple of months as a Saturday night short-order cook adjacent to a saloon run by a semi-retired genial middle-aged hood (as a felon, he couldn't directly run the saloon he controlled). While not much of a cook, I was very fast, which is what mostly counted with the drunks and boss. I was fired not for the discovery of the food I gave away to a few fellow poor students -- modest thievery among crooks was no big deal -- but an injudicious confrontation. Having fiddled the controls, I expertly shut down the grills loaded with steaks, the friers, and even the chili pot, during the post-midnight rush, then threw down my apron, and demanded double pay for the absurdly frenzied work. Comically, the cursing thug couldn't get the machines going, so I got an instant cash raise, in hand, and the grills back running. His retaliation included sicking a police detective buddy on me. I hadn't figured on such dishonor among thieves, though it goes with usual business ethics.
     Then, more decorously, there was a position as US Treasury Special Bonded Messenger in Minneapolis, a temporary appointment because of my good test scores (plus veterans' preference) for a bureaucratically delayed better position. It was low pay but in compensation I worked a polite scheme, claiming to be at the Federal Reserve checking-in cash, altered time slips, in which I hid out and drank beer and read much of the time. The fancy identification card, which I illegally kept after leaving to bum around, got me out of trouble a couple of times with puzzled vagrant-pursuing cops (Green River, Wyoming and New Orleans). None of these jobs I took seriously. Why should I? They were mutual short-term screwings. That's the way the market works.
     A more long-term job was a somewhat more ambivalent situation. I had to give up the third year of a fortuitous graduate fellowship, partly because I had run-off with the wife of a senior professor (rather frowned on in those days). She was partly disabled from an automobile accident, and I needed a regular trade. Another war was on (the Korean) and, having learned to be highly selective in applications (my degrees, awards, and much of my job history excluded), I got an apprentice tooling appointment, with a salary for going to classes, and a guaranteed job if I passed final tests. I chose airframe template maker -- sort of ladies' dress patterns for airplane bodies, only in metal -- partly because I had once worked wood templates in a saw shop. Tooling should be better than a grinding old assembly line, which I had tried, or an office job, which was not only as stupidly repetitious but demanding of proper ties and the rest of imposed decorums, yet again as in my watershed army times.
     With a knack for tests, I passed the course early and went to work in the tooling section of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, graveyard shift. Jake by me, since the third shift was an hour shorter for the same pay, less thoroughly supervised (the up-and-coming don't like the schedule), and full of odd southern California characters (a la Nathaneal West) living off the factory but masquerading in all sorts of hustling roles during the day.
     Truth to tell, I was never avery good template maker. Impatience and awkwardness (combined with vision problems) gave me trouble with tolerances and inspectors, and boredom gave me trouble with productivity. Since I seemed to be able to figure outcomplicated memos and blueprints, I was most often given botched jobs to re-do. That was appropriate because irregular, and supervisors couldn't quite figure out how much I was doing or dodging.
     Still, I couldn't keep quiet. So much of the work place was arbitrary, regimented by numbers, forms, meaningless requirements, and a phony hierarchy. But this time I would try subversion by way of the rules. I argued with the assistant foreman, who sent me to the foreman, who quickly rejected my plaints and warned me about "trouble-making," I went to the machinists's union rep, who said I was "meddling in management prerogatives" -- and "What are your politics?" That was dangerous ground in those anti-leftist days.
     So I crafted a two page letter to the personnel chief, not only trying to screw the foreman but making an issue about half-a-dozen "arbitrarily inefficient procedures," as well as the unresponsiveness of the authorities. Eventually I got so far up the hierarchy that I was scheduled to meet in the morning after my shift with the Plant Superintendent. That was a comic scene in his cubicle high above the assembly line. The factory colonel was a paunchy graying man whose feet barely reached the floor from his swivel throne. Puzzled by a loquadous third-rate toolmaker inexplicably arguing about standard shop procedures, he came on with phony geniality, then irritated belligerence, and finally retreated into self-made boss intimacy. With a paternal hand on my shoulder: What can I really do for you? Put you up for a promotion?
     I had been through that up-or-out gambit in response to complaints with a ship's first officer, an army Lt. Col., a couple of college deans (unhappy with my being a perennial student), and others, and wasn't playing. How about, instead, more flexible breaks (perhaps with memories back to the corn canning factory), no logical reason not to in non-assembly line tooling. How about more cooperative and fair divvying up the template jobs? How about a meeting when there was a big problem, not just with the dictatorial foreman but the whole section? How about the rigidity in plant scheduling? How about engineers arrogantly over-riding the shop people? How about supervisory favoritism? Wouldn't changes in all those be reasonable?
     The Super wearily agreed, but assured me that such changes would require getting rid of "all those goddamn personnel people." Apparently my even meeting with him must be part of his turf war with them. Furthermore, he explained, such changes would require re-doing the union contract, and not only reorganizing tooling but the whole plant, the whole company, and even the prime contractor, which happened to be the U.S. government. System, indeed. My trade was very small potatoes in a very big hill, and not much for digging.
     Not much happened. Some memos were probably exchanged, but not with me. So screw-em! I goofed off more and more, then showed less and less, down to two or three shifts a week. I would guess that I wasn't fired, just docked pay, because on various records I was marked as the guy who had gone all the way to the Plant Super with complaints. Being a troublemaker can have advantages, as I found several times. Other times, of course, I got punished before doing much. Eventually boredom as well as resistance put me again on the road.
