Life on the Line: One Woman's Tale of Work, Sweat, and Survival

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

In 1991, Solange De Santis began a new job at the General Motors van
plant in Scarborough. She started on the 5 p.m. shift and learned how to
instal fibreglass insulation. Unknown to her new employers, she was a
business journalist intrigued by the wide divide between blue-collar and
white-collar workers, and she resolved to work at the plant until its
scheduled closing in 1993.

De Santis holds two degrees and is currently a Toronto staff writer on
The Wall Street Journal. While on the line, she told no one who she was
and she told none of her office friends what she did in the middle of
the night. In this lively account of her experiences on the assembly
line, she gives us a harrowing description of her initial distress as
she struggled with unfamiliar physical work at unaccustomed hours, with
brutal noise all around and aches in every bone and muscle. After her
first day on the job alone without her trainer, she wept on the way
home. Another worker told her not to worry: “Everybody cries.”

The author’s experience of learning many different tasks on the line
is something of a horror story, and, like her, we never really escape
it. But De Santis is ever-curious as she investigates everything from
union politics to absent bosses and documents the difficult life led by
the motley group of workers who became her friends, along with the
choices they had to make when the plant closed down.

In telling the story of an assembly line that was past its day, De
Santis has borne witness not only to the dying of a plant but perhaps
also to the passing of an age.