The Autoworkers of Detroit: Salt of the Earth

There’s an apocryphal story told in our neck of the woods… When the men came shuffling home after the auto plant closed suddenly that day– without prior notice to the workers– many of the factory men had left their cars at the plant…

They were in the midst of purchasing a family sedan, but now, suddenly without jobs, with not even a remote prospect of a job in auto manufacturing ever again, the naturalized USA citizens who’d escaped Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Bulgaria– the Czechs, the Yugoslavians, the Blacks who had come up from the South to earn a living, the hill people from Western Appalachia who had come to find reliable work in the auto factory …. many left the equivalent of thousands of tons of metal in the parking lot.

Just walked away, as upper management had walked away from the workers. The only debate yet is whether the workers willingly left their cars, or whether the auto factory held the loans on them and repo-ed them, knowing they were sending their loyal workers to financial chicken-bones-only lives.

I was a kid in the rural outback then, but I remember the factory workers coming off the bus at the wrong time of day back down onto our road, their fedoras on the backs of their heads, their work uniforms too clean, their jackets slung over their shoulders. I remember the gait. Slow, head down, grim, sad, angry, scared.

Suddenly our 5-party line telephone began ringing off the hook as my little school friends called, weeping. Dad lost his job. What are we going to do???

What, what do you mean your Dad lost his job?!

The plant closed. For good. Just this morning.

What I remember most were how the hearts were just, without warning, cut out of the men in our little rural community … and the abject fear visited on their young sons and daughters, the wives, dependent elders all small shouldered and pale. One man losing a job, is often at least three other dependent people losing sustenance also.

Fire ten, take 40 persons down to poverty level in an instant. Fire 100, 400 suddenly go poor. Fire 1000, 4000 persons needing a dole. And so it went.

It was 1963, and this was the closing of the Studebaker auto parts manufacturing plant, about ten miles to the south of where we lived out in the boondocks.

The plant had been relocated from Detroit to South Bend, in order to save money, hire newly arrived immigrants, and be more profitable. But those at the top did not hold faith. They indulged their whims. Played by a rule guaranteed to cause bankruptcy, that is, paying themselves first and bleeding the company, instead of investing in capital equipment, design, listening to the public.

Just saying …

and praying for all the salt of the earth people to turn it around. In the last 18 months, inroads have been made in turning the auto industry toward creating wildly and quickly and reliably. Listening to the consumer has definitely begun. Design and efficiency is catching up to give us product that fits our time instead of our parents’ time.

The autoworkers can do it. I believe deeply they can. A union boss may represent workers’ solidarity, without representing the workers’ deepest individual hearts. It’s any arbiter’s or negotiator’s job to start out friendly but resistant to concessions. But concession on all sides do come. It takes a bit of time for that dance to be completed, for that process of give and take to occur. I believe it can and will.

I see that many guys in management can be a good guys with ethics and integrity for the industry, for the workers, for management, instead of simply being self-protective, self-indulgent parasites.

Too, many in the Fed Legislature can be awake and watching over, instead of throwing money down holes and never demanding an accounting.

It’s all possible. I sit here some mornings just reprising some of the mottoes of the immigrant and refugee men in my family, all of whom were in the trades, all of whom would surely say in Hungarian and Spanish the equivalent of the English trope: Wtf, we didn’t come all the way to America to rest, but to work hard, to build something great in this country that has been so good to us.

Just saying.

_________

CODA

In the 1920′s, Studebaker eliminated the manufacturing of horse drawn buggies to produce automobiles which were taking over the roads. They were able to make that huge leap in adaptation to the markets.

In 1923, they opened a six-story plant that from day one boondoggled the efficient manufacture of parts, which had to be schlepped up and down stairs and out to the stamping and final assembly buildings as well. An efficient plant design was a single story factory. As auto design and manufacture of those outer and inner parts of cars became more complex, the schlepping of parts hindered output more and more.

As demented as it sounds, it took until 1952 for effective conveyor belts and other mechanical conveyances to be constructed. Management and owners all had their big houses on Lake Michigan, sent their children to the best schools, their wives wore furs and diamonds… but they didn’t have the vision to invest in ‘new tech,’ nor safety measures, nor R & D that solicited the opinions of the people who drove their cars.

Meanwhile Studie lost its edge in the markets. Instead of plowing money back into capital expenditures in order to not only stay current but leap ahead of the pack, the owners lived off the fat of the land in extreme extravagance.

Finally, slogging production flow, low sales, and absurd money management, caused the powers to be to close Studebaker’s. They had just launched the “Lark,” an amazing looking car for its time and price, very much resembling a BMW classic chassis. But then, one of the head guys at Studebaker launched the chrome-battleship with the ‘pussy’ on the grill, and it sold about as well as fruit with black and white mold gurgling out of it.

Studebaker closed the plant and did not look back. Ironically, those Edsels, if one can find one in grand condition, nowadays can be valued at over a quarter million dollars. To those of us who grew up in the neck of the woods though, seeing the Edsel only reminds us of the day the men from the auto plant shuffled home in the middle of the afternoon with their shoulders bowed so very low.