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

by Mark Binelli

  Video monitors at various points along the catwalk displayed faces of Ford workers cheerily explaining, in layman’s terms, the specifics of the work taking place at the particular station below. According to one of the docents on hand, these were actually actors portraying Ford workers. At Windshield Installation, the actor-worker on the video, “Kevin,” introduced visitors to Bumper and Blinker, his robot-arm coworkers—or “teammates,” as “Kevin” called them—an especially lame attempt to anthropomorphize away the general Rouge tourist’s unease at the idea of salt-of-the-earth assembly line employees being displaced by automation, said unease no doubt stirred by the frankly eerie cleanliness and absence of heaving multitudes at what was, after all, supposed to be the First Wonder of the Industrial World.

  The assembly lines advanced at a strolling pace, just slightly faster than the part of a rollercoaster ride where the cart goes uphill. There were also truck parts dangling on conveyors all around me. Suddenly a shadow would wash over the catwalk, and glancing up, I’d see a truck body pulled along by car-wash-type chains on a track running above my head. The calm banality of the plant seemed unexpectedly peaceful at first, but then I began to feel unsettled by the constant, creeping movement everywhere, which, alongside the natural sounds of the factory, by no means cacophonous, though constant and slightly disorienting—the sharp needling whir of pneumatic drills, the hollow clanking echo of hammered metal, the occasional shrill safety alarm—combined to produce a sense of slow-motion vertigo.

  The lines made me think of slow-moving digestive tracts, and the factory as a whole began to remind me of one of those medical school illustrations of the human body in which the skin is removed and you can see all of the body’s veins and arteries and internal organs, or else of an ant farm, or else of the “enormous dollhouses, inside which you could see men moving, but hardly moving, as if they were struggling against something impossible,” again, Céline, only without the impossible-struggle part. I wondered what the people below me might be doing, if not this, if heavy manufacturing did go away. Subsistence farming? Would that be more rewarding? Some kind of service job? I wondered if the original factory tour, the one depicted by Rivera, rather than celebrating a shared myth of American productivity, reveled in pornographically watching brute labor.

  Unfortunately, pundits and elected officials on both sides of the political spectrum seem to have reached a consensus, most often phrased as, “Those jobs”—meaning, the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that have disappeared over the past decades—“are never coming back.” This verdict is delivered as tough love, a harsh truth akin to the unpleasantness of air travel or the inevitability of death, something accepted by grown-ups as part of life. Market forces, like the weather, can be studied, perhaps even crudely predicted, but to attempt to buck or control the invisible hand would be hubris. You might as well shake your fist at a tornado. Those jobs are gone; they had to leave; they’re never coming back.

  Autoworkers had also appeared in an earlier, rock-video-style film of a F-150 pickup’s construction, where a long row of them gave the camera a thumbs-up as the truck breached the figurative birth canal at the end of the assembly line. The Big Three had long used its employees as convenient props, skimping on their pay, health care, and safety whenever possible, yet more than happy to trot them out as a means of humanizing faceless and unpopular megacorporations. Come contract negotiation time, of course, the UAW members became greedy, lazy, fantastically overpaid. But as extras in a Chevy commercial, they were Just Like You, schlubby and hardworking Real Americans making an authentically American product.

  * * *

  One of the most interesting legacies of Fordism has been its effect on Henry Ford’s own idealized notion of labor. As Ford biographer Steven Watts notes, the sort of repetitive, machinelike grunt work being done in plants like the Rouge was largely the opposite of the specialized craftsmanship that so informed Ford’s concept of a Protestant work ethic, in which satisfaction in the production of something with one’s own hands provided a substantial part of the reward. Now, work required extracurricular compensation, in the form of high wages for the time, yes, but more importantly in the creation of consumer culture, whereby workers could treat themselves after a week of dehumanizing labor by purchasing the very mass-produced crap they and their fellow proletariat had played an otherwise interchangeable role in building.

