G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class
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.
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?
They do, but G.M. also needs to cut 20,000 jobs before emerging from bankruptcy. The number of plants in the Detroit area is dwindling; Pontiac Assembly is one of seven factories that G.M. expects to close in Michigan by the end of next year. Even Hamtramck is down to a single shift. There and elsewhere, there will be a deluge of applicants for a rapidly shrinking pool of line jobs.
Talking to Powell, I was constantly torn between marveling at his faith, his stubborn belief that everything was going to work out, and the urge to tell him to look around, to read the paper on any given day, to see the train that's heading straight for him and so many others and try to make a viable plan for his future before it's too late. But what would that plan be? What if you were 38 and had spent the last 12 years doing one thing for a company and an industry that allowed your predecessors to escape the Jim Crow South, that gave generations of black workers a shot at dignity and their rightful place in the American middle class, that allowed you to buy a decent home in a neighborhood right next door to white families who had fled your city years before? Maybe it wasn't the job you dreamed of when you were 20, but it was what you did and what your father did and what you and almost everyone around you knew, and it had never failed you before.