Product Description

Just when Solange De Santis had achieved success and security in the white-collar world of journalism, she decided to leave it all to work on the line during the final year and a half of a General Motors van plant in Scarborough, Ontario.

In Life on the Line, De Santis recounts in vivid detail just how and why she undertook this path of seemingly reverse ambition. What she found at the moribund GM plant was at turns surprising, monotonous, humorous, and grim. She encountered competent hard workers, raging alcoholics, mindless bureaucrats, and good friends.

Life on the Line is a penetrating look into a world that many of us shy from acknowledging, even as we accept the keys to our new cars. Completely candid, and as unexpectedly poignant as it is funny, this book will change the way you view blue-collar industry and the people who fuel its engine with their labour.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3527566 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-18
• Released on: 1999-05-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Journalistic curiosity led De Santis, a business reporter and freelance writer, to leave her comfortable white-collar world to work for 18 months on an assembly line at a General Motors van plant in Scarborough, Ontario. This lively and absorbing account of her time at GM is based on the daily journal she kept. De Santis effectively conveys the dominant element of working on the line: relentless, backbreaking labor. Whether she was installing hazardous fiberglass insulation, lights or other parts, the work was always dirty, sweaty and physically draining. She came to understand why workers, sometimes including herself, used their breaks to gulp down a few beers in order to get through the final hours of the shift. De Santis documents some sexual harassment in a plant where 15% of the workers were women, but her overwhelming attitude towards her fellows, both men and women, was respect for their hard work. She made several friends at the plant (including her future husband), and came to despise the condescending attitude of her middle-class friends toward factory workers. She includes a lively description of union politics at the plant; the union, however, could not stop GM from shutting down the factory in 1993. In a sad coda, De Santis movingly describes how the people she had worked beside, many of whom had no other place to go, lost their jobs. Agent, Jan Whitford of Westwood Creative Artists.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Always interested in the life of the blue-collar worker, De Santis, a business reporter, took a job on the line for the GM plant in Scarborough, Ontario. For more than a year, she worked in a variety of different areas, got to know the other employees, and watched them deal with various issues, including the closing of the plant. De Santis helps readers get to know her colleaguesAtheir fears, their joys, and their feelings about being GM employees. She also sees herself grow and develop, falling in love with and marrying a co-worker and dealing with the reactions of family and friends toward her blue-collar work. She also describes her new feelings about the white-collar world as a result of her experience on the line. Humorous, touching, and sad, this fascinating book will stay with you for a long time. For all libraries.ADanna C. Bell-Russel, Library of Congress
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
De Santis quit working as a business reporter for Reuters in her late thirties to take a job on the line in the General Motors Scarborough Van plant in Ontario. She's at pains to tell readers why she did so: wanting to test herself physically; wanting to free herself from the "cubicled veal pens" of office work; and wanting to tell the story of the people who make cars. Readers will be mesmerized by the fiberglass beneath her fingers and the incredible noise; stunned by the intense physicality of lifting, heaving, bending, twisting; and caught by the vivid personalities of the people with whom she worked. She does indeed challenge assumptions about the kind of folk who work in factories, but mostly she spins a terrific story, meticulously describing what she did all day with vivid pictures of the women and men she did it with. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Customer Reviews

Stands with the best works on working.
Solange De Santis was obviously not looking to "rip the lid off" assembly line work when she began either her experience at GM or her book. This is greatly to her credit. LIFE ON THE LINE does all readers the service of allowing them to make up their own minds. The author's point of view develops in the text at the same pace as her time passed on the line.

Crisp and insightful, this book can stand with the best of writing on the subject. The twofold treat is that those with no "shopfloor" experience may come to value more highly those who toil, and those who work on the line may be able to understand that they can be recognized and appreciated by ones not standing next to them in the heat and din.

Brava! From the author's brother.

Rich in detail and anecdote
How many Ivy-League educated journalists would be willing to break their backs and go work on the assembly line to relay this story authentically? Very few! This writer does, and so gets to know the tasks, the workers and the business of making vehicles from the most telling perspective of all. Thoroughly familiar with the corporate point of view from years of business writing, De Santis joins those people whose sweat and toil actually build our world. She gives us the private musings and dreams of hardworking folks who didn't get all the breaks in life that she did, and shows their courage and determination to survive the brutal decisions of an unfeeling corporation. It's sad that management just can't understand the rage of these people whose jobs have been given a death sentence for the sake of higher profits, yet who are expected to give 100% down to the last day. But their voices need to be heard.

An outstanding read
June 12, 1999 Title: Life on the Line Author: Solange De Santis

After graduating from the highly touted Ivy schools with her master's degree in journalism and a BA in English, Solange De Santis toiled in a very successful white collared workplace. Her fascination though, with "the other side", "the blue collar workers" would somehow overpower all sanity and she would seek out employment in the bowls of the workforce. Her dreams of writing a book and her journalistic past are her rational for exploring her curiosities. Hiding her outstanding employment credentials, she lands an assembler job with General Motor's lisping Scarborough Van plant. Solange, nicknamed Sally by her line mates, would now have 18 months in which to "spy" and compile enough material on life within the plant, before being laid-off, along with its 2,700 strong population. This fascinating account of Sally's perseverance, and demanding requirements associated with manual labor, are truly astonishing. Pushing herself beyond physical limits she thought ever existed, she finds herself becoming attached to her co-workers, "a cog in the wheel". A strong bond develops with her work mates through common hardships somewhat like a "boot camp". Her vivid descriptions of the sites and sounds within the plant and the people she works with have clear images and sounds popping into my head. Her circle of friends, "from all woks of life", are so typical of the many groups within the plant. Reading through her book I find Sally dredging up raw nerve endings I thought were buried long ago, for I am one of the 2,700 employee's of the Scarborough Van Plant that devoted the better part of my working life, along with so many others, to that job, as one of Sally's co-workers, on a different shift, with a different circle of friends, only to find myself one day, writing my resume. This book should appeal to anyone looking for a realistic account of life within those "dark window factories", and the typical "labels" these people are saddled with. Bravo Sally, an outstanding read in contrast to your Wall Street journalism.