  Fordism, at its outset, drew fervent admirers from the left, though many of today’s leftist utopianists would be happy to see the auto plants, if they can’t be wholly remade as windmill, high-speed rail, or solar panel factories, just disappear. But “saving” Detroit’s traditional economy requires at least a partial embrace of an ethically fraught industry. Urbanists like Craig Ruff may want a Detroit repurposed as “the world’s greatest bio-urban hub,” but lots of people in the UAW simply want their old jobs back.

  This split makes for interesting levels of cognitive dissonance. Along with calling for things like universal health care and a broader social safety net, which would undoubtedly ease the transition from a strong manufacturing base, the pipe dream most often touted by the sensible liberal policy maker in places like Michigan, at least economically speaking, is certainly not the Chamber of Commerce–enraging tariffs supported by people like Zimmick and a handful of outlying public figures (generally dismissed as fringe) like Dennis Kucinich but rather a wholesale conversion of the economy away from dirty industrial jobs. For possible replacements, people look to former manufacturing cities that have successfully reinvented themselves as hubs of technology (Seattle), higher education and general hipness (Pittsburgh, Portland), and the arts (Glasgow)—sidestepping the fact that in a state where one adult in three reads below the sixth-grade level, calls for the “reeducation” of workers to help them adapt to a new brainiac economy amount to the feeblest of platitudes.

  Many of the outsiders who made their way to Detroit in the wake of the auto industry’s near collapse came bearing suggestions of how the region might replace those jobs that were never coming back. Newt Gingrich called for stimulating new investment by making the city of Detroit a tax-free zone. In business circles around town, buzzwords like “tech incubators” and “entrepreneurial hubs” entered the lexicon. Experts cited all of the research highlighting the ways in which diversified local economies thrived, while the single-industry, large-scale paternalism of old faded away.

  Wayne State University’s TechTown, funded in part by General Motors, was meant to stimulate “job growth and small business creation by supporting entrepreneurs and developing companies in emerging industries including advanced engineering, life sciences and alternative energy”; likewise, Detroit-based Bizdom U, created by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, was an intensive four-month training and mentorship program designed to foster budding local entrepreneurs. All good and necessary moves, but still, it remained tricky to see how the jobs created in these tech hubs would help the people left behind by the vanishing factories.

  In the summer of 2010, a number of Detroit media outlets reported on another piece of positive economic news. From a column in the Detroit News:

  Tim Bryan took his company to Bangalore, India, in 2002. Now, he’s moving it into the new Third World alternative: Detroit.

  At the foot of Woodward, adjacent to Campus Martius, Bryan is steadily hiring information technology professionals to work in GalaxE.Systems Inc.’s new Detroit hub.

  The New Jersey–based firm is leasing at least two stories of a 25-story office tower that’s otherwise almost vacant—a star-crossed building that in the 1960s was built to be the dazzling headquarters for First Federal Bank of Detroit.

  Detroit, though, offers some of the low-cost benefits of doing business in the Third World. The rent at 1001 Woodward Ave.—between $14 and $17 per square foot—is rock-bottom for a major city.

  Detroit’s labor costs have dropped so far, even for technology workers, that Bryan tells his Fortune 500 clients they’ll pay
only 5 percent more to work through Detroit than to send their business to Brazil.

  The reality is that Bryan flies in one to three days a week to work with 20 employees in a skyscraper originally built for thousands. To Detroit’s latest clutch of business visionaries, this is what opportunity looks like.

  Bryan was interviewed in outlets all over the city, greeted unanimously with the sort of accolades one would expect to be handed to a man bearing a giant check. By the following spring, he had 110 employees, and a new slogan: “Outsource to Detroit.” Detroit’s working class had now been so thoroughly pummeled that the city was grateful to be considered competitive with the Third World. This passed for good news in 2010.

