[Mb-civic] Doing Good Jobs, But Losing Them

[William Swiggard]

Doing Good Jobs, But Losing Them

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; A21

WIXOM, Mich. -- From the outside, the Ford assembly plant here, about 40 
minutes west of Detroit, isn't much to look at -- a sprawling, bland 
mid-1950s monument to an architecturally forgettable decade.

On the inside, though, Wixom is a thing of beauty, a marvel of American 
production. Most auto factories turn out the same basic car, though at 
the end of the line different grillwork and a different name may be 
slapped on in a desperate attempt at brand differentiation. At Wixom, 
three fundamentally different kinds of cars rolled off the line 
simultaneously. Working in small groups that are directly responsible 
for the cars they turn out, Wixom's employees simultaneously built cars 
with front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive, convertibles, sports cars, 
luxury vehicles, even cars with the steering wheel on the right for 
foreign markets. "No other plant built three different cars at the same 
time," says Dave Berry, president of the plant's United Auto Workers local.

Some years ago Ford established an annual audit of plant efficiency. For 
four years running, the Wixom plant had the highest score of any of 
Ford's North American assembly plants. In 2004 J.D. Power and Associates 
ranked the plant as the third-best auto factory in North and South 
America -- beating all the Mercedes and Toyota plants routinely touted 
as the be-all and end-all of auto production.

But there was a problem: the product. Wixom turned out lots of different 
cars, but chiefly it turned out Lincolns. For many years, Ford turned 
more profit on the Lincoln than on any of its other cars; it was the 
proceeds from Wixom that financed many of Ford's truck plants. But in 
recent years, Ford focused more on overseas acquisitions -- Jaguar, 
Volvo, Aston Martin -- than on improving the product it made in America.

"We kept arguing for a product that appealed to the customer," says Tony 
Brooks, a salty assembly-line worker who heads the local union's 
military veterans committee. "The quality of the plant is what kept us 
alive, not the cars. When did they last redesign the Lincoln Town Car? 
Ten years ago?" Cadillac, he notes, successfully updated its product 
line in the past few years. At Wixom, a fundamental adage of production 
was stood on its head. Making the sausage was a pleasure to behold; it 
was the sausage itself that ceased to appeal.

On Jan. 23 Ford announced that it was closing factories across North 
America, and Wixom, its awards notwithstanding, was on the list: The 
factory is scheduled to be shuttered in the second quarter of 2007. It's 
not the first cutback at Wixom. Two years ago, the workforce was cut in 
half when Ford decided to produce its new Lincoln Zephyrs in Mexico. The 
workers laid off at Wixom then, however, were able to transfer to other 
Ford facilities. The most senior workers remain today, and they have a 
sinking feeling that by 2007, Ford won't have enough factories still 
operating to accept any transfers.

Last week I met with a dozen Wixom workers at their local union hall. 
Some were second- or even third-generation Ford workers; Berry's 
grandfather came from Tennessee to work at old Henry's River Rouge plant 
in 1925. When Wixom opened in 1957, Ford recruited employees from the 
mines of Kentucky, but today's Wixomites are a good deal more polyglot, 
with a fierce, friendly clannishness rooted in pride in their 
achievement and, now, indignation over their abandonment. "We're not 
victims," insists Burkie Morris, the local's education director. "We 
have skills in team-building, in computer technology, in cultural 
diversity. Our problem is that the company didn't reinvest in new designs."

That wasn't their only problem. Unions are blamed for the woes of Ford 
and General Motors, but it's more the case that the political weakness 
of U.S. unions is responsible for the woes of Old Auto. In every other 
industrialized nation, the health care of workers, retirees and their 
families is the responsibility of the government. In the United States, 
labor has failed to secure universal health coverage, which remains 
instead the responsibility of individual employers. This puts companies 
with lots of retirees at a disadvantage with newer firms and imposes 
costs on U.S. employers that their foreign competitors are spared. If 
not having universal public health insurance is the mark of a more 
purely capitalist economy, then the United States may be too capitalist 
to compete in the global marketplace.

"It's not, 'Woe is us,' " says Burkie Morris, speaking for his defiant, 
reeling buddies. Maybe not for you, Burkie, but speaking for your 
countrymen, who are seeing American manufacturing dismantled and the 
middle torn from our economy: Woe is us.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021401789.html?nav=hcmodule
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