No Degrees Of Separation Between Big Three And You
1,138 words
I grew up in a plant town.
The largest manufacturer back then in my small Southern hometown was a lawnmower plant that made riding mowers for Sears. Over two thousand people worked there.
We had other plants - a division of Hughes Aircraft, a division of Ashland Chemical, a plant for Purina Dog Food, a subsidiary of General Electric, a manufacturing plant owned by Utica Tool, an assembly plant for Kirsch window treatments - but the lawnmower plant was the biggest.
A lot of these plants would shut down for a week during Thanksgiving, and sometimes for a week during Christmas, ostensibly to retool or do routine maintenance on the big machinery that they used twenty four hours a day seven days a week, but also partly because it was easier than trying to work through a high absentee rate.
Couple that with school closings, and you had a large part of the county roaming around town, running errands, getting haircuts, tuning up cars before they got on the road to visit relatives. The plant's employees looked forward to this week.
Whenever business was slow, the lawn mower plant would use the break as a way to cut back production, adding a week or two to the layoff. Every once in awhile, there would be a four week layoff. This caused problems for their employees. One week off was a vacation. Two weeks off was hell, three weeks off was torture, and four weeks off was never ending, especially when their employees were used to being paid once a week.
The ones who already had side jobs or small businesses that they ran to supplement their income fared the best. By end of the second week of a four week layoff, you would see people out looking for some kind of work to do until the plant came back online. The famous "six degrees of separation" theory that says that all the people on the planet are connected to everyone else by six other people shrank to "two degrees of separation" in a small town - everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who was laid off. Within my family's small industrial uniform rental business, there was "one degree of separation", since the lawn mower plant was our biggest customer, so we suffered during these long layoffs too.
During Thanksgiving and Christmas break when I was in high school and college, I often made deliveries to the plant during these layoffs. There were no uniforms to deliver, but the maintenance guys usually used thousands of shop towels cleaning and adjusting the hulking machines that the plant depended on to stamp out the main parts of a lawn mower. The plant itself sat right off of a main traffic artery, close to a major interstate on-ramp. But with the layoff, I didn't have to watch out for the eighteen wheelers being hustled across the intersection so they didn't have to come to a complete stop. No cars clumped around the two convenience stores at this junction of the main artery and the side road leading to the plant that seemed to have a crowd after every shift change.
It would really hit me when I passed in front of the plant itself. There were empty parking spaces all the way up to the main entrance, a five football field sized stretch of empty asphalt which looked forlorn without the contingent of well maintained cars and trucks that normally sat between the white lines. The security guard at the back gate was bored. The loading dock where I normally had to fight to get a space to park was wide open. I had to walk to another checkpoint to get in the plant at times like these, then walk all the way back through the backside of the plant to open a loading bay door so I could make my delivery. Pushing the delivery carts that I'd brought through the plant to the tool bay was eerie. A massive building like this didn't sound right when the machines weren't running, didn't look right when the forklifts were idle.
It was at times like this that I realized that the lawn mower plant wasn't really our customer, it was our partner, a partner I wished would get back to the business of making lawn mowers so my parents could sleep at night and I could stay in school. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, for better or for worse, aren't really just major American employers, they are major partners in our American way of life. You will be affected, whether you work at these plants or not, if these plants sit idle for an extended period of time, or are forced to shut down for good.
Auto manufacturers are only configured to be profitable at or near full capacity, the way a Formula One racing car is only set up to run on a speedway at or near full throttle, so trying to figure out how to run GM or Chrysler more efficiently for the long term without changing the infrastructure doesn't make any sense at all. But with 2.5 million jobs directly and indirectly affected by the auto industry, according to the Big Three funded Center for Automotive Research, closing GM all but guarantees instant bread lines in Michigan, and will worsen the weak economic conditions in many other states that have stayed under the financial crisis radar so far. "If GM were to go into a free-fall bankruptcy and didn't pay its trade debts," says Kimberly Rodriguez, an automotive specialist with Grant Thornton, "then the entire domestic auto industry shuts down."
The economic gurus on TV who blame the 20 plus percent decline in new auto sales on consumer confidence need to mail their degrees back to the colleges they got them from. There is no place on a car loan application for "consumer confidence", but there is one that asks for "current employer." It doesn't take an advanced degree in economics to understand "people with jobs buy cars, people without jobs don't buy cars."
If President Obama and Congress don't do what is necessary to keep GM and Chrysler open, in the next six months there will be only a handful of states left with an unemployment rate under 10%. I don't know what happens in an area with over 20% unemployment, but I know what it looks like when a large segment of your community has no work in the short term. It looks just like my home town did at Christmas time, but without the gift buying, or the holiday spirit.
Do you remember those "six degrees of separation" I mentioned earlier? There will be "no degrees of separation" here in America between you and the people who work in the auto industry if our auto manufacturers go under.
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