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

by Mark Binelli

  KREIMES: “They don’t even come back there and give you an ‘Attaboy.’”

  The mediation took place in a conference room in the front office. Zimmick glad-handed the management representatives, including a top executive with slicked-back hair wearing an open-collared suit. Introducing the executive, Zimmick told me, shamelessly, “Now this is a brilliant guy. If you’re looking to interview someone who knows about manufacturing, you need to talk to him.” The executive arranged his face into a cheesy grin, seeming at once involuntarily pleased by the compliment and yet determined to convey, via an air of ruthlessly circumspect professionalism, both the fact of his being onto Zimmick’s flattery and the nonexistent odds of my ever getting any face time with anyone in the executive suite.

  Zimmick said I would have to wait in the lobby during the mediation. I followed him into the front-office break room, which he entered with impunity, implicitly putting himself on equal footing with the bosses and the suits. “They got the best coffee here,” he said, fixing himself a cup. A pair of management guys sat at a long table eating lunch. Zimmick shot them a mischievous look and exclaimed, “Sushi? You can definitely pay all our grievances, then.” The management guys chuckled self-consciously.

  Stepping outside for a quick cigarette, Zimmick lowered his voice and said to me, “I know you saw those two guys sleeping when we walked through the plant.” I hadn’t, actually, and felt derelict for being so easily distracted by the big machines, but I nodded silently. “I don’t represent everyone,” he said. “I call it like I see it. Unions get a bad name for a reason. Now these two guys, that’s a circumstance, because of the hours at this place, they might’ve had permission to sleep. But I ain’t got time for a guy who goes in and steals from the company. That’s stealing, even if it’s hours. If they come to me and say, ‘Well, John, you can save my job, right?’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah. Once. One time.’ That guy may hate me after that conversation, but I don’t care. You’re on your own. You do this again, don’t call me.”

  Zimmick made his way back to the conference room and I took a seat in the lobby. Display cases showed off gleaming examples of the company’s handiwork: a slick one-piece production hood, an aluminum dash cluster panel. After a few minutes, I opened my satchel and pulled out a book I’d been reading, a very funny jeremiad by the writer Jack Green against the literary critics who had (in Green’s opinion) failed to intelligently review William Gaddis’s great experimental novel The Recognitions upon its publication. Only after I removed the book from my bag did I notice its title, Fire the Bastards! I decided to put the book away and finish it later.

  After nearly an hour, Zimmick and Townsend emerged from the conference room looking tense. Zimmick gave me a tight little nod as they passed through the lobby. When I joined them outside, Zimmick was taking a drag on a cigarette and nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other in the crisp January air. He seemed even more edgy and intense than he’d been prior to the mediation. The ruling was being debated as we spoke. “They know me, and they know my arbitration record,” Zimmick said, summoning the blustery confidence he’d expressed earlier in the afternoon. “I guarantee you, they’re in there saying to management, ‘John Zimmick’s gonna stomp your ass!’ They’re gonna have to dig in their pockets.”

  Townsend remained perfectly still, other than for the occasional arm motion required to bring his cigarette to his lips.

  “You heard me,” Zimmick told me, nodding at Townsend. “I just gave my chief steward my word.”

  Townsend didn’t reply or shift his gaze, fixed on one of the buildings across the street, in our direction.

  Zimmick gave Townsend an anxious look, then cleared his throat and added, “Marv had words with the mediator. Some things were said he didn’t like.”

  What sorts of things, specifically, I wondered.

  Townsend said, “Lies,” finished his cigarette, and went back inside.

  Zimmick did not remark on Townsend’s mood. He said, “They came up with an excuse about how they’d offered our guys those hours before they brought in the temps.” He shrugged and continued, “We’ll be okay with whatever they come back with.”

  Zimmick was not a natural politician. He had yet to master the art of feigning sincerity while saying the opposite of what he actually believed. Instead, like a rookie bad liar trying to brazen his way though a line of bullshit on sheer balls, he would just lock eyes with you, as if daring you to call his bluff were proof enough.

  Zimmick gave me a hard stare. I didn’t say anything. We reentered the lobby.

