Detroit City Is the Place to Be (22 page)

Automakers loved this market-based defense: while gas prices remain low, consumer demand for inefficient vehicles does not change, and therefore it’s not their fault for responding to that demand. (It’s the Milton Friedman 101 version of “Stop me before I kill again!”) Of course, for years the carmakers opposed any environmental legislation that might affect their industry, with the help of lobbyists and friendly legislators like Michigan congressman John Dingell (and complicity from the UAW). As recently as 2008, GM’s vice chairman Bob Lutz called global warming “a total crock of shit.” As Jim Kliesch, a clean-fuel expert at the union of concerned scientists, told me, “The average fuel economy of vehicles produced today is roughly the same as vehicles produced in 1987. The automakers have demonstrated they would rather apply other technologies that improve amenities—you know, putting DVD systems in the backs of chairs and whatnot—because they can get a higher profit margin out of that than from putting the money into fuel economy. Their research at the time showed consumers didn’t care about fuel economy. So we’ve gone nowhere on the fleet average in two decades.”

*   *   *

The auto bailout that passed later in 2009, over the objections of congressional Republicans, came with numerous strings, all being manipulated by an Obama-appointed “car czar” who forced tough modernizing and belt-tightening measures on a recalcitrant Detroit. The result—significant union concessions, radically altered corporate structures, Chrysler’s merger with Fiat, and all three domestic automakers (including Ford, which never took any loans in the first place) posting profits for the first time in years—handed the president’s economic team a tangible achievement and made the Big Three seem like twenty-first-century corporations with viable business models.

The dependence of the auto industry’s comeback on underemployment, slashed benefits, and corporate profits mirrored the larger economic “recovery” in a predictable and depressing way, but the city was buoyed by the prospect of the carmakers actually turning a corner. Restored profitability, while not exactly trickling down to the average worker, still seemed like a sign of
something
, as did the on-time arrival to market of the Volt. Even more unbelievably, Chrysler—Chrysler!—had aquired a patina of hip, at least in advertising circles, thanks to a celebrated 2011 Chrysler 200 commercial featuring the rapper Eminem, filmed driving through the city to the opening chords of his hit song “Lose Yourself.” Downtown Detroit is shot in a gauzy and melodramatic noir mistiness, and in a brilliant final touch, the ad heralds the new Chrysler line as being “Imported from Detroit,” at once tweaking the historic quality- and bourgeois-cachet gap between the Detroit automakers and their foreign competitors and playing up the notion of Detroit as an alien, potentially hostile world, technically but not exactly part of the rest of America.

The Volt, meanwhile, debuted to sluggish sales, prompting temporary halts in production, and then faced an early recall after catching fire during a rollover test. Also, its cost, $41,000, minus a $7,500 federal tax credit, was prohibitive for the average driver. Still,
Motor Trend
named the Volt its 2011 Car of the Year, and enthusiasts reportedly became hooked on the car’s slick electronic interface, which made the avoidance of gas stations—the display informed drivers whether the engine was using only the battery or had switched over to fuel—as compulsive a challenge as an iPhone game. For the most obsessive of these new drivers, reported
New York Times
columnist Joe Nocera, “it could be months between fill-ups.” (When a lawyer from New Jersey bragged to Nocera about getting 198 miles per gallon, another Volt owner interrupted, “Is that all?”)

By 2012, the Volt had been named European Car of the Year—the first time a car designed and produced entirely in the United States had won the award—but the honor would not help rehabilitate the car’s reputation on the right, now that it had bizarrely joined
Piss Christ
as an artifact from the culture wars. Conservative pundits like George Will and Rush Limbaugh held the car up for ridicule, while Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, denounced the Volt as “a demo project funded by edict,” conjuring images of framed portraits of Obama glowering over Stalinist battery-cell assembly lines. Newt Gingrich, being Newt Gingrich, took the criticism to its most absurd extreme during the GOP primary when he decried the Volt’s impracticality by pointing out you couldn’t fit a gun rack in the car.
9

At this point, even Bob Lutz—“global warming is a crock of shit” Bob Lutz!—began to defend the Volt out of sheer paternal loyalty, despite being a lifelong Republican. Michigan, meanwhile, had decided to double-down on the potential of the new technology, hoping it would translate to jobs. Governor Jennifer Granholm supported numerous tax incentives to lure battery manufacturers to the state, to mixed early results. A123 Systems in Livonia, for instance, created 3,300 jobs, but required $250 million in federal stimulus money and another $125 million in incentives from the state.