  * * *

  About thirty minutes after the mediation resumed, Zimmick reemerged from the conference room, this time beaming and back in upbeat campaign mode. The ruling had gone in the union’s favor. In a compromise, the company had agreed to pay out eight-hour paychecks to the union members who’d been improperly denied the opportunity for Sunday and holiday overtime. Since the union members hadn’t worked, they were awarded what Zimmick called “rocking chair” money (meaning straight time, rather than overtime, paychecks), but Zimmick had never really expected overtime pay to begin with. Moreover, the settlement was not precedent-setting, so if the company tried pulling a similar maneuver in the future, he could take the evidence of the first deal straight to an arbitrator, who would almost certainly grant the union a full payout. Victory had put Zimmick in a generous mood. “This was a mistake,” he said of the company. “I saw that today. They weren’t trying nothing crafty.”

  I followed Zimmick back to his office, a short drive away. Local 174 was housed in a tan brick building next door to a post office sorting center. Under Reuther, 174 had been the first UAW local to purchase its own building, an Odd Fellows Hall on Maybury Grand Street in Detroit. The local had moved to its current location in 2001. Zimmick took me into the banquet room and showed me a WPA mural, transferred from the old building, celebrating the history of the UAW, including the Battle of the Overpass. There was also a lounge area with billiard tables and a long, curved bar. We pulled up a couple of stools. It was only about four thirty, so the place was empty and the lights were off. Zimmick sat on the very edge of his stool, keeping his feet on the ground, one of his knees bobbing incessantly. He did not remove his leather jacket. A hand remained in his pocket, as if he held a concealed weapon and felt safer with his finger on the trigger, prepared for the first sign of trouble.

  Zimmick had not come from a union family. “My ma tended bar,” he said. He’d never known his father, sent to jail for smuggling weapons over the Mexico-Arizona border when Zimmick was still an infant. Mostly, he was raised by his grandfather, a cab driver. Zimmick joined the UAW in October 1988, while working as a salt lab operator at Commercial Steel Treating in Madison Heights. “I ran the salt pots,” Zimmick explained, unhelpfully, when I inquired about the duties of a salt lab operator. (Subsequent research revealed it has something to do with hardening steel parts in baths of molten salt.) After clashing with management, Zimmick decided to run for shop chairman and won. Then he began clashing with the heads of Local 174, who eventually told him, when he needed a case to go to arbitration, “You don’t get to go. You guys don’t vote the right way.” Zimmick said, “That’s the way it’s going to be?” He put a team together and learned parliamentary procedure at Wayne State University’s Labor Studies program. In 2007, he ran for president of Local 174, narrowly lost, convinced the UAW to overturn the election results because of voting-day shenanigans pulled by the existing leadership, and, after a second vote was held, won handily. Three years later, his entire slate was reelected without opposition.

  As we sat at the bar, not drinking, just talking, the light from the outside grew dim and Zimmick’s mood seemed to darken concurrently. The high of the afternoon’s successful mediation was fading, especially as I probed Zimmick on the current state of his union. “The middle class really is going away, and I don’t have the answers for it,” he said, sighing. He talked about the need for the labor movement to regroup, to hit the streets, to pressure the political leadership to renegotiate trade agreements, though he admitted no one in Michigan was talking about such things—his only guys, really, were Kucinich in Ohio and Virg Benero, the Democrat who’d run for governor of Michigan and been defeated by Rick Snyder, a millionaire venture capitalist who had previously run Gateway Inc., a company that outsourced thousands of jobs while Snyder served on its board of directors. With membership taking such a massive hit, Zimmick had given himself and all of his officers a 50 percent pay cut. “I could go back to the steel plant and make more money with overtime,” he said. He told me stories about laid-off members he knew who’d committed suicide, gone to jail on purpose, become strung out on heroin. The drug business was the only one booming in metropolitan Detroit, he said. Zimmick often spent the night on a cot he kept at the local if he worked late and didn’t want to drive all the way back to Madison Heights, where he lived. He said he didn’t have many friends.

