These paragraphs had the strongest writing of the entire story. I would consider using the fisrt paragraph below as your jumping off point. try rearanging the piece a few different ways to see what works best. What are you trying to say with this story? Why does the narrator have this epiphany out of the blue? These character's have been pulling this stunt for some time and with great success so why would being caught change them. In my experiance men who sink to those levels aren't the kind of men who suddenly see the light of feminism. You need some thing stronger too get your point across and make the story plausable to the reader. Keep working on it.
Horace
The noise of the press forces us to wear earplugs, and on those rare occasions when you need to speak, you must scream to be heard. Under such conditions, little talk exists during the working portion of the day. My father was wrong on one count. Factory life was far from mindless. At our machines we are islands of production. Left alone, an inner silence countered by the noise of the press, we force our bodies into its repetitive processes, and we think. We think about the weather. We think about the next cigarette, the last seeming like hours ago even though it was just thirty minutes since the last break. We think about how making one small adjustment to our machine would increase our productivity, that would make this press the best in the plant. We think about how we cannot make that decision on our own. We think about Friday nights. Friday nights were what kept us going. Right now, as the cool air outside the club fought in my lungs with the warm fire I inhaled, coughing, I pictured our factory.
"I'm starting to see can lids in my dreams. Do you see them too?" Brent asked me one day during break about six months into his employment.
"Of course. Try doing this for ten years. Every action you do inside or outside the plant becomes tied into loading lids onto a belt, watching lids come around, and bagging lids for transport. You assimilate your productivity actions into your daily actions. Just wait, you'll see."
"I don't intend on being around here that long. I've got plans. You know what I mean?"
Brent Nolan, at age twenty-eight, had plans for many things. He planned on "running the place" as he stated on many occasions. His plans conflicted with many of our normal operations.
One of the many unwritten rules was that only mechanics, who knew the intricate details of the machine, or management, who apparently knew everything else that was important, would recommend machine changes. Brent Nolan, however, was above this rule. To his advantage, he had three things working for him: Traditional good looks, an extremely extroverted personality, and the fear that he had built into his immediate supervisors that he "might just get uncomfortable on the line and try for Supervisor. You know what I mean?" He knew exactly what Brent meant. He knew that Brent might put his college education "to use". Thus an offhand remark about his press' "lack of safety due to its excessive speed" resulted in a reduction of his output, the others taking up the slack. Brent noticed that "these lids here", lids for our most important customer, "might just run a touch better on his machine, don't you think?" The next day his line was primed for that product. His plans became reality.
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