Auto Recession Hits Workers

"Motor Wheel is leaving." The old rumor is going around Ypsilanti again. The second largest taxpayer and third largest employer in town, Goodyear-owned Motor Wheel makes brake linings and disc rotors. Up until very recently it employed five hundred people. But then in mid-November the plant foundry closed, laying off 136 workers indefinitely, and in early December the rest of the workers were given notice.

What happened at Motor Wheel is happening all across the dreary industrial plain around Detroit. Up and down the I-94 expressway, at Rawsonville, Chelsea and Saline, in Scio Township and at Willow Run the auto plants are lurching into low gear, some grinding to a halt.

At the General Motors Assembly Division, Willow Run. 3.600 persons have worked one week out of the last seven. Seven hundred were put on indefinite layoff in November, another 2,000 are being laid off indefinitely January 13, and what is left of the plant will probably be shut down for up to two weeks in February and March.

Motor Wheel isn't necessarily leaving, but prosperity probably is. The auto plants originally fanned out from Detroit and settled into fields beside places like Ypsilanti because land was cheap and labor could be drawn off the farm. They thrived on powerful currents in the world economy. When the farm labor ran out, more was was drawn farther away. Vast bedroom communities sprang up, communities whose only reason for existing was the plants.

Now the world is turning upside down. The Detroit Free Press predicts auto sales will improve by fall, but the automobile industry is in steep decline.

The Ypsilanti economy is a satellite of this industry. It shows signs of sinking into the last half of the seventies like a junked car into Ford Lake. The brand new condominiums lining the lake will look on, dreaming, and the expressway will still sweep past the Ford plant on its way to Detroit, but the best days in Ypsilanti are probably over.

Signs of spreading unemployment are easy to miss, but you can find them if you want to. Some observors discern an increase in the number of working age men walking the streets during the day. At the Central Bar in depot town a dozen serious drinkers idle away the late morning, occasionally cursing the economy but mostly talking about other things. Just up the street is another sign, the patient lines that start up at the MESC office every morning about eight and evaporate inside by ten.

It is cold and the lines move slowly, but the workers and their families still get up early to flock to MESC. There is every kind of worker, construction and auto, all colors and every working age; mothers bring in children and husbands their wives. They blame the government, shake their heads and try to laugh, but for many a looming uncertainty is knocking at their lives, and behind it is quiet fear and panic.

"I'm just living from week to week," different workers say. "As long as the benefits last I can't cry. Sure it's going to get better. It's gotta get better because it can't get any worse. It all depends on the government. "In my neighborhood everybody stays home because they're off work. It's not really hitting yet. Lot of us gonna be in big trouble. Sure it's gonna get worse. Just' breakin' even now, some's already fallin' behind." You can't find no work because people are gettin' laid off everywhere."

From a construction worker down the street at the Central Bar: "Whole thing is fucked up as far as I'm concerned, goddamn bad."

FILING FOR BANKRUPTCY

"People are getting set back," says Norbert Glover, an OEO manpower organizer whose job is to find people work when they have none. "If they got no jobs, then they get set back on their bills, and the next step is losing cars and houses."

The consequences of losing a job aren't simple. First there are the unemployment benefits, lasting as long as a year, and for autoworkers there are the Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB). But unemployment benefits aren't much, a maximum of $106 a week for a worker with four dependents, and the SUB funds are so overtaxed they're beginning to run out.

While workers and families wait for benefits to expire, car notes, house payments and other bill become mutual contradictions. The Legal Aid office in Ypsilanti reports many clients filing for bankruptcy, as well as fighting eviction proceedings. Banks repossess cars after three months default, and are repossessing more. Legal Aid also says businessmen seem to be taking more people to Small Claims Court, even though they're unemployed.

Phil Wells, recording secretary for the UAW local at Motor Wheel, says members are asking him for help, with medical problems and food stamps, legal problems stemming from financial troubles and how to file for bankruptcy.

"You always hear about Ford and Motor Wheel," says the young woman who takes bill payments at the Lidke Oil Company in Ypsilanti. "New customers call up and I have to take credit information. When it comes to their place of work, a lot of them say I used to work at so and so. Some of them just say, aw heck, I'm not going to make credit anyway, and say they'll come in with cash."

After the credit and the savings and the benefits run out, there is the Department of Social Services and welfare: food stamps aid to Dependent Children and then emergency relief. From there it's a sub-welfare economy of nothing.

 "We're getting calls from people who don't have any money to pay for food, let alone the rent," says Betty Renfroe, an OEO community organizer in Ypsilanti. "They don't have any people, they don't 'have any children so they can't get ADC and they haven't stuck to a job long enough to qualify for unemployment benefits. Young people are the worst, some of them are just at the end of their rope. They're losing the place they rent, their car and their credit rating."

