OPINION
6 Obiter Dicta
Back to the Factory, with a Vengence
How an injury at work got me thinking about the law
parmbir singh gill › contributor
A
fter getting my admission to Osgoode Hall
earlier this year, I began thinking a bit about
what area of law to go into.
Then, strapped for cash, I took a job at an
automobile assembly plant over the summer. The factory was sprawling, about the size of York’s Keele
Campus, and inside was a winding assembly line,
which was several kilometers in length. When the
line ran smoothly, which it did on most days, the
plant could churn out one car every forty-eight seconds, or roughly 450 cars over an eight-hour shift.
These are what the management referred to as “good
days,” and on good days, the supervisors could be
seen smiling.
But sometimes the line would malfunction, halting production for several minutes at a time, and
turning the supervisors’ smiles into frowns. These
are what the workers called “good days,” and on the
whole, you could tell for whom a day was good based
on how well the assembly line ran. This is part of what
Marx had in mind when he wrote about the contradiction between capital and labour.
Anyway, one of my jobs at this plant was to unload
large bins off of tractor-trailers and deliver them to
various points along the line. From there, other workers could reach inside them for the parts they needed
to build the cars.
Now, the bins were supposed to be made of hard
plastic, but because hard plastic was expensive and
cardboard slightly less so, the company decided to
behave like a company and made the substitution. The
only difference, other than cost, was that these cardboard bins couldn’t be opened without cutting them,
and, as you might have guessed, I was told it was now
part of my job to do that as well.
Fair enough, I said to my supervisor, but could I get
a knife?
“Oh yeah, the knife. Yeah, yeah. I’ll get you one in
a minute.”
Forty-five of those intervals later, I remained
knife-less and grew uneasy. The cardboard boxes
I had been delivering in the meantime were fully
sealed, which bothered the workers on the line
because it now fell on them to hack through the
industrial-grade cardboard, no easy task, while
keeping up with the rest of their work. Their frustration sounded something like this:
“Cut the fucking cardboard already, kid.”
“Ah shit, sorry. I asked for a knife...Uh, it’s coming.
Give me some time.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
(These are good people, I insist.)
When I found my supervisor, idle yet feigning the
opposite, I reminded her of the knife.
“I told you I’d get you one, relax!”
Relax? Relax. Right. Will do.
Five minutes later I was bestowed with a knife,
blunt-edged and encased in flimsy plastic, with a
blade that looked
a qu a r ter-i nch
shorter than the
thickness of the
cardboard I had
to cut through.
I hesitated before accepting it, but that hesitation
was trumped by a more acute sense of the perils that
would surely greet a request for something better.
So off I went to the line, poorly equipped, with
looks of exasperation greeting me at every turn. I
tugged and tore through this box, then another, then
the next. By the time I hacked through a dozen, with
another dozen to go, I realized I was falling behind on
the unloading part of my job. A faster pace demanded
itself: this box, that box, the one beside it, the one a
few feet down, then the next one, then…shit!
My thumb.
The gash went right to the bone, about an inch
long, and it was leaking profusely; I bled all the way
to the medical office. When I saw my supervisor along
the way, she motioned for me to stop, glanced at the
red mess on my hand, did some inferring, grimaced,
suppressed her grimace, and then asked with genuine
concern:
“What job were you on?”
“19A” was my reflex, not even a reply.
And then, as I stood bleeding at attention, she
spoke into her walkie-talkie:
“Victor, come in Victor. Yeah, we need Mike on
19A, Mike on 19A. No, no, Tom’s already covering
somebody. Mike knows the job, he can do it. I don’t
know where the fuck he is. Maybe the cafeteria? You
figure it out, I gotta go.” Then to me: “Ugh, gross, go
see the nurse right away. What are you waiting for?
Go!”
I stared at her blankly, knowing we were of different classes but wondering if we shared a common
genus. Undecided, I began walking again, and arrived
a short while later at a hostile-looking door marked
MEDICAL.
The company
nurse and company doctor on
the other side
were a f fable,
competent and
efficient. They washed off the blood, put three stitches
into my thumb, bantered and made light jokes, wrote
up a report, told me if the cut had been a half-inch
lower I would’ve lost the ability to bend my thumb for
good, chuckled at my good fortune, and then sent me
back to the shop floor in under an hour.
My supervisor, having already received news of
the prompt repair, was waiting nearby, and as I drew
closer she let out an exaggerated breath of air.
Then, “Victor, come in Victor. Yeah, tell Mike he
can go back to wherever you found him, the kid’s
fine.”
And then to me, “You’re good, right? Yeah, happens all the time. Shrug it off, you’ll be fine, yeah.” I
did, but I wasn’t.
It was only when the union intervened later that
day that I learned about the multiple violations committed by the company the whole way through.
Cardboard boxes are banned in that part of the plant;
no one without knife training, that’s me, is allowed to
wield a knife; anyone who wields a knife must receive
Kevlar gloves; additional tasks can’t be added to a
job without a commensurate reduction; an injured
worker is not to be sent back to the floor without
speaking to their union rep. The list goes on a little
longer, all of it explicitly laid out in the much more
obtusely-worded Collective Agreement.
So, it was in a single eight-hour shift that the company broke a legally binding contract in half a dozen
ways, injuring at least one worker in the process,
almost permanently.
It also produced 450 cars and at least seven figures in future profit for the owners and shareholders.
That’s what really matters, and it happens every day
of the work week.
“I bled all the way to the
medical office.”
I think I want to go into labour law. ◆
ê Thumbs up for workplaces under worker control.