     But I still thought of myself at times as a template man. Indeed, I got more work at a subcontracting jig-and-fixture shop (jigs hold templates in production place) in Sparks, Nevada. Given my small town origins and bias, I thought a small place might be better, less rule-and-hierarchy ridden. But the pushy bosses were right on top of you, and I soon got fired for "talking too much," right in the middle of a shift. In spite of my small town bias, I was learning that the malcontents were often better off in big impersonal bureaucracies that were muddled by their own rules and other incompetence. While I don't believe in the virtue of the mammoth -- whether factories, universities, cities, or what have you -- I ended up choosing the overblown. Trouble-makers survive better there.
     My next template job was at Boeing in Seattle. Two different stretches on the swing shift, while I ambivalently pursued another, fancier but too lightly subsidized, trade in a graduate school during the day. My template making hadn't improved but you might say that certain of my job skills had. For one stretch, with shop conditions much as usual, the assistant foreman for my section was a gruff old guy, a drunk so bent out of shape some nights that if I would cover for him on his paperwork he would cover for me on other nights for low competence or absence. Trades in the real world often depend on humane trade-offs in subverting the mean machine.
     Also, for part of another stretch, I had a mentor, a temperamental fortyish skilled leadman named Leo. He really had a knack for adjusting cams (here precision tooled connecting bars). I soon figured out that with preliminary pieces that posed too much work or scheduling burdens, Leo would neatly hammer them into rejects to be sent back for total recasting. A lesson in monkey-wrenching. I assisted him, and soon covered for him while he drifted around the whole tooling division with a blueprint in hand over the sports betting pool slips of a compulsive gambler. In trade, he would let me substantially screw-off. I could spend half an hour at a time at a back bench, amidst blueprints and orders, reading. Not big fat books, which would be too obvious, but cut-out sections or divided paperbacks. But a big problem with Leo was a locked-in smart guy's resentment. His red-haired arm would crane over my shoulder and grab my text: What is this crap? Socrateeze? Another asshole who got himself done-in for arguing too much! So, on another round, Leo slapped down in front of me pieces of a paperback, bright cover missing -- Mickey Spillane; Read something good for a change, or pick up another order for cams. So I quick-read the Spillane, and near the end of the shift put it under Leo's lunch box. The quiz, as I had expected, came after I assisted Leo on a couple of rush template repair jobs on the next shift. Belligerently: Well, how did you like a good read for a change?
     It was fucked-up, I replied. Hurtling on past his suspicious stare: Mike Hammer gets a hand smashed with the convertible door by the blonde, right?
     Yeah, but he really gave it to her!
     And Hammer gets shot in the other hand by the hired killer, right? And then Hammer shoots him with his good hand, right? That's three hands, which doesn't make sense! Right?
     You fuck-headed critic! Three hands is what makes it so good!
     Yet somehow the put-down also qualified me with Leo for further hands-on lessons in how to further beat shop procedures and company rules. From then on Leo let me spend a good part of my shift doing what I wanted, which was to work a fair enough half-time on easy fobs, reading the other half, as well as miss a shift or more a week. I had been taught by the king of screw-offs.
     Still, my larger lesson was to become a fuck-headed critic and teacher. To move on to other realms of being screwed by, and in defense screwing-off and screwing-up, prevailing institutions and hierarchies. To replace two decades of being a fucked-over subversive worker with three decades and more of pseudo-careerism as a malcontent academic. I was past thirty and with a family to support; it was easier and steadier and somewhat less regimented work. But my excuses don't make me forget what I learned in my various jobs. Always the naive village boy, it took me some time to fully realize that as an academic I was still in a suck-ass rip-off hierarchy, still as it were running a corn-filler or supposed to make templates. But that's another story . . .
     Other things finally learned, such as remorse? I am sorry that I often wasn't a more clever and effective work saboteur. Certainly I was dumb in some of the jobs I took. Certainly some of my critical and confrontational ways got me fired. You may then suspect that my unscrewings might have been peculiar to me, but since I learned many of them from others, that's doubtful. Or you might say that those were ancient times and places -- depression, war, and cruder bosses. Certainly some current situations, what with computerized controls, surveillance saturation, "downsizing" threats and temp-work insecurity, and other ways of exploitation and domination, may require some different, more complicated, tactics. Such as elaborate complaint and grievance procedures with harassment, environmental, and health claims. But I've talked to, and read accounts of a somewhat later generation (such as Rivet Head by a GM assembly line worker, and How To Tell When You're Tired by a just retired Bay Area stevedore friend), and it wasn't all that different. Or, for more current accounts, read the wide variety of anecdotes in various compendiums (such as Sabotage in the American Workplace). Or the large "personnel management" and "security" literature from the other side. Stealing, for example, remains as relevant as always for adjusting work exploitation. Work-screwing and counter-screwing provide a rich and still viable tradition for humanizing work that is authoritarian, or unfair, or just stupid or mean -- or, since they often go together, all of the above. Granted, sabotage should be selective. Not much justice in being mean to the wrong people. Just more of the usual. Subversion, too, requires the smarts.
     Or you progressive-minded might say that I am emphasizing excessive individualism when it should be an issue of unionizing, solidarity. Obviously I favor co-operative direct action, when it can be, and now, not years of bargaining away. I am not in principle anti-union (and was once president of a teachers' local, though not very successfully), but that just isn't pertinent in a lot of places and times. And I also don't forget that when I once raised some questions to a teamsters' business agent, two husky suits explained hard realities to me by putting my head against a brick wall, and then the company fired me. No, resistance to dehumanizing work and power must partly be in individual counter-screwing, appropriately varied sabotage, or you become a lagbolt for the inequality and domination and other falsity. Unscrew-em.*

"Screw: besides a metal fastener with a spiral threaded shank, and sexual metaphors, a screw has long been a prison guard or similar authority, and the appropriate reaction to it, as in screw-off, screw-up, screw-em . . .

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