[Marxism] Rise and fall of the Black auto worker

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, June 28, 2009
G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class
by Jonathan Mahler
Damon Winter/The New York Times

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.

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?

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28detroit-t.html

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