Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  After premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, Roger & Me was picked up by Miramax Films for a $1.5 million advance. Now a wealthy man and a celebrity, Moore moved to New York and started developing TV Nation, an NBC program that employed the same brand of satirical ambush journalism as Roger & Me. The only Flintoid he took with him was Hamper.

  Hamper had finally quit GM in 1988, after not even sedatives and forty-ouncers could hold back one final monster panic attack at his new job in Pontiac. Retiring to the pool shed behind the house he shared with his new wife—a schoolteacher who’d introduced herself by fan letter—Hamper turned “Revenge of the Rivethead” into a book. Rivethead won its author profiles in People and the New York Times, and a movie option from director Richard Linklater, who thought a shoprat would be a good follow-up to Slacker. Linklater even signed Matt Dillon to play Hamper and dragged the star to Flint for a two-day Rivethead tour. Hamper took the film types to Angelo’s, where Dillon tried to brush off the “Are you …” question by saying, “I get that a lot.” Coney dogs sold well among young women that evening. Rivethead, however, never became a movie. Like Hunter S. Thompson, to whom he was compared by his publisher, or Charles Bukowski, to whom he was compared by Businessweek, Hamper wrote animated prose whose message and energy could not be conveyed onscreen. Truly, he’s one of the most colorful stylists ever to plug in a typewriter. The plant manager’s State of the Factory address was a “Knute-Rockne-reborn-as-Leo-Buscaglia-on-the-threshold-of-industrial-Guyana rah-rah speech.” Flint is a “town that genuflects in front of used car lots and scratches its butt with the jagged peaks of the automotive sales chart.” But he had to be a sleight-of-pen magician to distract readers from a subject whose monotony would stump most authors after three hundred words. Only a genius could write an entertaining book about assembly-line labor. But not even a genius can make an entertaining movie about it. Linklater tried two scripts. One ended with an Officer and a Gentleman–like romance. The other, which Hamper liked, was heavy on recitations of his garage-rock-inspired prose.

  Hamper did get to be a TV star. Moore rented him a New York City apartment and made him a correspondent for TV Nation. Once again, Hamper was Moore’s house sidekick. In one spot, he visited Manhattan drug stores and sex shops, asking for size S condoms.

  “I think Moore just liked having me there because I was from Flint,” Hamper said. “He had all those Good Times Charlies and he liked having a good friend around. My relationship with him is two different people. There’s Michael Moore and then there’s the guy I knew, Mike Moore.”

  For Moore and Hamper, taking down GM was a ticket out of Flint. Moore, who would get rich as a left-wing auteur, bought a condo on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a chalet-style cottage on Torch Lake, a northern Michigan resort.

  Hamper moved to Leelanau County, another upper Lower Peninsula resort community where his wife had family. He signed a contract for a second book called America Drinks and Goes Home, but without his job at the shop, he’d lost his material, and without Moore, he’d lost his literary foreman, demanding quota. A loner and an introvert, Hamper had chosen the rivet gun and typewriter as his tools because shoprats and authors don’t have to interact with other humans. Moore founded a film festival in Traverse City, fifteen miles from Hamper’s cottage, but Hamper’s agoraphobia and fear of crowds prevented him from attending.

  A decade and a half after Roger & Me, Moore won an Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine, his exposé of America’s gun culture, and sat next to former president Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, as a reward for the anti-Republican agitprop of Fahrenheit 9/11. Hamper’s only public communication was deejaying a Friday-night soul music show on the local college radio station.

  “I think I’m a real product of Flint,” Hamper said. “My parents, grandparents, all worked in the shop. I think I was bred to take orders. I think that’s why I haven’t written another book. No one’s telling me what to do. If some guy called me up and said, ‘You’re gonna write a book and this is what it’s about,’ I’d probably do it. I’m just used to being told what to do.”

  NOW THAT THE UAW AND GM MANAGEMENT finally had a common enemy—the Japanese—the union dropped its son-of-a-son-of-a-sit-downer attitude and began cooperating with management. Buick, the most unproductive division in GM, had experienced its last strike in 1974. The next year, GM executives told Local 599 president Al Christner that the company was fed up with high absenteeism, insubordinate employees who slashed foremen’s tires, stacks of grievances, and semiannual strike threats. It was thinking of shutting down Buick Assembly, which had been built in the 1920s. The plant was obsolete, and so was its product, a heavy sedan with a V-8 engine and rear-wheel drive.