  * * *

  The same week of the mediation, it was reported that in 2010, Ford and General Motors had earned $6.6 billion and $4.7 billion respectively. These numbers represented the highest annual profit for either company in more than a decade, an improvement by Ford of 141 percent from the dark days of 2009. Even Chrysler posted a “modified operating profit” of $763 million in 2010.1 Overall, a certain conventional wisdom had clearly begun to settle in:

  AUTO SHOW 2011: DETROIT CELEBRATES INDUSTRY’S BIG COMEBACK

  (Detroit Free Press)

  SNYDER HAILS AUTO INDUSTRY’S REBOUND

  (Detroit News)

  FORD WORKERS’ PROFIT-SHARING CHECKS EXPECTED TO TOP $5,000

  (New York Times)

  DETROIT AUTO SHOW: INDUSTRY GETTING ITS VA-VA-VA-VOOM BACK

  (CNN.com)

  As with Wall Street’s early “comeback,” though, the celebratory tone struck many on the ground as premature and perhaps overly indebted to a definition of “coming back” that focused on corporate profit, which, contrary to the wishful thinking of supply-side economists, was often obtained at the expense of working people—hence the oxymoronic “jobless recovery.” In the case of the auto companies, this new profitability had been spurred by a variety of convergent events: gas prices dropping back to normal (i.e., artificially low) levels, Americans feeling comfortable making larger purchases again as recession fears temporarily ebbed, Toyota suffering a public relations disaster after certain of its models turned out to have defective brakes, perhaps even sufficient improvement in the quality of domestic cars and trucks to affect consumer choices.

  But there was a telling punditocracy disconnection when it came to Detroit’s stark example of the human cost differential between simple corporate profit and more general social welfare. The writer Malcolm Gladwell, for example, published a thoroughly entertaining takedown of Obama car czar Steven Rattner in the New Yorker, using Rattner’s own self-serving memoir to dismantle the myth of his outsized role in the heroic rescue of General Motors and Chrysler.2 The highlight of the article probably came with Gladwell not only pointing out that Rattner visited Detroit just once while overseeing the restructuring of GM and Chrysler, but that he actually bragged about this fact in his memoir.3

  And yet, in his gleeful undoing of the myth of Rattner, Gladwell heaped promiscuous praise on ousted GM president Rick Wagoner, who, it’s true, seemed indicative of the double standard the Obama administration applied to corporate welfare recipients on Wall Street (who were allowed to keep not only their jobs but their bonuses) and their counterparts in Detroit (Wagoner being “the head that was rotting,” in Rattner’s words, atop GM’s otherwise resuscitatable body). Still, Wagoner’s “tremendous” (Gladwell’s words) accomplishments supposedly included slashing the workforce from 390,000 to 217,000, opening plants in China (GM announced it would be the first of the Big Three automakers to import Chinese-built cars to the United States, beginning in 2011), and renegotiating contracts with the UAW, creating a two-tiered system in which pay for new hires plummeted from between $28 and $33 an hour to between $14 and $17 an hour. Wagoner was also praised for essentially shifting pension obligations related to health care off the books. (Not surprisingly, Wagoner’s own pension of $23 million remained untouched after his forced departure.) The loathsome Wall Street Journal editorial writer Holman W. Jenkins even applauded Wagoner for his “steady, long-term gamesm
anship perhaps unique in the business world”—a “gamesmanship” requiring the fortitude “to wait patiently for a generation of UAW workers and retirees to succumb to their smoking-related illnesses so GM could again become a normal company, with something like normal labor economics.”

  Back in 2009, several months before the bailouts had been announced, Professor Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University, had prophetically told me, “What they’re calling ‘restructuring’ really translates into job losses—reducing models, closing plants. It won’t be the auto industry of yesterday. It will be a global industry, where a very large share of the operations and profits will take place overseas.” So, yes, the companies had made themselves more profitable through a process of “reinvention” that, in many cases, involved simply reducing payroll and cutting the salaries and benefits of union members lucky enough to have survived the latest round of downsizing. “A lot of the guys I know who got laid off are back to work now,” Ray Grimble told me. “But they’re not making nowhere near what they had been making. That’s how the companies are making their money now. The middle class is almost gone. A guy can’t support his family at fourteen bucks an hour.”