"If they go down to Social Services, the most they can get is a rent order for one month, $30 for food and $8 expense money. That's all, and the next month they're out of luck. We don't have emergency money for food orders anymore, the Salvation Army is way over its budget and there's just no place for these people to go." "And what's gonna happen when the SUB pay runs out," asks Renfroe, "and all those people hit the welfare? This year people are suffering, bills are going unpaid but I'm not even worrying about right now compared to what happens next year. When a man is used to taking home $800 a month, and he has a $300 house note and a $100 car note, how's he gonna buy his food?"

"Pretty soon it's going to be give me that check so I can feed my babies. If I need to steal to feed my babies, I will."

CULTURAL DIVISIONS

"Not everyone is complaining," observed the woman at the Lidke Oil Co., "but when they do they blame the government, not the corporations. It's all the state of the economy, the state of the country, but not the corporations. When they talk about Motor Wheel they ask, how can they do this to us, how can they pull out?"

Left behind after Motor Wheel will be, as in any spent industrial or mining district, a lot of people with nothing to do. Thirty percent of Ypsilanti's population is already below the federally defined poverty line, with a mean annual income of $1663 per family. As industry slows and commerce departs for the suburbs, the tax base is declining relative to inflation. Police now serve in the high schools, one of the excuses being racial trouble, and the poor are tightly enclaved along ethnic/cultural lines.

On the east side of town live the migrants from Kentucky and Tennessee, sons, cousins and survivors of the migration north from the mountains which began during World War I to work in the bomber plant at Willow Run. On the south side of town live the blacks, and around the campus neighborhoods students, hippies and old people. The more prosperous live in newer neighborhoods west of the downtown.

Until a ward system was adopted in 1972, the city government was run by Junior Chamber of Commerce slates elected by the west side of town. This is because most of the rest of the town doesn't vote.

Non-partisanship is taken to great lengths. In December a maverick councilman accused fellow Democrats of working more closely with Republicans than their own party. The councilmember, an EMU student named Larry Lobert, referred to the phenomenon as the Old Ypsilanti Majority. No one bothered to disagree. According to tradition, after every meeting most council members meet at a place called the Pub Club to talk over the evening's differences.

The only real mention of politics in Ypsilanti these days is supplied by a small but effective Human Rights Party.

Riding on a $5 marijuana referendum and turning out voters in student-populated wards, HRP won two council seats last spring. Since then the party has demonstrated noisily at meetings and divided liberal white Democrats from conservative black ones. It may also succeed, this month, in getting passed a bill sticking landlords with criminal penalties for withholding security deposits.

Since HRP, ward politics have proven so troublesome that now there is talk of returning to the old "total city" approach, which the west side would again presumably dominate.

CLASS WAR IN YPSILANTI

The rumor that Motor Wheel is leaving has been around a long time. The truckers bring it in from other plants, and they say the company has a vacant building somewhere, probably in Kentucky, to which it can move the plant lock, stock and barrel should it decide to leave Ypsilanti.

Last May UAW Local 782 struck Motor Wheel after their contract ran out. The issues were over economics, not working conditions: a cost of living clause, higher wages and dental plan. Goodyear has always had bad labor relations and police were always coming by the picket line. On May 13 a line of them maced, clubbed and drew their guns on picketers. A can of mace was sprayed in the face of Al Cruikshank, the vice president of the local, and a black man on his way to the credit union was maced in his car.

The night after the attack a group of workers went to the city council and demanded action against the police. Police officers came to the building but did not enter the meeting, waiting instead out in the hall.

Council ordered an investigation, but seven months after the incident there are no conclusions. Joe Warren, the city manager put in charge of the investigation, said he wasn't able to arrive at any conclusions because emotions are high and police and union accounts so divergent.

Mr. Warren recommended arbitration, but the union members and the police cannot agree on an arbitrator. Part of the reason may be that Mr. Warren had a heart attack in October and was replaced by Herb Smith, the police chief. Smith was present at the Motor Wheel gate May 18 and presumably ordered his men to move in. The HRP pushed for a city council investigation, with subpoenas, but Republicans and Democrats voted it down.

Now the Motor Wheel workers have been laid off. The SUB pay hasn't run out this week, but it may next week and most certainly by next summer.

The workers were to report to work again after the New Year, but the plant has remained locked. The people at the personnel office say they can't commit themselves as to when anyone can report back for work. As of this writing, it is not known when the Motor Wheel plant will be reopening.