  That Halloween, Christner held a summit at the Flint Sheraton with Buick’s personnel manager. They walked into the meeting wearing devil masks, then whipped them off and shook hands. Once the company and the union stopped demonizing each other, they came up with the Quality of Work Life program, an attempt to end grievances and strikes by giving the guy on the line more say in how the plant was run. Workers could shut down the line, adjust machine settings, reject raw materials—all decisions that had once been reserved for foremen.

  “We had union people making schedules up, doing things that salary used to do,” Don Spillman said. “We gained a lot of power over what we did here.”

  Absenteeism, which hurt quality more than any other infraction—even more than drinking on the line—was cut to 2 percent in plants that adopted Quality of Work Life. Grievances—and the time-consuming hearings necessary to settle them—almost disappeared, because “you could settle a lot more issues with the plant manager.”

  The success of the Quality of Work Life program, plus the desire to emulate Japan’s just-in-time manufacturing process, convinced GM to build a new super-plant on the site of Buick Assembly.

  Buick City was supposed to be GM’s version of a Toyota plant. In the early eighties, the Japanese landed in America, forty years later than originally planned. They were building motorcycles in Ohio, using nonunion shoprats. From top to bottom, from Roger Smith on the fourteenth floor of GM HQ to the guy standing in a trench at the Buick, bolting mufflers to undercarriages, the world’s largest corporation had always dismissed the Japanese as copycats, a nation that had not produced an original thought since it got the idea to steal its alphabet from China. Japan did everything America did, at half the size. Now that Americans were cramming themselves into Asian clown cars—you didn’t drive a Honda Civic, you wore it like a square steel suit—GM conceded that the copycat nation was worth copying. As a Local 599 committeeman, Don Spillman was part of the “design team” for Buick City, an eight-factory, 235-acre, $280 million complex on the north side of Flint. GM wanted to break down work classifications by assigning assemblers to six-person teams, in which every member could do every job. The company also wanted “just-in-time” delivery of parts, instead of stockpiling materials in the plant. So Spillman flew across the Pacific Ocean, visiting Honda and Toyota plants to find out why they were winning. The Japanese had assembly lines delivering parts to the assembly line. They had robots welding seams and painting bodies. The workers did calisthenics before each shift. Nobody smiled.

  “It used to take us six hours to change a press line,” he said. “Set up dies to make a hood, take you six hours. The Japanese were doing it in ten minutes. When they first dropped all this stuff on me, I said, ‘That’s a cock and bull story.’ It took a whole bunch of people working together, the die setters working together, the production men working as a team. We changed a lot of classifications. We didn’t combine skilled trades because when you take electrical, machine repair—those are different. But the stock chaser, the buck handler, the assembly line, the paint shop—everybody had to learn all them jobs.”

  At a Honda motorcycle plant, Spillman was amazed to see parts popping out of the floor, like bowling balls on their return trip up the alley. The work
ers would snatch the tailpipes or tanks and attach them to the bike.

  “We brought back just-in-time inventory,” he said. “You don’t have a warehouse no more. You got these trucks in here, they’re bringing you motors or they’re bringing you windshield wiper blades just in time to put ’em on the car. And we brought back technology to change dies in less than thirty minutes.”

  Buick City resulted in the demise of Fisher One. Instead of building bodies on the East Side of Flint and trucking them to the North Side, which wasted gasoline, manpower, and time, GM would build the entire car in one location.

