The Man in the Plant

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a factory floor: presses, a shift whistle, a time clock punching)
He clocked in. Understand that first. He clocked in.

[Verse 1]
Louis Chevrolet was a racer and a mechanic,
Swiss-born, French-raised, came over, drove fast, built engines,
and William Durant wanted a name with speed inside it
so he put Louis in a company and put Louis on the badge.
And then they disagreed — about a car, about a cheap one —
and Louis sold his shares and walked away in nineteen fifteen.

[Chorus]
Sold his shares. Sold his shares and kept the name on nothing.
The badge went round the world and he did not get any of it.
Then the Crash, and then the money went, and then the work ran out,
and in nineteen thirty-three he took a job — he took a JOB —
as a mechanic. On the floor. In a Chevrolet plant.
Clocking in, under his own surname, as an employee.

[Verse 2]
Imagine the badge on the hood of the thing you're working on.
Imagine your own name, stamped, coming down the line at you,
eight hours a day, in a building owned by other people,
who are paying you an hourly wage to service your own name.
He did that. That is documented. That actually happened.
He died in 'forty-one. He was sixty-three years old.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I have thought about what that must have been like
and I genuinely cannot get to the bottom of it —
whether it was humiliating every single morning,
or whether after a while it was just a job, just metal, just work,
and the name on the hood stopped meaning anything at all.
I hope it was the second. I suspect it was the first.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the time clock punches out)
He clocked in.
Every morning. Under his own name.