  * * *

  In 1932, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo spent several months in Detroit living at the Wardell Hotel on Woodward Avenue while Rivera painted a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Edsel Ford, Henry’s son, at the time the nominal president of Ford Motor Company (though his aging father still pretty much ran things from behind the scenes), paid Rivera just over $20,000 for the commission. Rivera and Kahlo arrived in Detroit at the peak of the Great Depression. The automobile industry, booming just a few years earlier, had been hit particularly hard. Unemployment in Detroit had risen to 50 percent, with two-thirds of the population living below the poverty line; just a few weeks before the famous international art couple’s arrival, police officers and members of the Ford Company’s private security team had fired on laid-off workers agitating for unemployment compensation outside of the Rouge plant, killing five men. Nevertheless, Rivera, a Communist, had romantic visions of “the dawn of a period of new splendors for the [North American] continent and for mankind,” in the words of his biographer Bertram Wolfe—a “free union of the Americas” wedding “the industrial proletariat of the North with the peasantry of the South … the factories of the United States with the raw materials of Latin America … the utilitarian aesthetic of the machine with the plastic sense that still inhered in the Amerindian peoples.”

  After spending weeks having the run of the Rouge and other factories, climbing into turbines and incessantly filling his sketchbooks, Rivera began painting what he would later describe as his greatest work, the Detroit Industry murals: twenty-seven separate frescoes on all four walls of the museum’s templelike courtyard, depicting both the awesome scale of the modern factory floor and an iconized Marxist fantasia of working-class solidarity and collective toil. For visitors today, the room still feels like a holy space, albeit one filled with imagery more bizarre than even your typical Catholic reliquary. Rivera drew inspiration from creation myth, Aztec statuary, the Mexican retablo (painted tin votive art), Soviet propaganda posters, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Charles Sheeler’s photographs of the Rouge (taken one year earlier).

  Though the piece is dominated by workers bent like galley slaves over various stations of the assembly line, with the monstrous stamping presses and blast furnaces seething in the background, there’s also a creepy fetus (Kahlo had just suffered a miscarriage, the inspiration for her own canvas Henry Ford Hospital) and a panel depicting the vaccination of the child Christ (painted to resemble the recently kidnapped Lindbergh baby) and another pair of panels, flanking an entryway like caryatids, depicting, respectively, a brawny high-pressure-boiler operator holding a hammer, his work glove decorated with a red star, and Henry Ford poring over a blueprint.4 Local religious leaders, editorial writers, museum patrons, and politicians condemned the perceived revolutionary nature of the artwork, but to his credit, Edsel Ford defended Rivera, and the Detroit Industry murals emerged from the controversy intact, unlike Rivera’s next major commission, at the Rockefeller Center in New York, which was destroyed after the artist refused to remove a portrait of Lenin from the work.

  Rivera’s murals remain a favorite stop for Detroit-area schoolchildren on field trips. I must have visited the Rivera Court, as it’s called, many dozens of times. It’s the one room in the museum you make sure to pass through on every visit, even if simply to luxuriate in the space for a quick, rejuvenating moment. But somewhat incredibly, the first time I ever really sat and stared at the artwork for longer than ten minutes or so came shortly after I moved back to the city, when one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Vic Chesnutt, performed an evening concert in front of the courtyard’s South Wall. Normally, there’s no seating in the room, aside from a handful of benches set deep in a few corners, but for Chesnutt’s performance, the museum had set up rows of folding chairs, and so during his set, I’d had the opportunity to study the mural for as long as I liked, as I’d never done before. One thing I noticed was that, despite all the manual labor taking place in the frescoes, you couldn’t actually see many of the workers’ hands, at least not in the foreground of the South Wall, where gloves or heavy machinery or the close-packed bodies of other men almost entirely obscured just about every laborer from the wrist up. Yet on the uppermost panels of the mural, an octet of enormous, bare, disembodied hands hovered over a volcano, clutching at the air and shaking angry fists.