  Buick City opened in September 1985. With twenty-eight thousand workers, drawn from factories all over Flint, the plant was supposed to represent the city’s recovery from the recession of Reagan’s first term. This hive became the birthing chamber of the LeSabre, a compact, front-wheel-drive sedan at the bottom of the Buick status ladder. Buick City did a great job producing LeSabres. From the time the complex opened, the LeSabre was one of J. D. Power and Associates’ highest-ranked automobiles for quality and reliability. There was no problem with Buick City. The problem was with Buick. It was the car your retired high school principal drove to church. Buick’s motto should have been “The Last Car You’ll Ever Own”—not because of its durability but because the average age of a Buick owner was sixty-seven. David Dunbar Buick, whose fiercely short apparition is reproduced in a bronze statue on a Flint sidewalk, didn’t live much longer than that himself. It’s an astonishing piece of nostalgia now, but gasoline cost less than a dollar a gallon in the 1990s. Young drivers who had once begun the Buick-to-the-grave cycle in a LeSabre were now buying SUVs. In Buick City’s first decade, GM lost another ten points of market share, falling from 40 to 30.7. It also didn’t help that Christner had been voted out of Local 599’s presidency by workers who were angry about the concessions of the early eighties and thought the Quality of Work Life program “was just another management scheme to eliminate jobs,” as one member put it. Christner was eventually succeeded by a Vietnam vet who took the local back to its militant roots, appearing at Flint city council meetings to protest the company’s tax abatements. Only a dozen years after it opened, GM decided to shut down Buick City, moving production of the LeSabre to its plants in Hamtramck and Lake Orion, Michigan.

  After the word came down from Detroit on November 22, 1997, Flint’s UAW region president called it “some Thanksgiving bad news from GM that will cripple our community for decades to come.” In an attempt to save the plant, the UAW had taken out ads in the Wall Street Journal and Inventor’s Business Daily, publishing a company memo that ranked Buick City second in quality of GM’s nineteen North American plants. It was no use. General Motors had scheduled the Flint autoworker for extinction and was knocking off shoprats as rapidly as western pleasure hunters had exterminated the buffalo. Once Buick City closed, the count would stand at twenty thousand—less than one-quarter of the population just twenty years before. The company’s strategy was to disperse Flintoids to plants unafflicted with ancestral memories of the Sit-Down Strike. At Flint Truck and Bus, Hamper had gotten used to reading novels at work thanks to those double-up arrangements with a linemate. Once he was transferred to Pontiac, “the jobs were timed out to make sure the workers wouldn’t be allowed a moment’s intermission,” he wrote. “Anyone caught reading a newspaper or paperback would be penalized. The union was nothing more than a powerless puppet show groveling in the muck.”

  Flint’s bitterness over GM’s plan to fire the entire city led to the last great strike against General Motors, not far from where the first had begun. It began at the Flint Metal Fabricating plant, where the company had failed to install $200 million in improvements agreed on in the previous contract. Fearing a strike over its broken promise, GM began removing Chevy Silverado hood dies so it could continue production of the truck elsewhere. Just as in 1936, the very action GM took to avoid the consequences of a strike ended up provoking one.

  “We held their feet to the fire about the two hundred million dollars and before Memorial Day, General Motors called some truckers in to take those dies out,” said Spillman, who was on the staff of UAW region 1C, which covers south-central Michigan. “I went over, got the shop committee together, and we wouldn’t let ’em load the dies onto the truck. We got in front of the trucks and wouldn’t let ’em load the dies. So what General Motors did, they waited ’til Memorial Day weekend, brought a scab crew into the plant, and took them dies out like thieves in the night. I told my boss, ‘We’re going to have to strike that plant if they don’t bring ’em back.’ Nine thirty on June the fifth, management wanted an extension. I said, ‘Only way you’ll get an extension, if I can look at that TV set over there and see helicopters airliftin’ them damn dies back up here.’”

  The strike began half an hour later, as 3,400 workers at Metal Fab walked out. The following week, the walkout spread to Flint East, a parts plant whose employees felt GM’s outsourcing of work was just practice for moving all their jobs to Indiana or Tennessee.

  “Outsourcing is big,” a toolmaker told the Flint Journal. “General Motors doesn’t seem to even want plants in Flint anymore. Why do you think they’ve been sending work to other places?”

  Unlike Metal Fab, which stamped out hoods and fenders for a limited variety of cars and trucks, Flint East produced speedometers, spark plugs, and filters used in almost every GM vehicle. You cannot sell a car without a speedometer. Because of the just-in-time supply system it had copied from the Japanese, GM had no warehouses full of speedometers. The 5,800 workers at Flint East halted every assembly line in almost every plant in the GM universe.

