Detroit City Is the Place to Be (23 page)

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.

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

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

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

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

T
OWNSEND:
“Right!”

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

Z
IMMICK:
“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.”

G
RIMBLE:
“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.”

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

T
OWNSEND:
“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.”

K
REIMES:
“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.