  Chesnutt’s own hands occasionally drew the eye as well, tugging spasmodically at his baggy pants and inert legs—he had been paralyzed in a car accident decades earlier—or else adjusting a lever on the side of his wheelchair with a frantic repetitiveness that seemed like the effects of an involuntary tick. I’d noticed his hands the last time I’d seen him play, several months earlier, at a Carnegie Hall tribute to his fellow Georgians R.E.M., where he had managed to transform the band’s maudlin antisuicide ballad “Everybody Hurts” into something raw and fractured and beautiful, his own vulnerability nakedly on display on the hallowed New York stage. About a month after his performance in Detroit—on Christmas Eve, actually, just over a hundred years to the date from Henry Ford’s first successful experiment firing up a motor in his tiny kitchen—I read on Facebook that Chesnutt had taken his life at his home in Athens, Georgia.

  Chesnutt’s performance was also the first time I’d noticed, in the middle distance of Rivera’s South Wall mural, the small group of civilians in street clothes observing the workers from a catwalk, part of some factory tour, which I’d always considered (such tours, that is) a relatively recent construct, but of course in the twenties and thirties Fordism fascinated the public, and witnessing the bustle of the miniature city that was the Rouge would have been as exciting as a visit, in more recent years, to Cape Canaveral for a shuttle launch. One of the tourists, a stern-looking old man in a fedora, broke the fourth wall of the painting to glare directly at the viewer, one bourgeois spectator locking eyes with another from opposing shores of a river of workingmen. Only later did I realize he was standing apart from the others, and that he was actually supposed to be a foreman, which gave his look a different sort of pointedness. Is there a reason, he seemed to be asking, why you’re not working, too?

  * * *

  Ford still offered tours of the Rouge facility, so one afternoon a couple of days after I met John Zimmick, I drove out to Dearborn and bought a ticket at the Henry Ford Museum. I was the only one to board the tour bus when it arrived; likewise, I found myself sitting alone in the theater where, prior to taking an elevator to the catwalk overlooking the factory floor, visitors watch an informational film about the Rouge, the so-called First Wonder of the Industrial World, which, to my surprise, acknowledged the Battle of the Overpass alongside the expected touting of Henry Ford’s canny perfection of vertical integration and the assembly line (though Ford’s long-standing and deeply p
ersonal hatred of unions received somewhat of a gloss).5 Upstairs, a video warned us against waving at workers on the factory floor or otherwise distracting them.

  The first thing that struck me about the Rouge, or at least the Dearborn Truck Facility, the portion of the Rouge we were allowed to see on the tour, presumably spit-shined for public consumption, was the lack of chaos, how orderly it all seemed, especially compared with descriptions from the earliest days of the plant (e.g., Ferdinand’s futile struggle in Journey to the End of the Night to resist the “furious din” that “shook the whole building from top to bottom.… [I]t’s hard to despise your own substance, you’d like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but it’s too late for that. This thing can never stop”) and the grimy, documentary photographs and films dating from the same era.

  From the catwalk, you could peer down onto the open floor and watch each point of the assembly line where workers put together the popular F-150 pickup truck. The colors of the bodies were White Platinum (white), Royal Red (burgundy), and Blue Flame (an almost neon blue). At one part of the line, just the front sections of the trucks, riding on individual palletlike stands called skillets, according to a placard, slowly rolled past a woman in a red sweatshirt, who stuffed something foamy-looking behind the seats, and then past a balding guy wearing a Red Wings T-shirt with a spider tattoo on his left forearm, who screwed in the headlamps using a pneumatic drill hanging from a long air tube, and then past another guy, who sat on a chair at the end of a long, swiveling arm, almost like the arm of an adjustable lamp, only moving sideways, allowing him to slide into the backseat to screw in some part I couldn’t quite make out and easily slide back out again all by pushing himself on this cool arm-seat. At least this particular technological advancement seemed like a vast improvement for the workers—actually encouraging employees to sit down on the job!—something you’d assume certain bosses just on principle would deny, perhaps even insisting on having the guy laboriously climb into and out of every backseat, regardless of its cutting into productivity.