Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  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?

  JOHN ZIMMICK, 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 o
f 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.

  After the so-called Battle of the Overpass, Reuther’s legend was born. He would go on to become one of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century labor movement, the historic concessions on health care and other benefits wrung by Reuther from the Big Three playing no small role in the creation of an American middle class. The title of Lichtenstein’s biography is drawn from a quote by American Motors president and future Michigan governor George Romney: “Walter Reuther is the most dangerous man in Detroit, because no one is more skillful in bringing about the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing forms of society.”

  Zimmick and his members remained well aware of the historical significance of Local 174. A framed black-and-white photograph of Reuther and his wife, May—both killed in a plane crash in 1968, en route to the UAW retreat in northern Michigan—hung on the wall of the little office. And yet, as everyone knows, the fortunes of unions in general, and the UAW in particular, have fallen precipitously since those glory days. Although still one of metropolitan Detroit’s biggest locals, 174 has seen its membership drop to about forty-two hundred from over ten thousand members only four years ago, before the recession and numerous plant closings and layoffs decimated its ranks.

  The reason for this afternoon’s house call was a mediation, the factory’s management standing accused of using temp workers on Sundays and holidays without offering the hours to union members, who contractually are supposed to receive first dibs and who would also be paid double time, based on hourly wages much higher than temp pay. Such petty shenanigans on the part of management seemed less about cost cutting than provocation, an intentionally maddening form of psyops. Still, Zimmick was fired up about the proceedings and their potential outcome. “The last contract was hard,” he told me. “Everybody got raises. Everything seems to be going well. But management is going to try to get away with things if they can. It’s always a struggle. Our advantage is, we have a lot of eyes around this place.”

  “The clause states they’re not supposed to use temp employees over a thousand hours,” Grimble added. “They’ve done pushed that issue way beyond.”

  “We’re asking for full pay at double time for everybody who would’ve worked,” Zimmick said. “And if they wanna sit there and be stubborn without even giving a counter, we’ll say, ‘See you at arbitration.’ Do you want to go to D.C. in May?”

  Grimble was trying to get the fax machine to work. “What’s the cause?” he asked.

  “Unfair trade agreements. We’re going to challenge the Chamber of Commerce. Tom Donohue”—president and CEO of the Chamber—“is a real pain in the ass. He’s never seen protests yet. We’ll raise a little hell. There’ll probably be a 150, 200 members going. It’s not officially UAW, though. The second floor of the hotel will be the naked girls and the Jell-O shots. I’m president, so I’ll stay on the first floor. Can’t have cell phone pictures of me with a beer bong.”

  I couldn’t tell whether Zimmick was joking or not. Before I could ask, Marv Townsend showed up, along with two other shop stewards, Fred Kus and Len Kreimes. As the men, none of whom could be described as slender, entered the office, its unoccupied square footage was reduced with fleet dispatch. They all removed orange foam earplugs and thick plastic safety goggles, except for Townsend, who left on his goggles for a while. Kus had a gray-flecked beard and looked like an outlaw biker, though not as much as Kreimes did. Before grabbing a paper plate and helping himself to fried drumsticks and mashed potatoes, he handed Zimmick a thick computer printout detailing the number of hours worked by all of the temps. Many, it turned out, had well exceeded the thousand-hour limit, at which point they were supposed to become union members; some had worked as many as seventeen hundred hours. The top union worker at the factory made $25.09 an hour; temps could be paid whatever the job market was willing to accept, which, in this job market, could amount to $10 an hour, or even less.

  Zimmick greedily flipped through the pages, loosing a wicked laugh. “I like it,” he said. “Oh my goodness. It’s the Golden Goose. They’re making money on this shit. Nice job, Fred.”

  Townsend, the only black guy in the room, had close-cropped graying hair and a mustache and had been working at the factory for seventeen years. He and Kreimes actually started a week apart. Townsend said he moved to Detroit from Mississippi after he got out of the service in 1975. His first job had been working at a barrel factory, cleaning out the big drums. All of his coworkers had been ex-cons. “They’d just got out of jail or prison, and that was the only work they could find,” he told me. “They were good workers, though. That was a fun job.” He paused to bite into a biscuit, then said sadly, “I used to love coming to work here. Loved it.”

  The company had been started in the sixties, in the garage of the founder’s home, at first strictly servicing the automotive industry but eventually expanding into making parts for boats and motorcycles, which had proved disastrous, at least according to the stewards. “Way I look at it,” Grimble said, “you can’t sell cars, you’re not selling boats.” Still, the company had bounced back of late, in part because of new environmental regulations requiring semitrucks be more fuel efficient; the company had been contracted to make special brackets for the trailers to help achieve these ends. “So now we’re doing real good,” Townsend said, before quickly correcting himself: “They are. We’re surviving.” It was an old story: when times were tough, the union had agreed to concessions in order to save jobs. But concessions had a way of quickly settling into permanence, at least until the
next round of concessions.

  GRIMBLE: “They got everybody so damn scared, nobody wants to say anything, because they’re afraid their job’s going to go away.”

  ZIMMICK: “They have an advantage. The deck is stacked against us real heavy in this economy.”

  TOWNSEND: “The company says maintenance is not, it’s not … what? What did they say y’all wasn’t?”

  KREIMES: “We don’t make money for ’em.”

  TOWNSEND: “Right!”

  KREIMES: “Overhead. We’re overhead. We got the same amount of maintenance guys we had seventeen years ago and we’ve added three buildings.”

  ZIMMICK: “Tell you what, though. The past few months here things have changed for the better. I’ve been getting phone calls. People like working here.”

  GRIMBLE: “People like working here? You mean new people? Because they’re just glad to have a job. If people had been here when times were good, and then they went bad, and then the company stepped on you, those people sure aren’t calling you.”

  ZIMMICK (PENSIVE): “No. And these new guys, they’ll get their turn, too, down the road, I’m sure. They’re fair about that!”

  TOWNSEND: “We’ve been sold out. Who owns this country now? I was watching the news yesterday. In Indiana they got a freeway with a bridge on it, and they had to keep repairing it, so they sold it to Australia. Who done own us? Our workforce, man, they come out and say, ‘Americans don’t got no more pride in their work.’ We got a lot of fucking pride! They just don’t understand how it is to come to work and people are depending on you, and you make sure all of your jobs are taken care of, and you’re working ungodly hours to keep the customer happy, you do all of this, and then at the end, they reap all the rewards.”