A Roof, A Meal, And Your Teeth.
Everything a man needs, at a price he can picture, within four thousand feet of where he works. Housing on Aperture Row, coffee at five cents, the company store on credit, the finest bowling league in Marquette County, and a dental plan this company built for a reason it is not ashamed of.
A man who lives four thousand feet above where he works spends two hours a day going up and down, and two hours a day is ten hours a week, and ten hours a week is a fifth of the man. So I built the housing inside the mine. Aperture Row is on the second level, it is warm, it is dry, it is fourteen dollars a month, and nobody who lives there has ever been late.
The competition offers a pension. I offer a house you can walk to work from without going outside in a Michigan January. I know which one I would take, and I know which one 1,247 people took.
The Schedule Of Benefits
Benefits available to all personnel, Spring 1959
| Benefit | Detail | Cost to personnel | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Housing, Aperture Row | Two rooms, heated, second level | $14 / month | Waiting list of nine |
| Housing, surface | Four rooms, Ishpeming road | $31 / month | For families and the claustrophobic |
| Commissary | All hours, Sub-Level 1 | See menu | Coffee 5¢. Pie Thursdays. |
| Company store | Credit against wages, no interest | Nil | Everything but lemons |
| Medical | Second floor, all hours | Nil | Medical has asked us to print ‘all hours’ in bold |
| Dental | Every procedure, every filling, no limit | Nil | See the next section. Please. |
| Bowling league | Fourteen teams, Tuesdays | Nil | Marine Division fields one man |
| Laundry | Gel-grade, industrial | Nil | Gel does not come out. Laundry keeps trying. |
| Rail spur | 2.6 miles to the DSS&A | Nil | Freight only. Personnel have ridden it anyway. |
| Bomb shelter | The whole facility | Nil | We are the bomb shelter |
No benefit on this schedule is contingent on length of service, grade, or department. The President’s position is that a man on his first day needs a roof exactly as much as a man on his last.
The Dental Plan
Here is the section Personnel asked me to write carefully, and I am going to write it exactly as it happened, because this company does not pretend a benefit came from nowhere.
In 1955 the Material Emancipation Grill entered service. The grill removes from a man any object he ought not to be carrying through it, and the department that built it defined “object” with a thoroughness I have come to expect from them. Tools. Coins. Buttons. Belt buckles. And, it emerged in the first week, fillings.
Within a month this company had more men with holes in their teeth than any employer in the State of Michigan and I was not going to have that on my payroll. So I hired two dentists, put them on the second floor, told them to fill every hole this building makes at no charge for as long as the building keeps making them, and that is the finest dental plan in the Upper Peninsula, and it exists because of the grill, and I am proud of both.
Dental — By The Numbers
- Dentists on staff
- Two. Full time.
- Fillings replaced, 1955 – Spring 1959
- 4,910
- Fillings replaced more than once, same tooth
- 1,206
- Record, single tooth
- Eleven. Machine shop. He walks through it on purpose.
- Fillings recovered from the grill tray
- 4,910
- Fillings recovered that were not issued by this company
- Fourteen.
“Every hole this building makes, this building fills. That is the policy and it is the only one I have that the competition could not copy if they tried.”
Fourteen fillings in the tray that we did not put in. Dental keeps them in a jar. Dental has not been told what to do with the jar and I have not been asked. — C.
Form ASI-502. The grill is described at Form ASI-209. The commissary menu is at Form ASI-307. The company store does not stock lemons, and personnel are asked to stop requesting them.