Despite the conservative misinformation campaign, though, the Volt’s sales were inching up; by June 2012, GM had already matched its sales numbers for the entirety of the previous year. Even more important, the Volt had spurred the competition to step up: an electric version of the Ford Focus was slated for a quick debut, with electrics in the works from Toyota and Honda.

As for the electric car being the future, well, the verdict remains fuzzy. In March 2011, for instance, CNN reported some very good news for the auto industry that remained, potentially, very bad news for the portion of the auto industry that cared about our collective carbon footprint—namely, a rise in truck sales of
32 percent
over the previous year. As the Big Three had been making their much-touted comeback, their top-selling vehicles were all SUVs and pickups—for GM, the Silverado pickup; for Ford, the F-series of pickups (though sales of the Ford Explorer SUV also shot up 139 percent); for Chrysler, the Dodge Ram pickup and the Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV. These sales showed no signs of slowing down, even as gas prices once again began to rise.

“Keep in mind, we reset our expectations,” Paul Ballew, the chief economist at Nationwide Financial, told CNN. “Five years ago, three dollars a gallon was, ‘Oh my goodness.’ Now it’s more of a norm.”

A crowd gathers outside Detroit’s Cobo Center to pick up applications for federal aid to low-income residents. Approximately 60,000 people showed up over the two-day period, though assistance would only be available for 3,400 families.
[Daniel Mears/
Detroit News
]

8

COMEBACK!

Or, What Will Become of the Workingman in Detroit?

J
OHN
Z
IMMICK, THE PRESIDENT
of United Auto Workers Local 174, parked his black GMC Canyon pickup truck in the lot of one of his shops, a metalcrafting factory in the west side suburb of Romulus. Zimmick wore a gunslinger’s-length black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a forest green sweater pulled tightly over his low-slung paunch. He was middle-aged, on the shorter side, with facial features at once sharp (aquiline nose, narrow, appraising eyes) and rounded (the rest of his face) and a vowel-flattening Michigan accent bound to a dry-throated chain-smoker’s baritone. Zimmick handed me a manila envelope and a briefcase. The briefcase turned out to be a gift box of World’s Finest Chocolate designed to look like a briefcase. After grabbing two KFC carryout bags from the back of his truck, Zimmick craned his head suspiciously in the direction of my car.

“This ain’t foreign, I hope,” he said. It was not.

“Good,” he replied, and we headed into the plant.

It was a chilly morning in 2011, two years after the auto industry’s second bailout and some months into its vaunted comeback. The factory comprised four warehouse buildings arranged on two sides of a service drive, which in turn wended its way through an entire office park of similar light-industrial manufacturing plants, the signage of many of these buildings bearing cryptic acronyms (EWI, DRS, NWC), most of them smaller auto parts suppliers of the sort the Big Three and their allies warned would topple in a domino slide of bankruptcies if the U.S.government dared allow GM or Chrysler to go out of business. Zimmick asked that I not reveal the identity of this particular facility. He personally worked about seventy hours a week, acting as the direct service rep for thirty-one of Local 174’s approximately one hundred plants.

Inside one of the factory’s buildings, twelve-foot-square sheets of solid white foam material had been stacked like drywall next to a garage door. An outsized drill hanging from the ceiling would be used by pattern makers to cut the foam sheets into molds according to customer specifications. These molds would then be packed into what looked to me like an enormous dirt-filled garden box, though the earthy substance was actually something called “green sand.” The newly molded sand would eventually be covered with molten 835°F zinc from a pair of bubbling vats. The final mold, after cooling, would then be taken to one of the buildings across the street and squeezed like a retainer into the mouth of a two-story stamping press and used to punch out (say) the metal side panels for the latest Toyota truck body.

