Sunday's NY Times Magazine Cover Story- G.M., Detroit and the Fall of Black Mid.Class
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G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Published: June 24, 2009
The Pontiac Assembly Center in Pontiac, Mich., is a massive, low-slung structure of concrete and corrugated green steel that squats conspicuously among the many strip malls that line one of the city’s main thoroughfares, South Opdyke Road. Locals refer to the three-million-square-foot factory, which makes Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, as Plant 6, because when it opened in 1972, it was the sixth General Motors manufacturing facility in this city, 25 miles north of downtown Detroit. At the time, General Motors was the world’s largest automaker. It dominated the American market, manufacturing half of the vehicles sold in the U.S. As recently as 2003, Plant 6 was running three consecutive eight-hour shifts, employing 3,000 people and making 1,300 trucks a day.
Marvin Powell heading to work at the Pontiac Assembly Center on June 10, 2009, at 5:48 a.m.
Today, Pontiac Assembly is the city’s last working auto-assembly plant, and like many of America’s car factories, it is operating at a greatly diminished capacity. By last summer, the plant was running just one shift — from 6 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon — having shed nearly two-thirds of its workers through a combination of layoffs, buyouts and early retirements. A few months ago, Plant 6 slowed down its assembly line and laid off another 600 employees, bringing the total number of remaining workers to fewer than 600. The factory now produces only about 230 vehicles a day.
On a clear, mild Thursday afternoon in April, I stood among the smattering of cars, mostly American-made pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles, clustered together in a small section of Pontiac Assembly’s vast parking lot as the plant’s single shift ended and its employees trickled out. Among them was Marvin Powell, a tall, heavyset, African-American man in blue jeans, a green sweatshirt and a baseball cap that read “All-Star Dad.” We were going to throw horseshoes with some of his co-workers in a park next to their union hall, Local 594, but as Powell climbed into his Chevy Equinox, he told me he wanted to grab something to eat first.
“You didn’t have lunch?” I asked.
“I did, but that was at 10 o’clock,” Powell said.
Powell wakes up every morning at 4, showers, eats breakfast and watches SportsCenter before setting out for the plant at 5:30. He is stationed at the very end of what’s known as the final line, the last stage of the vehicle-assembly process. By the time a truck arrives at his position, its frame has been attached to the chassis and the engine is in place. Powell has 1 minute 40 seconds to perform his routine on each vehicle, a series of tasks that includes attaching cables to batteries, tightening nuts and bolts and installing a transmission dipstick.
Barack Obama has called the dying U.S. auto industry “an emblem of the American spirit,” but Powell speaks about what he does without romance or nostalgia. “It’s not a glamorous job, to say the least,” he told me as we settled into a booth at a nearby Arby’s. Still, Powell derives at least a little satisfaction from his work. “Do I feel a sense of pride when I spot a Silverado or Sierra on the road?” he said. “Yeah. I do.”
More to the point, he is grateful for the life the job has afforded him. There are the little things — the Saturday-night takeout, the flat-screen TV, the Caribbean cruise he and his wife took before they had kids, the trip to Disney World after, the high-end educational toys for his precocious 5-year-old son, Marvin II — and the bigger ones. Most notably, Powell was able to leave the city of Detroit, where he was born and raised, for Kingsley Estates, a quiet subdivision in Southfield, a racially integrated suburb of modest middle-class homes just north of the city. And his wife, Shirese, was able to quit her job to spend more time with their children and start a small day-care center in their house.
When Powell and I met outside Pontiac Assembly, the mood inside the plant was especially tense. Just a day before, the line was stopped early for a plantwide meeting on the factory floor. A G.M. executive had recently spent a day touring the plant to determine its future, and the guys wanted to know if any decisions had been made. Would they be bringing back any of the laid-off workers? Were there going to be more layoffs? Was the plant going to close?
The plant manager did his best to reassure everybody but offered no definitive answers. By the time most of the plant’s employees got home, however, local news outlets were reporting that General Motors would be shutting down all of its factories for as many as 10 weeks this summer.
“People are worried about everything right now,” one of Powell’s co-workers, Stanley Hutcheson, told me at the horseshoe pit. Hutcheson was born and raised in Newark and came to Pontiac in 2002, when there were more than 900 layoffs at his plant in Linden, N.J. Given all of the uncertainty surrounding Detroit and the Big Three, I asked him if he thought about moving back home and looking for another job. “Nah,” he said. “There’s no money out there for me. G.M. is here.”
Later that night, I asked Powell how he was going to manage while Pontiac Assembly was idle. “It’s going to be extremely tight,” he said. Powell earns more than $900 a week. Between his government unemployment and his supplemental G.M. unemployment benefits — or SUB-pay — guaranteed under the company’s contract with the U.A.W., he’ll make $700 a week while Pontiac Assembly is quiet, not quite enough to cover his family’s bills. He was hoping that the write-offs for his wife’s home-based business would yield a large enough tax refund to make up for the shortfall.
The idling of its plants was part of G.M.’s scramble to make a case for its continued viability by cutting costs in advance of a government-imposed deadline. The company, which is considerably larger than Ford and Chrysler, has since filed for bankruptcy. Because of G.M.’s size, the government-orchestrated restructuring is going to be particularly painful. It remains to be seen what, exactly, the future of General Motors will hold, but it’s unlikely to include many $28-an-hour assembly-line jobs like Marvin Powell’s.
Too long to put it all here.......Read the rest at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/ma...roit-t.html?hp
