Ethan Morris
Amrutha Kunapulli
IAH 207 section 14
3/24/16
Rivethead, Ben Hamper. New York: Warner Books, July 1992. 234
The booming vehicle industry brought illustrious blue collar employment opportunities to the city of Flint Michigan. Following closely behind these mass employment opportunities were eventual layoffs, causing Flint to spiral into poverty. In the book Rivethead, by Ben Hamper, we are woven through the blue collar journey of the main character, Ben. His goal is to last thirty years as an auto worker wrestling rivet heads inside the industrial corporation General Motors, but he fails miserably and hardly survives for ten years. Ben’s journey inside General Motors is cut short because he cannot withstand the dehumanization of the shop rat worker by the large corporation. The process based management system of General Motors degrades Ben’s individuality, he is seen as a dispensable piece of a machine rather than a valued human being. In a futile attempt to retain his individuality, Ben turns to writing about the always present despair associated with being one of many lowly shop rats working for a large process based corporation.
The term shop rat defines an individual who designates their life to being a part of a well-oiled machine. Corporate America views them as a dehumanized, easily replaceable component used to “keep the line moving.” Many factory workers were able to withstand losing their individuality in order to work for a large corporation. In order to do so, they turned to harmful substances such as drinking and smoking as a way out, a way to withstand the grind of shop life. In Ben’s case, he turned to writing about the drudgery of General Motors as a way to salvage his individuality as a human. “I developed a pattern where I could race through my job in thirty seconds and shoot back to my bench for a luxurious minute and a half of observation and composition. It was like working two jobs at once, and the best part was that the clock moved by so quickly.” This quote by Ben shows how he used writing as a way to overcome the system of dehumanization by General Motors. By finding a way to complete his job quickly and find time to write in between, he is effectively retaining his individuality because he is doing something that he has a desire to do, rather than labor at his monotonous assigned spot on the assembly line. The quote depicts how Bens writing allows him to feel like he is beating the system that General Motors is trying to impose on him. They want him to “follow procedure” and attend to his assignment without fail for the duration of his shift, no unassigned breaks, no doubling up shifts with other workers, no doing anything that would break the designated procedure and allow the line to stop moving. But writing allows him to break procedure and retain a sense of individuality inside the factory. If Ben had allowed General Motors to mold him into the dehumanized working robot they wanted him to be, he would have cracked much sooner.