- You deserve a break today.
In the summer of my first year as an undergraduate student I worked at a Coca Cola bottling plant. It was fascinating to observe the hourly workers’ ability to dope out the bottling line and self-organize. Management routinely “adjusted” the conveyor speeds in order to pace production. Workers responded to these changes in many ways. During higher speed runs, some worker would routinely nudge a bottle just so and it would tip and jam the line, causing all the bottles following it to fall. The sound of the line crashing was always a welcome respite from the repetitive drudgery of the midnight shift. The sound of klaxons and breaking glass marked these moments of relief, during which the smiling hourly workers got a 20 minute break from the routine. No words were ever spoken. No plots were hatched. These “accidents” were simply a part of the system.
During my graduate studies, I worked summers as a ladleman at a steel plant. It was a quick way to build my bank account for the coming year. The steel making process was organized around teams—crane operators, ladle operators, pour operators, furnace operators, casting guys, and the gang foreman. Team performance was measured by the number and weight of “heats” completed during a shift. The highest performing teams received bonus pay each month.
- Just one more heat.
All of the teams were pretty aggressive. A critical path process was ladle preparation–one of my jobs. Each ladle had to be prepared by molding sand into the base as a release agent for the slag that remained after a pour. The sand was molded wet. Once the ladle was lined, it was cooked under a huge burner to remove all moisture from the sand-water mixture. If tiniest amount of moisture remained in a ladle, the pour of molten steel would overlay the wet spot and produce a steam explosion that would cause the molten steel to explode out of the ladle. For this reason, a ladleman only poured from ladles he himself had built.
The process of drying a ladle was always fuzzy. How much moisture was in the sand mixture? How humid was the work environment? How did the wind affect the drying burners? The only answer back in those days was, the longer under the burner, the safer the ladle.
The first explosion I witnessed occurred before the plant installed a shield over the head of the ladelman’s pouring station. The steel exploded out of the pot and flew all over the plant. Emergency sirens blasted. The ladleman on the pour platform disappeared beneath the lava-like flow. There wasn’t much of him left after the incident. The team lost an entire heat that night. No bonus for them.
The second time, it was my pour—the last of the shift. The boss was pushing hard to get a fourth heat and the team was working hard—bonus time! Hooray! Since it’s all about being a team player, my ladle drying time was shorter rather than longer, but well within the “norm”.
I was on the pouring platform when the thing blew. The newly installed shield over my head saved my life, though I still bear burn scares on my left forearm. It was the guy on the casting platform below me who caught it in the face. The team actually got the bonus that month—rewarded for productivity.
Those were the days when men were men, so when I quit the mill my teammates roundly condemned me as a sissy “college boy”. Of course, such incentives don’t take lives nowadays, do they?