Just beyond the presses and up a short flight of stairs, we entered the plant’s designated union office, a cramped and shabby space: cheap wood paneling, rolling desk chairs with stained fabric and broken spines, a faded American flag and various informational flyers (e.g., “Your Rights: Family and Medical Leave Act”) decorating the walls. Ray Grimble, one of the shop stewards, sat behind a cluttered desk typing something on an antique PC. Grimble had a mustache and a slightly feathered hairstyle and wore a navy-blue sweatshirt. When I asked how long he’d worked at the plant, he replied, “Twenty-three years,” then added, “Let me put it this way: too damn long.” But he said it with a congenial smile, Grimble possessing the sort of ingrained pleasantness that struck some people as particularly American and was ascribed most often to residents of midwestern and southern states.

Grimble was a patternmaker. He’d grown up in Inkster, and though his wife, Lisa, worked as an adjunct professor of English, much of his immediate family had been employed in some capacity by the auto industry: both parents at stamping shops (his father, until his retirement, at this very plant), his grandmother at GM’s Fisher Body facility, his brother (“a big-time computer geek”) in the CAD (computer-aided design) department of Ford. When he was a kid, his parents had only one car, so after school they’d always hurry over to pick up his father at Dearborn Stamping, where he was working at the time. His interest piqued by the big machines, Grimble got into the business himself. The first ten years were “pretty decent,” he told me. “It’s been steadily downhill after that. I’ve seen lots of shops go out of business. I’ve had friends my age have to move back in with their parents because they couldn’t make it. Two Christmases ago, everyone at dinner from my wife’s side of the family was like, ‘You know about any snowplow work for me?’” Grimble had been elected steward that fall. “I just got tired of all the bullshit,” he said. “You can only take so much. Hopefully, my input can make a difference.”

Nodding at the KFC bags, he said to Zimmick, “I see you took care of Marv.” He was referring to Marv Townsend, the shop’s chief steward.

“I took care of you, too!” Zimmick exclaimed.

Grimble looked around the room and said, “Where is she?”

Of all the Detroit-area UAW locals, Local 174 holds a place of pride in union lore, owing to its connection with Walter Reuther. The seminal labor activist got his start in the UAW as president of Local 174, which he founded in 1936 with a $350 loan from a Communist buddy working in one of the Cadillac plants. The local was amalgamated—meaning, its membership had been drawn from dozens of various-sized factories and shops, as opposed to workers from a single massive GM or Ford plant. It represented an area of west side metropolitan Detroit described by Reuther biographer Nelson Lichtenstein as “a sprawling field of parts and assembly plants,” places like Federal Screw, Timkin Axle, and Michigan Malleable Iron. Reuther began Local 174 with seventy-eight registered members; by the end of that first year, after the successful resolution of his first big sit-down strike at the four-thousand-employee Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company, membership had exploded to three thousand—over the course of only ten days! Eight months later, the union had thirty thousand members.

This flourishing dovetailed with the thrilling success of the Flint sit-down strike, begun on December 30, 1936, which forced General Motors to broker a deal with the UAW for the first time and gave workers across the country, not just autoworkers, a glimpse of the power of organizing. Reuther, meanwhile, had the audacity, in May 1937, to make a move on Ford’s Rouge facility, heretofore entirely off limits to UAW organizing. The city-sized plant was “both physically and psychologically insulated from union influence,” writes Lichtenstein, “surrounded not by the West Side’s friendly ethnic neighborhoods but by a sprawling set of highways and parking lots under Ford control.” Still, with its hundred thousand employees, the Rouge proved an irresistible target. While attempting to cross the Miller Road overpass leading into the complex, Reuther and three other UAW leaders were brutally attacked by forty security goons directed by Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s thuggish enforcer. Reuther was repeatedly slammed to the concrete and kicked in the head, before being thrown down a flight of stairs. Unfortunately for Ford, a
Detroit News
photographer captured the beatings in a series of shots that would win the Pulitzer Prize.