Friday, December 8, 2017

A Woman's Work is Never Done

A brief comment on life in the factory from friend and reader of Facts For Working People, Theresa Barber, a retired GM and Allison  Transmission worker. Theresa was active in her union as well.  We would love to read more stories about work. It is interesting to hear what it was life for a woman to do this work, have children then back at it again. And men talk about women not being strong or having endurance. We all know that saying that if men had to have children the population would decrease considerably. Theresa points out that the most efficient way of running this machine was when the workers ran it themselves. That's also the most efficient way to run the entire factory and society.  Thanks to Theresa for this. RM

From Theresa Barber
Indiana

Ahhhhh memories. What I did for 18 years. This is the Monte Carlo front bumper facia. Famous for the bright trim popping out. (Like a plastic chrome strip) The machine behind is the mold where the reaction injection thermoplastic bumper was molded. It was demolded and placed on the trim buck in the foreground where it was trimmed and sanded. 


You had the person running the machine and the trimmers. The jobs were rotated however the team chose and we relieved ourselves. (No relief person) At least that was the most efficient way to run the machine. Of course management was always trying to screw with it which invariably always messed things up. Lol. I ran many models during my 18 years in this plant. It was such a physical job, after coming back to work after each pregnancy I was back to pre-pregnancy weight within a couple of weeks. This is the job that did my shoulders and knees in. Feeling it today. Lol

1 comment:

Sean said...

A Women's Work is never Done. This was the regular comment of my mother an Irish woman who lived with us on a few fields. Nobody told my mother this comment. It just came out of her life experience. It was her truth. She worked from she got up before dawn to she went to bed at night, worked in the home, worked on the farm, had myself and my siblings at the same time. It is not a positive way to think about it but when faced with class society always trying to make out that men are superior to women if I was forced to it would hard not to conclude that women are not stronger than men. All the work they have to do and at the same time reproduce the race, reproduce the working class. I cannot imagine having my body change as a baby would grow inside me, cannot imagine the struggle of giving birth, nor the growth that would come from having given birth. For capitalism women are a since of cheap labor and the way to reproduce more labor and a source of cheap or unpaid labor. If there is to be a socialist world working class women will have to play leading roles. Sean O'T.