Even though the work factor system had supposedly eliminated the need for a stopwatch, the minutes of Local 1424's monthly meetings reveal an obsession with ensuring that each shop steward had one to keep the pace of the line from being pushed above "objective" limits. Stewards had to circulate every hour to time the lines to prevent the company from raising the rate. The former business manager Bob Norris recalled, "If you didn't watch the company, they were constantly pushing that lever"-the one that controlled the speed of the line. If a worker managed to find a shortcut that allowed her to perform a task faster than the time-study engineers had calculated, the experts came in to reevaluate the process. "That was one of the problems we'd have with this work factor study," explained a process engineer, "trying to figure out where'd I goof? How come they can beat that rate so much? So you'd go back in and reanalyze and see what you'd done wrong." The dehumanizing aspect of the system frightened even the time-study engineers. Working there "would kill me, those rates-maybe fifty an hour, seventy an hour, hundred an hour," said a plant engineer. "To do the same thing a hundred times an hour for an eight-hour day would drive me nuts, putting the same parts in, and you just keep going and going and going. Ugh!" And the line stopped for nothing.