  “We’ve been beat,” Zimmick continued. “Absolutely lost this battle. People talk about the comeback of the auto industry.” He snorted. “American cars, now that’s true. The quality is the best in our lifetime. But the workers aren’t feeling it at all. It’s called ‘lean manufacturing,’ and they cut corners everywhere they can. Temps are rampant. People are used to having nothing. That’s the difference. They’re grateful to be temping for eight bucks an hour now. ‘Wow, I have a job for the first time in eight years!’ It’s so sad. There needs to be a wake-up call, or a revolution. But they do it to you gradually, just carve out little pieces over time, so you don’t notice. That’s how it works in this country.” I mentioned the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, and Zimmick, nodding, added cryptically, “If you have an elephant on a dinner table, you’re not going to eat it in one sitting.” Correctly reading my silence as confusion, he went on, “You’re going to carve it every day, little by little. Until it’s gone.”

  Our talk suddenly felt boozy and confessional. Perhaps the mere act of sitting at a bar long enough naturally brings out such moments, even if there’s no alcohol. “Big business, big corporations have just destroyed us,” Zimmick told me. He stared at the surface of the bar, like a drunk contemplating another round he couldn’t afford. “They won,” he said.

  Abandoned Highland Park police station. [Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre]

  9

  AUSTERITY 101

  NO MATTER HOW DEXTROUS or well-intentioned our elected officials, any plan to reinvent Detroit, or even adequately address the city’s most fundamental crises, required the one thing Detroit lacked most of all: unimaginable amounts of money. As John Mogk, the Wayne State law professor and urbanist, pointed out, Detroit’s major recent success stories have been obtained in large part through spectacular levels of capital investment. “If you reach back to the sixties,” he said, the housing development of Lafayette Park “has probably experienced a billion dollars a mile in public and private investment. Midtown”—which includes the university and hospital districts—“in the two miles from the Fox Theater to Grand Boulevard, has probably experienced a billion a mile over the past ten years.”

  Mogk contrasted this healthy area of Detroit, which he calls the Core, with the other 130 square miles of the city, which he calls the Heartland—historically the strength of Detroit, a city never known for its downtown as much as for its industrial plants, strong neighborhoods, and high levels of home ownership. The Heartland, Mogk noted, has been steadily deteriorating. “And that’s where all the problems are,” he says. “And the only part of that whole area that’s received anything commensurate with the level of investment in the Core area has been the Poletown Plant and the Chrysler Jefferson Plant. So, as Core Detroit becomes more closely linked with the suburbs, Heartland Detroit is drifting off on its own. To focus on what’s happening in the Core area really creates a fal
se sense of future hope. If you look at the income distribution in the city and ask me if the Heartland is coming back, well, are you kidding me? Cities are not built or rebuilt for low-income residents. It would be nice if they were. But that just doesn’t happen.”

  As municipalities across the globe stare down varying levels of financial catastrophe, the notion of increasing investment in failing communities such as the Mogk-defined Heartland has become folly, with the terms of debate instead shifting almost entirely to discussions of debt reduction and austerity. The received, morality-tale version of the salvation of the auto industry, often recounted in the form of a self-help recovery narrative, in which the mulish executive-suite occupants were forced to hit rock bottom before making the “hard choices” necessary for survival, has more recently been applied to ever more insolvent governmental entities, which have been painted as the functional and moral equivalents of GM or Chrysler, that is, bloated and inefficient bureaucracies unwilling to change with the times, get tough on labor, and become “lean” and “competitive.” Like the Big Three, we were all being told that our cities and states—along with their citizens and public servants—needed to discard childish illusion and accept that aspects of American life had changed forever.

  In this context, the Michigan legislature adopted the Emergency Financial Manager law, which deficit hawks cast as a top-down, stern-father means of enforced frugality, necessary for irresponsible charges who had proved incapable of making, and abiding by, a budget. The fact that most of the cities facing possible EFMs were, like Detroit, contending with all of the problems associated with concentrated poverty (including the absence of any sort of real tax base) tended to be glossed over, though it was hard to see how any of this could end well: cities like Detroit already barely delivered on the most minimal of public services, and the idea of forcing even more cuts, somehow rooting out “waste” in the system, moved beyond the vague shared-sacrifice campaign slogans employed by politicians across the spectrum and began to enter the realm of field amputation.