  The strike lasted fifty-four days, the longest since the two-month epic of 1970, and cost GM $2.5 billion. The company returned the dies to Metal Fab, agreed to spend the promised $200 million to improve the plant and to stop outsourcing parts made at Flint East. On the other hand, GM decided to spin off its parts operation into a new company, Delphi, and to build new plants where a small group of workers would assemble parts purchased from outside suppliers. GM engineers were trying to design an autoworker who earned $2 an hour, never got sick, and died on retirement day. Since the Tech Center had not developed even a test model, Human Relations was trying to figure out how to relate to as few humans as possible.

  Spillman considered the strike a victory, because Flint Metal Fab and Flint East were still open. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century, there were only six thousand shoprats left in Flint.

  “GM pulled out of here ’cause they had done whupped the union,” he said. “They thought they had and they wanted to make more money overseas. Flint had a big backing of union people all over, you know, so they needed to break that big bloc of union members up. I’ll never understand that, ’cause we worked with management since the early eighties when Quality of Life started, we worked with them to make the company more competitive. We made all the major changes and we still got the shaft.”

  6.

  “A Rust Bowl”

  On the East Side of Chicago, life did not run according to the laws that nature imposed on the rest of the world. When night fell on other neighborhoods, those neighborhoods stayed dark until the next morning. On the East Side, the sky burned red when U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, or Wisconsin Steel dumped a load of hot slag, the waste product of steelmaking. The steel mills created their own suns, their own skies, their own weather. In other neighborhoods, housewives hung their washing in the basement when it rained. On the East Side, wives hung it indoors when the wind blew in from the mills, lest their sheets be stained with soot. On bright mornings, the air and the sidewalks glittered with graphite, a metallic mist so thick “you could take a spoon and get a hold of it,” recalled an East Sider. Visitors remarked on a musty odor, but to natives, the stench of steelmaking was as natural an atmosphere as oxygen. Men didn’t go to work when the sun rose and return home when it set: they pulled the eleven A.M. to seven P.M., the seven-to-three, the three-to
-eleven, sometimes a different shift every week, so when you went up on 106th Street at three in the morning all the restaurants were open, and when you knocked on the door of Marino’s Tap at the same hour, Marino would sell you a twelve-pack of beer, damn the city’s two A.M. license.

  The East Side is so named because it lies on the east bank of the Calumet River, a canal-slow body of water that flows into the heel end of Lake Michigan. The ore freighters docked in the Calumet, where they were emptied by Hulett unloaders, huge metal insects feeding from ship holds, rising and dipping like oil derricks. The river ran red from the iron filings dumped by the mills. Concrete banks guided the Calumet along a geometric course, under black lace railroad bridges, past pyramids of rock salt and coal, alongside junkyards piled with compressed cars. The East Side has often considered itself a misunderstood island at the edge of the city, tethered to the rest of Chicago by bridges. This was where the city’s dirty work took place. Mayor Richard J. Daley even built an elevated toll bridge over the East Side, so he wouldn’t have to drive past the mills en route to his vacation cottage in Michigan. The Skyway walks across the flyover neighborhood on hundred-foot iron legs, so “cars pass like distant jet traffic,” the Chicago Sun-Times once wrote.

  The bridges also kept out the blacks. Even as they were welcomed into the mills, they were not welcomed into the East Side, which remained Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Irish, and Mexican. In 1954, five black families moved into a housing project in Irondale, a sister steel village, and could not be dislodged, even after a week of bombing and rioting. But the blacks never crossed the river.

  Since the Calumet River was an international port, the East Side was also a nautical neighborhood, as likely to be visited by sailors from Germany as by anyone from downtown Chicago. Nearby, in South Chicago, were two of the most famous maritime bars on the Great Lakes. Horseface Mary’s, named for its proprietor’s prognathous homeliness, was across the street from U.S. Steel’s main gate. Kate’s Tavern, on South Chicago Avenue, was better known as Peckerhead Kate’s, after the barmaid’s nickname for all her customers. A florid, busty woman, Kate once popped a breast out of her blouse after overhearing sailors speculate on whether she wore falsies. “Here, you goddamned peckerheads,” she shouted, grabbing a sailor’s hand and clamping it to her teat. “Feel this and see if it’s real!” When the Great Lakes were frozen, bachelor sailors wintered over in South Chicago flophouses.